Team Coaching

How to learn from the overlap of being a coach and being a therapist.

There are quite a few similarities between being a coach and being a therapist. The surroundings may differ — an office building instead of a therapist’s office — but the actual day-to-day work often falls into the same category, namely, helping people overcome obstacles so they can move ahead, feeling fitter, performing better.

Psychological therapists face the daunting task of guiding their clients to better ways of dealing with issues and to a better way of life in general. They use different tools to accomplish permanent changes in the lives of their clients and some of these tools might also be of help to coaches who work to effectuate lasting change in organizations.

Team Coaching

While it may be easy to assume a business coach usually helps with practical work-related issues at hand, and not — like the therapist — with personal obstacles that do not necessarily have something to do with the workplace, in practice, the opposite is often true. More often than not, the work-related issues have their roots in the thinking and behavior of the individual employees, thus relating to their personal inner psychological life.