Looking at Therapy Through the Lens of Coaching

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. Carl Rogers

That line from one of the twentieth century’s most influential psychologists captures something that sits at the heart of both therapy and coaching: the belief that change doesn’t come from fixing what’s broken, but from creating the conditions in which a person can grow. It’s a fitting place to start, because Rogers is part of coaching’s origin story — and understanding that shared heritage is what makes the difference between the two professions genuinely interesting.

Coaching and therapy are two of the most commonly confused “helping by talking” professions (followed closely by coaching vs training and coaching vs consulting). It’s easy to see why there might be confusion – both involve a skilled practitioner and a person seeking change, both rely on listening, on asking good questions, and on creating a space where someone feels safe enough to think differently.  So yes, from the outside, they can look remarkably similar. But to those of us in the coaching profession, the differences are very clear.

Having said that, the relationship between coaching and therapy runs much deeper than surface similarities or differences. Coaching has roots in the therapeutic tradition, and some of its most powerful tools originated there. At the same time, coaching brings its own distinct orientation, one that results in a very different relationship between coach and client.

Key Takeaways

• Shared Roots: Both professions stem from humanistic and positive psychology, focusing on human growth and the “working alliance.”
• The Orientation Shift: While therapy addresses healing and clinical distress, coaching assumes wholeness and focuses on structured accountability and forward momentum.
• Cross-Pollination: Coaches can ethically integrate tools like CBT and Solution-Focused inquiry to add depth without crossing into clinical practice.
• The “Both” Approach: Therapy and coaching can be complementary (the “mental health lottery”), where one clears the ground and the other builds the future.
• Ethical Boundaries: Professional maturity means recognizing when to refer a client to clinical support as part of ICF-aligned care.

Cousins, Not Strangers

Coaching did not arrive as a fully formed profession out of nowhere. Like most professions, its heritage draws on a wide range of theories, disciplines, and philosophies; one of which is the world of psychology and therapy. Let’s explore that history for a moment.

The humanistic psychology movement of the mid-twentieth century, led by thinkers like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, introduced ideas that now sit at the very heart of coaching. Rogers’ belief that people have an innate capacity for growth. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the pursuit of self-actualisation. The radical idea that the practitioner’s job is not to fix people, but to create the conditions in which people can flourish.

Then came positive psychology. When Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he made a provocative argument: psychology had spent a century studying what was wrong with people. What if it devoted equal energy to studying what was right? His vision, that psychology should be “just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness,” became the philosophical bridge between the therapeutic world and the emerging coaching profession.

The result is that coaching and therapy share what researchers call “common ingredients.” A 2019 chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology describes psychotherapy, counselling, and coaching as three approaches that exist on a continuum, sharing fundamental elements: the working alliance, positive expectations, and the promotion of well-being. Both professions know that change begins with a relationship built on trust. Both rely on empathetic listening, powerful questions, and the belief that the person sitting across from you has more capacity than they realise.

This shared heritage is worth understanding deeply. It is not a weakness in coaching’s identity. It is actually one of coaching’s great strengths.

What Makes Coaching, Coaching?

If coaching and therapy share so much common ground, what makes coaching its own thing?

Much of the writing on this topic tends to offer generic distinctions. Therapy looks backward; coaching looks forward. Therapy treats dysfunction; coaching builds on strengths. Therapy is long; coaching is short. You’ve seen the list. You could probably write it yourself.

The trouble with this sort of binary thinking is that it is reductive. It takes complex, overlapping professions and turns them into neat opposing columns, when the reality is more like a continuum. A 2020 study comparing ICF certified coaches and therapists in Iceland found that the dividing lines we like to draw don’t always hold up in practice. Goal setting, it turned out, was just as central to therapy as it was to coaching. Therapists reported that they did not focus on the past nearly as much as popular comparisons suggest. And coaching often goes significantly further than simply setting goals and moving forward. The conversations go deep, and the change can be lasting.

This is worth acknowledging, especially if you’re new to coaching and still working out what it actually involves. The difference between coaching and therapy is not that one is serious and the other is light. It is a difference in orientation, structure, and purpose, so rather than relying on a set of distinctions as the full picture, here is how the coaching lens feels different in practice, told not as a binary, but as a continuum.

The Essence of Coaching

Coaching begins with the idea that the client is whole. Not broken, not in need of repair, not a diagnosis waiting to be identified, but a resourceful, creative human being with the capacity to find their own answers. The coach’s job is not to have the answers; it is to have the questions. This shifts the entire power dynamic. In coaching, you have what some researchers describe as “a collaborative dyad between two egalitarian people”. The client sets the agenda. The client decides what success looks like. The coach partners, provokes, supports, but does not prescribe.

Coaching is also quite structured. Where therapy contracts tend to be flexible, covering practical arrangements like scheduling and payment, coaching contracts can be detailed and tightly defined. The coaching areas are agreed in advance, roles are made explicit, and the boundaries, limitations, and structure of the relationship are negotiated up front.

Accountability is another core feature of coaching. Your coach and the structure of the coaching contract keep you accountable to someone other than yourself. With a therapist, you can simply not come back one day, and nobody will call to ask why. The arrangement is open-ended, session by session. In coaching, both parties sign up for something specific. There is a defined engagement, agreed goals, and a mutual commitment to follow through. Your coach will check in. Your coach will ask what happened with the action you designed last session. And for some reason, as humans, if we commit to something in the presence of another person, we are more likely to actually do the thing we said we were going to do.

There is also a difference in where the real work happens. In therapy, the session itself is often the primary site of healing and integration: the relationship, the emotional processing, and the clinical interventions are all central. In coaching, the session sets direction, but the real test is what happens between sessions. Coaching uses a cycle of reflection and action as its engine: clarify a goal, design an action, take the action, then return to reflect on results and obstacles. Over time, this loop builds momentum because the client is not only gaining insight, but they are also practising change in their day-to-day life.

Coaching also draws feedback from the wider system. In executive and workplace coaching, for example, that often means 360-degree input, perspectives from managers, peers, and direct reports. Therapy typically stays within the confidential dyad. Whereas coaching can sit at the intersection of the personal and the organisational, which means it pulls context from a wider field.

None of this makes coaching better than therapy. It makes it different. And that difference, the orientation toward wholeness, the structured contracting, the emphasis on between-session action, is precisely what makes coaching powerful for people who want more from their lives and work.

What Coaches Can Learn from Therapy

Q. If coaching has its own identity, why should coaches engage with the therapeutic tradition at all?

A. Because some of the most effective tools in a coach’s toolkit have therapeutic origins. And coaches who want depth, not just technique, learn from those origins.

The Cognitive Behavioural Lens

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, is built on a simple insight: our thoughts shape our feelings, which shape our behaviour. Change the thought pattern, and you can change everything downstream.

This insight has crossed directly into coaching. Cognitive Behavioural Coaching applies the same framework, identifying unhelpful thought patterns, testing assumptions, building new cognitive habits, but in a coaching context, with clients who are seeking growth rather than treatment.

A 2021 study of a structured cognitive behavioural coaching program published in the National Library of Medicine found significant improvements in both stress reduction and well-being, with large effect sizes. Participants who were not in clinical distress but were struggling with workplace stress experienced measurable, lasting change through a six session coaching program grounded in CBT principles.

ICA Graduate Athina Tsellou traces this lineage even further back in her research paper, “How Would a Stoic Philosopher Who Studied CBT Coach Today?” She draws a fascinating line from ancient Stoic philosophy through modern CBT to contemporary coaching. The Stoic principle “focus on what you can control” maps directly onto CBT’s core tenet of examining what we can and cannot influence, which is precisely the kind of reframing that happens in coaching every day. “If we want to be on good terms with our highest self,” Tsellou writes, “we need to close the gap between what we’re capable of and what we’re actually doing.” Marcus Aurelius could have been talking about coaching.

The Solution-Focused Lens

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, developed by Steve de Shazer in the 1980s, represented a paradigm shift in the therapeutic world: instead of asking “what’s wrong?”, it asked “what’s already working?”

This reorientation, from problem to solution, from deficit to strength, is now so central to coaching that many coaches do not realise they are using a therapeutic framework. The miracle question. Exception-finding. Scaling questions. All of these were born in therapy and migrated to coaching because they fit so naturally.

Research confirms the power of this approach. A randomised study published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022 found that solution-focused coaching led to stronger increases in self-efficacy, approach motivation, and goal attainment compared to problem-focused coaching. When you help people focus on what is already working, they find more of it.

ACT, Motivational Interviewing, and Beyond

The transfer does not stop there. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which encourages people to accept difficult thoughts and feelings rather than fighting them, and then commit to action aligned with their values, has found a natural home in coaching. The ICF itself published a 2024 article on implementing ACT principles in coaching practice, noting that both disciplines “believe that individuals are not fundamentally broken but rather grappling with challenges that arise from the intricate workings of the mind.”

Motivational interviewing deserves special attention here because it may be the clearest example of how deeply coaching and therapy can overlap.

MI was developed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick in the 1980s as an evidence-based, person-centred approach to facilitating change, originally for patients with substance use disorders. Its guiding spirit, partnership, acceptance, empowerment, and compassion, will sound immediately familiar to any trained coach. Its core skills, open questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries, map directly onto the ICF Core Competencies for active listening, evoking awareness, and facilitating client growth.

ICA Graduate Taryn Escreet, a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers with over 20 years of leadership experience in the Victorian justice system, explored this integration in her research paper titled “Motivational Interviewing with Coaching“. Her literature review found that MI and coaching share compatible principles, skills, and structures, and that organisations are now teaching MI as part of foundational coaching programmes. The evidence is compelling: a meta-analysis of 72 clinical trials found that skilled MI at the outset of an intervention produces large positive effect sizes, and that MI is differentially more effective with people who are less ready for change (Hettema, Steele & Miller, 2005).

What makes this particularly relevant for coaches is Escreet’s practical finding: MI’s “engage” and “evoke” tasks are the most promising elements for integration with coaching. Where coaching excels at structure, accountability, and action planning, MI excels at building engagement and resolving ambivalence. Together, they address a gap that coaches often encounter: the client who knows what they want but cannot seem to commit. As Escreet concludes, “Integrating MI with coaching is conceptually coherent, practical, and has the potential to improve client outcomes.”

ICA Graduate Caroline Drake explored how even more specialised therapeutic models translate into coaching. Her research on AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) found that this strengths-based therapeutic approach “aligns very closely with the coaching philosophy.” Its emphasis on the client’s innate strength, the power of the practitioner-client relationship, and the importance of fully experiencing emotions maps onto what good coaching already does.

ICA Graduate Sara Janiczek takes this even further, applying Albert Ellis’s Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) directly to relationship coaching. In her research, she shows how the 12 irrational beliefs that REBT identifies can help coaches work with clients on dysfunctional thought patterns in relationships, without crossing the line into clinical treatment. It is a practical example of how therapeutic literacy makes coaching more effective.

The point is that therapy has spent over a century developing sophisticated frameworks for understanding human change, and coaches who engage with that body of knowledge bring more depth to their practice.

What Therapists Can Learn from Coaching

The learning runs both ways. Just as coaches benefit from understanding therapeutic frameworks, a growing number of therapists are discovering that coaching principles can transform their practice.

This is not a fringe trend. Research by Moore et al. (2013) on health and wellness found that coaching and psychotherapy are increasingly converging, with therapists adopting coaching tools to help clients who are not clinically unwell but want to move forward in their lives. And the ICF’s own data shows a significant number of credentialed coaches come from counselling and therapy backgrounds, bringing their clinical training into a coaching context.

So what does a “coach approach” offer a therapist?

The Wholeness Assumption

Perhaps the most profound shift is in how the practitioner sees the client. Therapy, by its nature, often begins with what is wrong: the diagnosis, the symptoms, the dysfunction. The coach approach begins with the opposite assumption: this person is whole, capable, and resourceful. They are not broken. They do not need fixing.

For therapists who work with clients beyond the acute phase of treatment, clients who have done the healing work and are ready to build something new, this reframe can be transformative. It changes the questions you ask, the energy you bring, and the possibilities you open up.

The Power of Forward Focus

Therapists are trained to explore the past, and that skill is invaluable when the past is actively driving present distress. But for many clients, especially those nearing the end of therapy, the most powerful question is not “where did this come from?” but “where do you want to go?”

Coaching’s relentless forward focus, its emphasis on “what do you want now, and how do we get there?”, gives therapists a practical framework for those later-stage conversations. It helps clients transition from healing to building.

Structured Accountability

One of coaching’s most distinctive contributions is its accountability architecture. The cycle of reflect, design an action, take the action, return, and review is not something most therapy training covers in depth. Yet many therapists find that adding structured accountability between sessions dramatically accelerates their clients’ progress.

This does not mean turning therapy into coaching. It means that when a client is ready for action, the therapist has a clear framework for supporting follow-through rather than relying solely on insight and emotional processing.

The Egalitarian Relationship

In traditional therapy, the therapist is the expert. They diagnose, they develop the treatment plan, and they guide the clinical process. Coaching flips this: the client sets the agenda, the client is the expert in their own life, and the practitioner’s role is to partner, not prescribe.

Many therapists report that integrating this more egalitarian stance, even partially, changes their therapeutic relationships for the better. Clients who feel like equal partners in the process tend to be more engaged, more self-directed, and more likely to sustain changes after the professional relationship ends.

ICA Graduate Michelle Wiebach, who has experienced both Coaching and Therapy as a client, puts it simply: therapy helped her understand where her patterns came from. Coaching helped her take ownership of where she was going. For therapists who want to support both journeys, understanding the coach approach is not a departure from good therapy. It is an expansion of it.

Blended Coaching: How the Profession Has Evolved

In the early days of professional coaching, there was strong resistance to blending coaching with anything, especially therapy. Pioneers like John Whitmore, Myles Downey, and James Flaherty worked hard to establish coaching as a distinct profession. The ICF definition was deliberately narrow. The boundaries were drawn firmly. This was necessary. A new profession needed clear edges.

ICA Graduate Shana Pike captures this tension well in her research paper, “The Therapeutic Potential of Coaching.” She writes: “Coaches will go to great lengths to separate themselves from therapists.” Why? “Perhaps to avoid legal risks. Perhaps as a way to justify the lack of credentialing. Perhaps as a marketing technique.” She then quotes researchers Rothazier and Hill, who observed: “When a new field begins, it often needs to define itself by creating ‘straw dog’ analogies, comparing masterful coaching to mediocre or even terrible consulting, counselling, teaching, mentoring. It brings itself up by putting something else down.”

The coaching profession has matured since those early days. The conversation has evolved from “coaching is NOT therapy” to a more sophisticated understanding: that many effective coaches blend coaching with other modalities, including therapeutic frameworks, and that this can be done ethically and powerfully.

At ICA, our approach reflects this evolution. In our Blended Coaching programme, we explore how coaching can be combined with mentoring, consulting, training, and therapy, with clear frameworks for when blending adds value and when pure coaching is the better choice. The key principles are straightforward: blend with permission, with transparency, and with the client’s agency always at the centre. In practice, an ethical blend looks like this:

• Ask for permission before shifting modes.
• Name the shift clearly. For example: “I am stepping out of my coaching role for a moment to share some expertise…”
• Share briefly, without attachment to the client taking the advice.
• Return immediately to the coaching stance and ask a coaching question.

This is not about coaches practising therapy. It is about coaches being literate in therapeutic concepts, understanding enough about CBT, solution-focused approaches, and ACT to recognise when a therapeutic framework can enrich a coaching conversation, and knowing when a client’s needs have moved beyond what coaching can responsibly address.

As Grant and Green write in their 2018 paper, coaching has become “a permanent fixture in contemporary Western society.” The question is no longer whether coaching belongs. It is how coaching can continue deepening, and part of that deepening comes from genuine engagement with the therapeutic tradition it grew alongside.

When Therapy, When Coaching, When Both

So, how do you navigate the boundary between coaching and therapy? The answer is not as clear-cut as you might imagine. It is a set of considerations that evolves with context.

Coaching is likely the right fit when someone is functioning well but wants more: more clarity, more confidence, more follow-through on the goals that matter to them. The executive is preparing for a bigger role. The career changer is figuring out what is next. The leader who wants to have better conversations with their team. These are people with agency who need a thinking partner, not a treatment plan.

Therapy is likely the right fit when someone is experiencing significant emotional distress, when past trauma is actively interfering with their present, or when they are dealing with a diagnosable mental health condition. These are situations that require clinical training, ethical obligations, and often a longer, more process-oriented approach.

And sometimes, often, the answer is both.

ICA Graduate Michelle Wiebach describes this from personal experience: “In therapy, I uncovered ‘shoulds’ and scripts that I thought I needed to live by and be stuck in. Through coaching, I learned that I was not living in my truth. Through therapy, I learned where those toxic patterns came from and how to challenge my past. Coaching helped me set goals and go into action to become the person I wanted to be.”

Wiebach calls the combination of coaching and therapy “hitting the mental health lottery.” Therapy does the deep excavation. Coaching builds the future on that cleared ground. They do not compete. They complement.

Your Ethical Responsibility: Knowing When to Refer

For coaches, part of professional maturity is recognising the signs that a client may need support beyond what coaching can provide. These include:

• A client expresses thoughts of self-harm or harm to others
• Signs of a diagnosable mental health condition, such as severe anxiety, depression, or PTSD
• A client who keeps circling back to unresolved trauma without being able to move forward
• The coaching relationship begins to feel stuck in emotional processing rather than action

In these moments, the most powerful thing a coach can do is make a thoughtful referral, not as a failure, but as an act of professional care.

The ICF Code of Ethics (revised April 2025) makes this responsibility clear. The Code establishes that all ICF professionals must “demonstrate ethical practice” as the very first core coaching competency. This includes maintaining clear agreements about the scope of coaching, respecting the boundaries of one’s competence, and referring clients to other qualified professionals when appropriate. The Code also requires that coaches establish professional contracting from the first session, making clear what coaching is and what it is not, and revisiting those boundaries if the work begins to shift.

The ICF’s ethical framework covers five key areas: agreements for client engagement, confidentiality and legal compliance, professional conduct and conflicts of interest, commitment to delivering consistent value, and professional integrity and accountability. Coaches who work within this framework are not just protecting their clients; they are strengthening the credibility of the entire profession.

Read the full ICF Code of Ethics

A Richer Practice

Here is the insight that makes this topic worth exploring: coaches who understand the therapeutic tradition are not confused about their identity. They are more grounded in it.

When you look beyond the black-and-white distinctions and seek to genuinely understand the different modes of helping, you coach with more confidence. You know what you are doing and why. You can draw on therapeutic frameworks when they serve your client, and you can recognise when a client needs something you are not equipped to provide.

The coaching profession is in a moment of maturation. The early years required clear lines: coaching is this, not that. Maturity means moving toward genuine intellectual curiosity about the disciplines and traditions that surround coaching. Therapy is one of the most important of those traditions. Understanding it does not blur coaching’s identity. It sharpens it.

For those exploring coaching as a career or a calling, many of you come from helping professions already. You are HR professionals, educators, health practitioners, and leaders. You understand the impulse to support people through change. Coaching gives you a powerful, distinct framework for doing that. And when you understand how that framework relates to the broader landscape of human development, including therapy, you bring a depth to your practice that sets you apart.

Coaching is its own discipline, one that is generous enough to learn from its neighbours, and confident enough to know what it does best.

References

ICA Graduate Research:

All ICA students complete a Research Paper as part of their studies in our ICF Accredited Programs. 

Escreet, T. Integrating Motivational Interviewing with Coaching. ICA Coach Portfolio.

Drake, C. Utilizing AEDP to Inform Your Coaching Practice. ICA Coach Portfolio. https://icacoach.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/caroline-drake-utilizing-accelerated-experiential-dynamic-psychotherapy-to-inform-your-coaching-practice/

Janiczek, S. Rational-Emotive Therapy Tools Applied to Relationship Coaching. ICA Coach Portfolio. https://icacoach.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/sara-janiczek-rational-emotive-therapy-tools-applied-to-relationship-coaching/

Shana. Coaching versus Therapy: Exploring the Therapeutic Potential of Coaching. ICA Coach Portfolio. https://icacoach.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/therapeutic-potential-of-coaching/

Tsellou, A. How Would a Stoic Philosopher Who Studied CBT Coach Today? ICA Coach Portfolio. https://icacoach.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/athina-tsellou-how-would-a-stoic-philosopher-who-studied-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-cbt-coach-today/

Wiebach, M. The Benefits of Doing Coaching and Therapy. ICA Coach Portfolio. https://icacoach.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/coaching-and-therapy/