Do I need coaching, therapy, or both?
Coaching is really accepted in the business world, and I think that's wonderful. It’s rare to meet a leader who has not worked with an executive coach — and most of them want to talk about their experience! Psychotherapy is a lot less acceptable to talk about, but in truth, coaching owes a lot to therapy. In my experience, many of the best leaders are people who’ve “dug in the dirt,” as Peter Gabriel once wrote of his experience in therapy.
But how do you know which is right for you, and what are the differences? Therapy must be done by a licensed mental health professional, while coaches may have training and certification but their reference point is business and they are often former executives themselves. Coaching aims to drive change and results in the business setting. Therapy aims to promote mental health and wellbeing through a variety of modalities that can include the classic “Tell me about your mother,” but can also be extremely present oriented and action-focused, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which shows up in many coaching sessions too. You might practice mindfulness in coaching and in therapy!
My advice is that if you feel anxious, extremely sad or depressed, and if positive change feels impossible to create, seek out therapy. If your mood is affected or you keep getting in your own way, therapy can help. We bring our pasts and our childhoods to work with us everyday and sometimes we need a skilled therapist to help us make sense of our pain, surface unresolved issues or hurts, and help us create new narratives and models for being. Therapy is effective in helping us spot patterns that slip us up. This can have really positive effects in our work!
Coaching usually helps a leader address certain behaviors that are limiting our effectiveness in the organization. Through conversations, journaling, and frameworks or tools, the client learns new ways of approaching challenges. But in coaching, looking at past patterns matters too. Emotions matter too. And so, it’s a cousin of therapy.
I asked Dr. Chris Bittinger, a leadership professor at Purdue and executive coach. Chris has spent a lot of time in therapy, too, dealing with childhood hurts and his own ADHD. Here’s what he told me (listen to our interview here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6nMvLSFfdgmPTi9wAP8mW5).
Like a therapist, “A coach is a vessel to deal with the emotions of stress. Often clients come to me with a lot of feelings, so we practice emotions focused coping, and then once they get through the feelings, they can move to problem focused coping and looking at options and exploring tools. If you’re struggling, you can keep a list of issues to discuss for that regularly scheduled therapy time or the regularly scheduled coaching time. You can save difficult emotions and feelings for a session. Bittinger’s research around the efficacy of coaching for executives found that holding space to feel and review stressful items was a big value from the coaching experience. “They wrote this list and they could compartmentalize and put it down and say, I'm going to talk to my coach on Friday. I'll talk to them about this then. And that just helped them. They had a container for it, and it was the coaching conversation.”
Like therapy, coaching is a safe space. And then you have a person equipped to give you some tools back.
Throughout his career, Chris needed therapy to work on mental health challenges with a trained professional. He says, “coaching was really about helping me be successful in reaching goals in my career or in my life or as a leader at work, and have some structure to some goal setting, which was a little different than therapy. I think therapy was helping me navigate and understand all these things that had happened, and then the commitments that I made as a result of those, and those were actually informing how I was leading. And then I could bring those to my coach and say, let's work on some tangible behavioral things to be a better leader.”
Bittinger admits he’s biased, but says it is a transformational experience if you get a coach, especially when you're dealing with stress and burnout. “A coach is calm, and I call it the non-anxious presence or the differentiated presence, and also a great listener and demonstrating empathy. It just can transform them.” Coaching also places an emphasis on tools and progress reports to keep track of— homework.
Leaders who seek coaching are willing to open up and become self-aware. They want to improve their self awareness. Bittinger notes, “There are business outcomes, but there really is a sense of, I just need to become a better leader. I want to improve. I want to be better for my people. I know there's some things getting in my way, how I handle my own anxiety, how I handle stress, how I show up with my client, with my team, and I know I'm not showing up. How do I show up better? I set the tone. So how do you help me set a better tone?”
Chris cites his own experience working for an anxious leader as one of the reasons he went into coaching. “I have worked with calm and clear and principled leaders, and I've worked with anxious ones, and that's a difference. The environment matters so much to employee wellbeing. I always thought it was my fault that I'm burned out or that I'm stressed. It's never just one thing. The environment matters greatly, and the leader sets that tone.”
But therapy has proved equally valuable for Bittinger. His therapist has helped him with tools and reframed thinking when childhood trauma sneaks up on Bittinger and he is physically and emotionally dysregulated.
At therapy, “We practice some deep breathing. And then my therapist gave me this phrase. He said, there's no consequence now. There's no catastrophe now because I worry that there's somebody coming from behind me. I have had such a great benefit with therapy. And then the coaching has just, it's sort of informed by all these experiences. And I see the benefit of these one-to-one conversations and helping. And that's why I do what I do. I want to see leaders flourish and succeed. And coaching, I think, is a part of that. Therapy is certainly a part of that. the things we've just talked about is a part of that. But yeah, so that's a big part of my story. And Chris’ story informs his coaching: So I am not the ADHD. I'm not the adverse childhood experiences, but they've certainly informed how I lead and how I view leaders.”
Tell me what you think the differences are! Of course, I recommend both!
Morra
PS: How do you define leadership? Chris and I took a stab. What’s your definition? Chris: Well, I'm also a faculty at Purdue, and I'm teaching a leadership course this fall. And I stood in front of my undergrads and I said, every one of you is a leader, because you all influence through your attitude and your actions, your character, your conversation. So I consider leadership as influence, just influencing others. We influence how we post on social media. We influence through how we show up at work, our attitude.
Morra: I define it as someone with the power and influence and ability to bring a group of people together to work towards a shared goal. Influencing others to reach a shared goal. There's got to be a direction. We've got to have a shared fate.