Creating an Exceptional Life: Making the Critical Choice between a Therapist and a Coach
Have you noticed that nearly every successful person, in any field, has an individual, or a team of individuals, around them whose sole purpose is to help them excel and succeed?
The examples are numerous. In the world of business, you’d be hard pressed to find a CEO of a Fortune 500 company that doesn’t have someone in his or her life that works privately with them at being more effective. This is also true in the world of sports. Back when I was playing golf for a living I had a fitness trainer, a sports psychologist and a swing instructor. An entourage like that is true for every serious athlete in any sport.
However, seeking the support of others to ensure success is not limited to professional athletes and corporate executives. It’s something we all do—if we’re wise. When we feel stuck, confused or lost in some area of our lives, we reach out for help.
This is especially true when we feel stuck or lost in our personal and/or relational lives. During those dark and disappointing moments, many are brave enough to reach out for support and guidance. Sometimes people read self-help books, attend workshops, talk to church leaders, consult an energy worker or even get a reading from a psychic. However, for many people, when they’re stuck and confused, they usually consider working with a therapist or a coach.* If that’s you, then it is critical that you understand the difference between therapists and coaches because their focus is completely different.
Simply put, therapy is about healing; coaching is about mastery.
Therapy is about mending brokenness and recovering, while coaching is about living artfully and exceptionally. Both are beautiful and necessary, yet they are very different.** Which do you need at this point in your life? The purpose of this article is to help you make the right choice. It’s my belief that the vast majority of us need one or the other at any given point in our lives—if we desire to live exceptional lives. We either need to be patched up (therapy) or shown how to get to the next level (coaching). To help you determine which is right for you in this moment, allow me to use a graphic and admittedly bizarre metaphor.
Imagine you love golf and that you’d like to become a really good golfer. There’s an art to hitting a golf ball consistently well and you’d like to learn that skill. But right now, your game is awful. You don’t know what’s wrong or how to fix your swing, so you wisely decide to seek help.
For fun, let’s say I’m a golf instructor/coach (which I used to be) and you’re going to allow me to coach you because I’m a master at golf. It’s my profession and I’m an expert. But on the way to the lesson, you get in a car accident and break your leg. It’s mangled; there’s even a bone sticking out! But you’re a golf nut and you really want to play better, so you come to the lesson anyway—with the broken leg. You want me to teach you the art of hitting a golf ball long and straight.
So I’m on the driving range and here you come, severely limping, bleeding and wincing in pain, yet carrying your clubs on your shoulder. You say, “Pro, I’m here for my lesson. My game sucks but I really want to play well and I’m hoping you can help me fix my swing.”
My response would be obvious. I’d say, “You’re in no condition to hit a golf ball! I don’t care how much you love golf and want to play it skillfully; you’ve got a broken leg! I can’t work with you. You’re injured. Right now you need to heal. Go to the emergency room and fix that leg. When it’s healed, come back and I’ll coach you on how to play golf.”
The meaning of this insane metaphor is obvious, I hope. As a life and relationship coach, people come to me because they’re stuck in some way. You could say their “golf game” sucks. They are dissatisfied with their personal or relational lives. And because I’ve mastered those areas in my own life, my role is to show them how to get unstuck and live artfully and skillfully in their lives.
But sometimes people come into my office with a “broken leg,” meaning, that in that moment, they are emotionally and psychologically “injured, bleeding and wincing in pain.” They aren’t ready to live and love artfully. It’s premature. They need to heal. Let me be specific here.
If you were abused physically, sexually or verbally as a child, and you have never talked about that and processed that with a therapist, you need to do that first before you try to live and love artfully. You can’t do it with a “broken leg.” You can try, but it won’t work. You’ll just hurt yourself and others in the process.
If you were raised by an alcoholic parent or had a family member die when you were young or suffered some other kind of traumatic event in your life—and never talked about it or processed it with a therapist—you aren’t ready to talk about how to live an exceptional life. You need to heal first.
In other words, you have to deal with your “broken leg.” You can’t be in denial about your past, you can’t be ignoring it or suppressing your feelings about it. Obviously you can’t change the past or forget it. Healing does NOT mean that. Therapy and healing is facing, owning and expressing all of your feelings about your “broken leg,” coming to a place of acceptance and peace about your “injury” and seeing how you’ve been unconsciously conditioned and programmed by the events of your past.
Once you’ve come to terms with your “broken leg,” and it doesn’t take long, then you’re ready to come back to the driving range and allow me teach you how to master the game of golf. You have to have a functional body-mind in order to make art with your life.
There’s the possibility of major misunderstanding here, so let me be crystal clear. Even after therapy, even after you’ve owned your past and made peace with it, seeing how it has conditioned your body-mind, even after all that healing has occurred, that doesn’t mean you will never be affected by it any longer. Like I said earlier, you will never forget your past and you will have scars. Let’s go back to my crazy metaphor.
When you went to the emergency room (therapy) for the broken leg you suffered in the car accident, they put pins put in your leg to set the bone. Then you wore a cast for 6-8 weeks and when you got that off, you went to physical therapy to regain the strength in your leg. All that healing and rehabbing doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t walk with a limp the rest of your life. You might. Healing doesn’t mean there won’t be any lasting effects of the wounds you suffered in childhood. There may be scars; you may walk with a “limp.”
However, healing does mean that your body-mind functions well enough so that you can live and love artfully—in spite of and with your “limp.”
I’ve seen a man with only one arm play golf with skill and joy. I’ve seen people paralyzed from the waist down play golf masterfully. They modify a golf cart and hit the ball while sitting in it. Hell, Tiger Woods won the 2009 U.S. Open playing with a stress fracture in his leg and a bum knee!
You can experience abuse, alcoholism, abandonment or some other kind of trauma in your past and learn to live and love though it and in spite of it. Having once “broken your leg” doesn’t mean you can never play golf masterfully. You can master the art of living and loving—and make no mistake, it is an art—with wounds. They just can’t be open wounds. If you’re currently injured, bleeding and wincing in pain you first have to heal before you can focus on making art with your life.
Much of the discord and drama that is experienced in relationships is because one or both people are trying to relate with “broken legs.” They have open, bleeding wounds that have never been mended. When that happens, the injured person is expecting the other to somehow heal their wounds. That never works and it creates even more injury and pain.
I had a client who was dating a woman who was sexually abused when she was a little girl. She had never talked about it or processed it with a therapist. One day she would push him away; the next she’d want to be close. Back and forth it would go. He was confused and they had all sorts of drama. She couldn’t fully trust men. She had never healed her “broken leg.” I told him that there was no way the two of them could create an artful, healthy relationship until she went to the “emergency room” and healed up.
So, do a little self-evaluation. Is your body-mind functional and healthy enough to focus on living and loving artfully? Or do you need to talk to a therapist about the wounds that you’ve never spoken of before? Where do you belong right now? In the “emergency room” or on the “practice tee” with me? Do what’s best for you. Trust your instincts. Just bare in mind that you don’t need to talk about your story with a therapist for years and years. You only need to own all of your feelings about it and understand how it has warped your view of life and love. That can happen relatively quickly. Then call me and I’ll teach you how to swing!
Roy Biancalana
www.coachingwithroy.com
407-687-3387
* In this context, I use the term “therapist” to refer to all traditionally educated, state licensed professional who take insurance, e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health professionals, marriage and family therapists, substance abuse counselors and traditional therapists.
I use the term “Coach” to refer to someone whose credibility comes not through state licensing, but through personal experience and individual mastery of their chosen profession. The difference is most easily seen when comparing an M.D. to a golf instructor. Yes, golf instructors can have extensive training, but their credibility comes through their personal experience in the game rather than years of formal education.
**Admittedly, therapist sometimes function as coaches, helping their clients live or relate artfully in some way, and coaches sometimes have to do some therapeutic, healing work. If I were to include all these nuances as I write, this article would become cumbersome and sloppy. What I’m communicating about the differences between therapists and coaches is generally true, it’s just not always true.
