Therapeutic coaching is a hybrid of therapy and coaching. It is solution-focused, helping you to find answers that are right for you, while providing the benefits of traditional therapy. It is predominantly present- and future-orientated, with an emphasis on nurturing strengths and values in shaping and acquiring the life that you want and swapping it for the life you currently have. Therapeutic coaching is an approach to personal change that harnesses the different but complementary powers of coaching and therapy in a single way of working.

The boundary between coaching and therapy lies in disputed territory according to purists. Coaches therefore expect their clients to be prepared to commit to making changes from early in the process which then requires a firm-enough foundation of psychological wellbeing and resilience. This is not an easy option it is not as it often means you work harder and deeper in this process.

It is nonetheless like therapy in creating a space for deeper exploration of the self than is generally found in coaching. Where necessary, this might involve exploring the past, looking at how our early years can create unconscious patterns of behaviour that shape how we habitually think, feel, behave and relate to others and more importantly to ourselves.

But there are many that believe that it is a fantastic combination of two different modalities of change. Like counselling, it will often involve revisiting difficult experiences in a way that is unsettling and upsetting, but this is the process it needs to go through to get the best results and enrich the life you will lead afterwards.

What coaching and therapy have in common is a belief in each person’s ability, given the right circumstances, to live a better life and to continue to do this for the rest of their time. It is generally agreed that coaching is largely a future-orientated process that enables people to identify where they want to get to in their working and/or personal lives, why they want to get there and how best to navigate a route to that destination.

Whereas there is broad agreement that therapy is essentially concerned with our past and works on relieving distress, healing emotional wounds, resolving inner conflicts, changing unhelpful habits of thought and behaviour, fashioning new narratives and thereby enabling people to live with less or no psychological pain.

I think therapeutic coaching is designed for those who are experiencing a measure of disquiet in their lives and for those who, whether by choice or circumstance, find themselves at a point of transition in their lives, have no idea how to get where they want to be but they know its not where they currently are. A little bit like using a sat nav with no destination programmed in as yet.

This might relate specifically to work, to a particular aspect of life or to life in general. Therapeutic coaching is also of value to those who have a sense that, though they are doing all right, but life is far from what they want it to be and feel there is much more they want and will be able to achieve with the right guidance and support.

Coaches will generally pay much more attention than therapists to helping their clients to pinpoint their personal strengths, qualities and values. Once recognised, these can be cultivated and brought to bear on life’s opportunities and challenges. Coaches also tend to place more emphasis on a session-by-session basis and on working with their clients to identify specific steps that they can take towards their longer-term goals. So by using someone like myself who is trained in both counselling and coaching, you get the best of both worlds.

Therapeutic coaching remains different from therapy itself, in that the primary aim of this deeper exploration is not to relieve distress and heal wounds, but to inform the project of actively crafting a more fulfilling life and committing to change. It is therefore not suitable for people who are experiencing persistent distress and or finding it difficult to function on a day-to-day basis. In such cases, initially at least, therapy is likely to be a better option.