Coaching vs. Counseling

“The Pursuit of Excellence”

Coaching focuses on empowering superior development through increased knowledge, improved talents, added skills, and personal motivation. Its purpose is to assist, through partnership, the highest possible level of performance and achievement. This is done through a cooperative peer-to-peer effort (co-active process) to achieve superior heights yet unknown.

Counseling focuses on correcting perceived problems by changing behaviors and attitudes. It begins by utilizing investigative/diagnostic tools to examine feelings, attitudes, perceptions, and behavioral patterns that hinder performance and achievement; then implementing therapies designed to eliminate discovered obstacles that interfere with the ability to develop properly and to function at an acceptable level of performance and achievement. This is accomplished in an expert-to-patient relationship (clinical process) where the clinician leads or guides the patient up from an unacceptably inferior condition.

While the process of coaching may suggest, utilize, or cause a change in behavior or attitude, it is merely part of the process. The real purpose of coaching is accelerated development and enhanced effectiveness.

In essence, while counseling helps those below the expected standard to rise up to it, coaching strives to help people rise to the highest possible level of excellence through a co-active pursuit of enhanced effectiveness, self-mastery, and superior leadership.