You’ve probably heard the word “coaching” used in a dozen different contexts across your personal and professional life. Sometimes it refers to athletic training. Sometimes it sounds like therapy or counseling. Sometimes it resembles consulting or mentorship. With so many interpretations floating around, it can be challenging to understand what professional coaching truly entails and how it might benefit you.
Professional coaching, however, is distinctly different from these other supportive relationships. According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the global gold standard for coaching excellence, coaching is defined as:
"Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential."
Coaching is a relationship centered around structured conversations that helps you close the gap between your intention and your actions. It’s about creating a space where you can think more clearly, make stronger decisions, and move forward with confidence. Professional coaching represents a unique relationship that supports you as you step into the leader, communicator, or entrepreneur you’re working to become—all with a trusted thought partner by your side.
Unlike many other professional relationships where you might be told what to do or how to fix your problems, coaching operates from a fundamentally different premise. A coach doesn’t position themselves as the expert on your life or work. Instead, they create an environment where you can:
- Think more clearly about your challenges and opportunities.
- Make stronger, more aligned decisions that reflect your values.
- Move forward with confidence even in uncertain situations.
- Reconnect with your authentic goals, voice, and ability to lead.
- Develop sustainable solutions that work specifically for you and your context.
At its core, coaching gives you the increasingly rare experience of being deeply listened to—not to be fixed or managed or even advised, but to be truly supported as you do your most important work.
This distinctive approach makes coaching particularly valuable in a world where quick fixes and one-size-fits-all solutions rarely deliver lasting results.
When coaching works at its best, it provides a transformative space where you can step back from the daily demands and pressures to gain perspective, reconnect with what matters most to you, and develop approaches that are authentically yours. It’s not about following someone else’s roadmap but about creating and refining your own.
What Coaching Is Not
Understanding what coaching is not is just as important as understanding what it is. Many people come to coaching with expectations shaped by other professional relationships they’ve experienced. Clarifying these distinctions helps establish the unique value that coaching brings and ensures you can make informed choices about the kind of support that best meets your needs.
Coaching vs. Consulting
Consultants are hired specifically for their expertise and specialized knowledge in a particular field or industry. They analyze situations, identify problems, offer detailed recommendations, and often help implement solutions directly. Consultants are typically brought in because they have answers based on their experience solving similar problems for other clients. Their value lies in their ability to quickly diagnose issues and prescribe effective solutions.
A coach brings questions, not answers. This fundamental difference shapes the entire coaching relationship. In coaching, You are recognized as the expert on your goals, your context, and your values—not the coach. The coach helps you think more clearly about these things by asking powerful questions, creating reflective space, and offering observations—but they don’t prescribe what you should do or how you should do it.
Coaching doesn’t solve your business challenges for you. Instead, it helps you make clearer, more confident decisions about your business—ones that genuinely fit your unique leadership style, vision, and team dynamics. This approach ensures solutions are not only effective but sustainable, because they come from you and align with who you are and what you value. While this might initially seem less efficient than having someone hand you the answers, it builds your capacity to solve not just today’s challenges but tomorrow’s as well.
Coaching vs. Training
Training is structured around specific content with a defined curriculum, clear learning objectives, and a predetermined completion path. Training is designed to transfer specific knowledge or skills from an expert to a learner through a systematic process. There’s typically a right and wrong way to do things in training, with exercises designed to help participants master particular techniques or approaches.
Coaching takes a fundamentally different approach. There’s no preset module, standard script, or predetermined curriculum to work through. You set the agenda based on what matters most to you right now. Your coach helps you get where you want to go, starting from where you actually are—not where a training manual assumes you should be. This personalized approach allows for exploration of the nuances and complexities of your specific situation.
This key distinction explains why someone who has gone through dozens of leadership trainings may still benefit enormously from coaching. Training equips you with valuable skills and knowledge, but coaching helps you apply those skills in your unique context, with your unique strengths and challenges. It bridges the gap between knowing what to do and actually implementing it effectively in real-world situations where multiple factors are at play.
Coaching vs. Mentoring
A mentor shares stories, insights, and advice drawn directly from their own experience in a field or role similar to yours. This relationship is incredibly valuable when you want a model to follow or a shortcut to avoid common mistakes. Mentors typically have “been there, done that” and offer guidance based on their journey—both what worked and what didn’t. The relationship often includes elements of sponsorship, where the mentor advocates for the mentee’s advancement.
Mentoring is built on experience and often hierarchy. Coaching is built on partnership and equality.
Where a mentor might confidently say, “Here’s what I’d do in your situation,” based on their past experience, a coach asks, “What do YOU want to do here?” and then helps you figure that out through exploration and discovery. Rather than offering a roadmap based on someone else’s journey, coaching helps you create your own map—one that reflects your unique starting point, destination, and preferred traveling style.
This distinction makes coaching particularly valuable when you’re navigating situations without clear precedents or when you want to develop approaches that authentically reflect your own values and style rather than adopting someone else’s.
Coaching vs. Therapy
Therapy or counseling focuses on healing and emotional wellness. It often explores the past in depth to resolve trauma, understand unhealthy patterns, or address mental health challenges. Therapists are trained to diagnose and treat psychological conditions and help clients process difficult emotions and experiences. Therapy typically works from a model where something needs to be healed or fixed.
Coaching is not a replacement for that vital work, nor does it attempt to be.
Coaching is predominantly present- and future-focused. It’s about what’s next—not what happened then. It starts from the foundational belief that you are already whole, capable, and ready for growth, rather than broken and in need of fixing. Coaching assumes that you have the internal resources to move forward; you might just need support in accessing those resources more effectively.
When deeper psychological support is needed, a responsible coach will recognize the boundaries of their expertise and encourage seeking therapeutic help. Many people find that therapy and coaching can work together beautifully in a complementary way—therapy for healing past wounds and coaching for creating forward momentum toward future goals. Each serves a valuable and distinct purpose in supporting overall wellbeing and success.
When People Seek Coaching
People typically don’t seek coaching because everything is falling apart or because they’re fundamentally broken in some way. This common misconception often prevents people from engaging with coaching until they’re in crisis. In reality, most people seek coaching because something important is shifting in their professional or personal lives—and they want to handle that shift with clarity, purpose, and strength.
When you look beneath the surface of most coaching engagements, you’ll typically find one of three powerful catalysts at work. Understanding these catalysts helps clarify when coaching might be particularly valuable for you or your team members.
1
Preparing for a High-Stakes Event
Some of the most productive coaching engagements begin when someone recognizes that an important moment is approaching—one where how they show up will significantly impact their results, relationships, or reputation. You know it’s coming—a career-changing conversation, a major sales presentation, a leadership announcement, a board meeting, a critical negotiation, or even a personal event with professional implications.
In these situations, the stakes feel high because they are high. You want to show up as your best self, fully prepared and capable of navigating whatever emerges. You recognize that winging it might work, but deliberate preparation dramatically increases your chances of success.
Coaching provides a structured space to:
- Get truly intentional about your message and desired outcomes.
- Clarify your thinking so you can communicate with precision and impact.
- Rehearse key conversations and refine your approach based on feedback.
- Anticipate potential challenges or questions that might arise.
- Align your communication approach with your deeper values and goals.
- Develop contingency plans for different scenarios that might unfold.
The worst time to think about what you’re going to say or how you’re going to respond is in the moment you’re actually saying it or responding. That’s when pressure is highest and thinking capacity is often most constrained. Coaching helps you do the thinking beforehand—so you can act with purpose and presence, not panic and reaction when the moment arrives.
2
Navigating a Transition
Significant transitions stretch even the most capable and experienced leaders. Whether you’re stepping into a bigger role with new responsibilities, shifting careers entirely, launching a new business, leading a newly formed team, or adapting to organizational changes beyond your control—transitions bring both exciting opportunities and unsettling uncertainties.
During transitions, the rules often change. The metrics for success may shift. Relationships reconfigure. And the strategies that worked in your previous context may no longer apply. It’s easy to lose your footing during these periods, even when the change is positive and desired.
Through focused coaching during transitions, you can:
- Clarify what success truly looks like in this new season.
- Identify which of your existing strengths will transfer well and which new capabilities you need to develop.
- Navigate evolving expectations and build effective new relationships.
- Establish appropriate boundaries and communication patterns.
- Create structures that support your effectiveness in the new context.
- Stay deeply aligned with who you are and what matters to you, even as everything around you evolves.
Coaching provides an invaluable thinking partner during these pivotal periods—someone who isn’t caught in the same transition current, who can provide an outside perspective while remaining fully committed to your successful navigation of the change.
3
Experiencing a State of Confusion
Sometimes there’s no big crisis or obvious external change triggering the need for coaching. From the outside, everything might look perfectly successful. But internally, you feel a growing sense of disconnection, restlessness, or stuckness.
As one client memorably described it: “I was playing checkers really well, but all of a sudden it was a Settlers of Catan board.” The rules seemed to change without warning, and strategies that had reliably worked before suddenly stopped producing the expected results. Your indecision or lack of clarity is affecting you in ways you don’t like—perhaps showing up as stress, diminished energy, second-guessing, or a nagging sense that something important is missing.
In these situations, coaching provides a confidential, non-judgmental space to:
- Name what's no longer working in your current approach.
- Identify patterns or assumptions that may be limiting your options.
- Question whether your current priorities truly align with your deeper values.
- Reconnect with your core purpose and passion that may have become obscured.
- Build a bridge from where you are to where you want to be.
This state of productive confusion, while uncomfortable, often signals readiness for significant growth. Feeling stuck is not a failure, it’s a signal. It frequently means you’re ready to grow beyond your current definitions of success or that you’ve outgrown approaches that served you well in an earlier stage. Coaching helps you navigate this territory with intention rather than simply pushing harder along paths that no longer lead where you want to go.
What are the benefits of being coached?
