Is Psychology Old or New?
Psychology as an actual field of study seems to have originated in 1879 in the first laboratory devoted to the field created by Wilhelm Wund. Since that time, the field of psychology has changed and grown by leaps and bounds and sometimes doesn’t even resemble it’s original beginnings. Psychology is a field that requires training before practicing and has professional regulations that psychologists must adhere to.
Psychology and life coaching often seem to be pretty much the same thing – and often they are. However, while it does seem like psychology’s purpose is to help you understand your life better and why you do the things that you do, life coaching is more like your cheerleader along the way with many common sense tools to guide you forward. Life coaching can be therapeutic but it isn’t therapy.
If you have deep, emotional issues and extremely damaging behavior, it is most likely that you will want to work with a psychologist to help you bring yourself up to a more neutral place in your life and then possibly work with a life coach to help you go forward.
Thomas Leonard, one of the two people attributed with creating life coaching as a profession, and founder of Coach University, a virtual university for personal and business coaches, made the following distinctions between coaching and therapy:
| Coaching is about: | Therapy is about: |
| Achievement | Healing |
| Action | Understanding |
| Transformation | Change |
| Momentum | Safety |
| Intuition | Feelings |
| Joy | Happiness |
| Performance | Progress |
| Synchronicity | Timing |
| Attraction | Protecting |
| Creating | Resolving |
Not everyone would agree, but it’s a good start at the distinctions.
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November 20, 2011 | Tags: life coach, Psychology
Category: life coaching
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Not everyone would agree. But I certainly do. This is an excellent start to outlining the distinctions between Coaching and Therapy. The only thing that I would add is that most Coaching has demonstrable results in life. It can be very hard to say that about most therapy. Action, Results and Joy. That’s what I am for when I Coach. Thanks for the great contribution to the field.
Therapy needs to change. All the new things that have been discovered about the brain and how it works, and how people learn and change don’t seem to be accounted for. Life and Spiritual Coaching seem to fill that gap. This seems to be a ‘new age’ of discovery and growth for humans. Embrace it.
Even coaches employ coaches don’t they? And successful business men and women who seem to “have it all together” have their coaches. I guess this is what helps to make them successful.
Well, it certainly helps! I don’t have a formal coach right now but I have a coach/husband, a few close friends who give me feedback, a Mastermind group to do the same.