Coaching vs. Therapy

You’ve Done Therapy and Had the Breakthrough. So Why Is Nothing Changing?

You’ve had the searing conversations in talk therapy. You’ve discovered that you’ve been carrying around a significant mother wound, or father wound, or abandonment issue. Maybe you’re the middle child, or the youngest child, or the problem child next to your sibling’s golden child.

Now, thanks to therapy, you feel validated. You’re armed with an understanding of the inter-generational and nuclear family dynamics that shaped you and how you perceive the world. In short, you’ve had your Breakthrough.

Yet with this newfound knowledge, you still find yourself falling back into old patterns – chasing friendships or relationships with emotionally unavailable people, not speaking up during meetings at work, procrastinating, or putting yourself last.

What therapy often doesn’t help with is where you go from The Breakthrough.

Sure, now you know what you’ve been doing to self-sabotage, and thanks to a lifetime of bad habits, you’ve driven yourself into a proverbial ditch. A therapist’s job is to ask you what happened in your childhood that led you to driving yourself into said ditch.

A coach, the other hand, will help you find your inner shovel, so you can dig yourself out.

What Coaching Offers that Therapy Often Doesn’t

Admittedly, I’m a little biased here, being a health coach and all. But hear me out – what needs to happen next is for you to take action. To choose differently, in the moment, as new situations arise where you might default to old patterns.

Keeping yourself small and not speaking up during that meeting? Thanks to therapy, you know you’re holding back because of an old wound, but at this point it’s not a choice – it’s a habit. Or to borrow from neuroscience, it’s a neural pathway that you’ve built over decades of holding back.

You can’t erase the neural pathways that contain the limiting beliefs that have held you back until this moment; but you can 100% overwrite them with a new, learned script of your choosing.

What’s great about working with a health coach is that they will keep you accountable to the new promises you make to yourself. Even if it’s just a tiny step in that direction -- maybe you don’t volunteer to present your budget request to the Board right off the bat, but you speak up to the working group on what it needs to deliver to be convincing, and lead that effort.

That’s a big step forward, and one that will help rewire your subconscious mind into believing that you are a person who leads projects. That’s excellent progress. Keep building on that.

A Coach Will Hand You a Shovel When You’re Stuck in a Ditch 

Coaches are highly skilled at asking exploratory questions and making reflective statements to help you discover the root cause of the behaviors you want to change. They support you in creating your vision and goals for yourself, reinforcing your “why” for pursuing it, and supporting you in taking action to make it happen.

Being clear on your goal, and consistently visualizing this new version of yourself and how the new you moves through the world sends a powerful signal to your brain that your identity is shifting.

This is when the real magic happens. Achieving goals takes time because your subconscious needs that time and consistency to accept your new identity - as someone who completes assignments as soon as they come in, or who eats healthy at home 5 nights a week, or who gets up 10 minutes earlier each day to meditate.

Once your subconscious accepts your new identity, your new habits become automatic and effortless.

Actions Fast-track Identity Shifts

They say actions speak louder than words, and this just as true for your subconscious as for any other audience.

Action is also the fastest way for you to tell your subconscious who you are now. This speeds the shift in your identity from your default – typically steeped in limiting beliefs – to the upgraded identity you are consciously choosing and acting on in small ways every day.

The actions below may seem small, but they communicate the powerful message to your brain that you are capable of doing new things, and your sense of identity will start to shift in response from someone who has never written a page, eaten healthy or exercised, to someone who DOES.

You wouldn’t expect to go from not writing at all to writing your entire novel in a weekend. Coaches understand this sometimes frustrating part of habit change, and are trained in ways to break down goals into manageable action steps that keep you from feeling overwhelmed.

Taking small consistent action is a powerful way to achieving goals, and also ensures you keep your promises to yourself. This builds self-belief and creates a confident mindset in the brain, which makes more resources available to you and makes you far more likely to succeed.

Progress from your own work is intrinsically motivating, and will help you stay locked in even in the face of obstacles or challenges. Remember, often the most difficult thing is to get started, but once you do, there’s no telling how much you might accomplish!

Therapy and Coaching Have Their Place

A good coach is an expert in supporting you through lasting habit change, which is a fundamentally simple, but not easy process. They help you tap into your inner wisdom to find your proverbial shovel to dig yourself out of the ditch of self-sabotage.

There’s also something really powerful in knowing that someone is in your corner rooting for you. So many clients feel better just by having a present, sympathetic person to speak with about as they work to change their habits. Benefits can extend far beyond accountability to include motivation, self-discipline, and perseverance.

Mind you, this is not about discounting therapy. It’s a phenomenal tool for uncovering your unconscious thought patterns and attachment style, making your limiting beliefs conscious and receiving needed validation.

“Well, what now?”

But if you find yourself asking, “Well, what now?” It’s time to get creative in designing and building the life you want one new habit at a time, free from limiting beliefs.

And a coach is an excellent resource for this.