Health Coaching & Therapy: Key Differences & Considerations
We’ve been seeing a healthy dialogue surface around key differences between health coaches and therapists. At their core, health coaches and therapists both have the same goal—they both want to optimize their clients’ overall health and wellbeing. However, their approaches often differ quite significantly and in deeply nuanced ways, leading many to ask, “Do I need a health coach or do I need a therapist? Or perhaps, do I need both?”
In today’s blog, we work to unpack some of the key differences and similarities between health coaches and therapists and answer some very frequently asked questions related to both these critical health and wellbeing professions. To inform these insights, we spoke with Susanna (Zan) Barry, PsyD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Health Coach, who shared unique perspectives from her career as both a clinical psychologist and coach.
With over a decade of experience as a health coach as well as an extensive career as a clinical psychologist, Zan has worked with two different sets of populations and has worn two distinct hats. Zan shares, “My work with health coaching can span health behaviors, changes and goals—for example, cutting down on smoking or vaping, feeling better about physical fitness, making nutrition and dietary changes. Sometimes, clients are referred by a clinician for something like achieving more optimal sleep with the thought that instead of squeezing what they need into a 20-minute doctor’s visit, they can benefit from having deeper conversations, goal setting, allyship and the support of a health coach.”
In her role as a clinical psychologist, Zan explains, “Although I’m very interested in the foundation of physical health behaviors as part of mental health, I’m also working with peoples’ family histories, longstanding thought patterns, places where they may be stuck in thought loops preventing them from making strides forward in their lives.”
In its simplest terms, Zan shares, “Therapy does have more of a focus on the internal and health coaching extends to external behaviors that then carry into the world.”
What are some of the key differences between health coaching and therapy?
Health coaching and therapy are two unique approaches to achieving more optimal health and wellbeing. Therapy, for example, delves largely into psychological and emotional wellbeing. Explains Zan, “As a therapist, I might be working with clients through very painful things, like helping them to clear mental patterns that are keeping them stuck, breaking free from self-limiting beliefs that come from historic root causes. Therapy does go into some more internal work where clients are repatterning some of their inner thoughts and re-templating the groundwork that went down a long time ago—then deciding whether they want to keep or edit those patterns in some way. We’re honoring and acknowledging the past while charting a different course for the future.”
Health coaching is behavior-based, even when it’s related to mental and emotional health and wellbeing. Zan shares, “Coaching has the wonderful benefit of helping people act in a new way and change from the outside in. They then start to feel a mastery of new behaviors. They start to experience biochemical benefits of nutrition and fitness that can of course lead to more positive emotions and more positive thought patterns. There’s a saying that you can act your way to a better way of thinking instead of thinking your way into better action—and that’s starting to get at the health coaching approach. It’s about reaping the benefits of outside change and having that filter into inner change.”
There’s a lot of growth that happens in therapy that’s still very internal long before it shows up on outside; so it can be very enriching and enlivening process for people but it isn’t always action right out of the gate; if people are more attracted or looking to take action on own behalf, coaching is a great complement to therapy
Who benefits from health coaching vs. therapy?
Health coaching and therapy address different health needs and often have quite distinct approaches. In order to determine what might be needed in any scenario, Zan provides some guidance, “Someone who is deeply suffering, who has been through major life events that they need to address with a trained therapist could benefit from this sort of therapy relationship. Someone who is really attracted to the coaching modality where you’re very goal-oriented and action-oriented and mastery-driven could really benefit from coaching.
The bottom line: go with what works for you. “I would never inflict therapy on someone where it would not help them suffer less or live more fully,” says Zan. “I think there’s a misconception currently that everyone should get some amount of therapy and I don’t subscribe to that. I think that both coaches and therapists are trying to work themselves out of a job. They want to focus on growth and thriving and have that sustainable change that makes someone grow and flourish and potentially never need them again.”
How does health coaching play a unique role on the broader health & care team?
It goes without saying that health coaching holds an irreplaceable role on the patient care team, bringing an expertise to the table that’s incredibly valuable. Adds Zan, “Health coaches are the experts at understanding common human obstacles that we all face—these shared experiences—that we procrastinate, or we tend towards immediate decision-making rather than thinking of our future self and no one understands that better than the coach.”
What sets health coaches apart from other health and care professionals is that they’re masters at ushering in very necessary behavioral change and making sure that change sticks. Echoes Zan, “Health coaches are experts at behavior change and can look at our commonalities and see the unique person in front of them. They ask questions so they can tailor interventions to each individual they work with and create something that’s so personalized and science-backed. They not only break our dreams down into actual steps but also get us motivated to take the first step and each successive step. Coaches know how to adapt and adjust the approach to help somebody not only get the first few steps of the process but get all the way to the goal.”
What value could a coach bring to a therapy relationship?
“We don’t need another multi-million dollar study to tell us that a good night’s sleep will make us feel better in the morning, or that nourishing ourselves with some wholesome food will make us feel more energized,” says Zan. “There’s no need to further prove that those things are medicinal in their own right and coaches bring that to clients every day in ways that are actionable and that don’t feel intimidating. Not everyone responds in the same way, but there’s a method that’s right for everybody and coaches are very good about finding the right way in.”
It’s precisely this personalized approach that makes health coaches so successful at helping people become healthier and happier versions of themselves. We’re proud to make health coaching more accessible to employees across the country through our ongoing partnerships that deliver our best-in-class health coaching services to our Industry Partners. While health coaching serves a very distinct purpose compared to other health and care professionals, like therapists, we see the role of a health coach as both complementary to other professionals like therapists and absolutely irreplaceable within the broader context of the patient care team.
Thanks very much to Zan Barry for her impactful insights and for her ongoing dedication to both professions.