Differences Between Counseling and Life Coaching Research Proposal

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Life Coaching vs. Counseling

There are many differences between life coaching and counseling. While counselors are required by state law to pass specific examinations after meeting requisite hours of education, life coaches are under no such demands and may enter into service without having completed any education or achieved any certification or license. Yet both life coaches and counselors work towards achieving similar goals -- that is, they both put the needs of the client before their own and help the client to identify objectives and work to meet them for a positive outcome. Counselors may work with clients who have behavioral and/or psychological problems, while life coaches tend to work with clients who need assistance focusing on a specific outcome and working to achieve it. Life coaches help clients prepare an action plan, stay motivated, block out specific activities, and pursue a life goal that will give the client happiness. Counselors tend to be less life goal oriented and more overcoming a specific problem oriented. Clients who are not in need of serious behavioral or psychological assistance may find life coaches to be a beneficial, while clients who are in need of serious behavioral and/or psychological help would most likely benefit from a trained and licensed counselor.

Summary of Proposal

This proposal aims to compare life coaching to counseling and show how each offers distinct benefits to specific types of clientele.

Life coaching is a relatively new and unique approach to helping persons that is born more out of motivational speaking phenomenon than it is out of the science of psychology, though it benefits from psychological studies. Life coaching is a phenomenon that sees coaches assisting clients in identifying goals that will make the client happy and that they would like to achieve. Life coaches support the pursuit of these goals and/or dreams by providing motivation, emotional support, directional support, and key analysis of how to better organize one's life in order to overcome habits that might be negatively impeding the process of fulfillment.

Counseling on the other hand is based on psychological science and can taken several forms, such as behavioral therapy or psychoanalysis. Counseling is a science that approaches the issue of mind and behavior disturbances and seeks to help clients by locating and identifying the problem and assisting the client in overcoming that issue by a number of different means. Typically, a counselor will specialize in a specific approach to counseling, such as Applied Behavioral treatment or person centered therapy. Each counseling uses the methods that he/she finds most suitable, and usually clients who have specific problems will require a specific counseling approach. For example, a patient who is suicidal will receive counseling from a counselor who specializes in working with suicidal clients.

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Child counselors will specialize with children over adults, etc.

This paper will show that life coaching has its place in the assistance of persons who seek a special kind of service that is not related to serious mental or behavioral disorder; it will discuss the more controversial aspects of the comparison between life coaching and counseling and the differences related to the two.

The paper will take a phenomenological approach to the topic of life coaching vs. counseling. It will show through direct observation of both life coaches and counselors how the two approaches are utilized to achieve different aims, with the end goal being to promote a more positive position for the client.

In this manner, the paper will show that life coaches help clients to achieve a specific life goal, while counselors help clients to address a specific problem. While counselors will allow clients to talk more as they intrude less, wanting the client to typically uncover problems on their own and identify solutions through talking it out, life coaches usually do not use this approach. Life coaches tell clients exactly what they think and get to the root of issues that are impeding the client's progress. The life coach is similar to a basketball coach, who watches the player in practice, sees the strengths and weaknesses of the player, tells the player what they are, what their potential is, what they can expect to achieve and then talks to the player about how to achieve it. The counselor on the other hand allows the client to come to his or her own conclusions and might steer the client in the appropriate course but never states outright that this is the way the client should go.

This paper discusses approaches that counselors can take to address the issues of clients: it will discuss non-directive forms of counseling, such as interpersonal therapy, psychodynamic therapy and person centered therapy. It will also discuss directive forms of counseling, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and solution-focused therapy. It will show how directive forms of counseling are similar to life coaching, although the latter is less situated in the psychological background and more oriented towards a management type of approach with a specialization in motivational skills for addressing the client's needs.

Also discussed by way of comparison will be the various approaches that a life coach can take to address the needs of a client. The life coach will provide valuable feedback that is helpful to the client in identifying what he/she is doing and how to correct it. The approach of the life coach will range from….....

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