When you’re thinking about seeking help or support for any issue, it’s useful to consider what will actually serve you best.
I come at this as someone who has trained as both therapist and coach, as well as someone who’s received both therapy and coaching.

Therapy is more about exploring feelings in depth, making sense and processing. It can be short or long term. Short term therapy is usually something people seek to help them through a difficult, one off event. Longer term therapy often involves uncovering ways you’ve learnt to adapt to life and how this might not be serving you any more. It often involves looking back to understand what happened then and what is happening now.
Therapy is deeply involved with allowing difficult feelings to emerge, developing self awareness, insight into yourself and how you relate to others. A therapist’s role is to sit with you in the depth of your emotional landscape and hold that space.
In contrast, coaching is more forward looking. There isn’t the same depth of emotional exploration and it isn’t about looking back to make sense. For me, coaching is for when the “and so what” question emerges – someone is at a place where they want to explore their thinking, the possibilities open to them and crucially want to take charge of their own actions in pursuit of “what now?” A coach’s role is to facilitate that person’s thinking.

An example
In my “About” section I mentioned I had therapy through my cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery. That’s what I most needed at the time; many sessions featured a lot of crying and acknowledging the depth of grief I was feeling. I recall feeling desperately sad at the bleakest point of it all – I didn’t need to think “so what now”, I needed a therapist to sit with me in that sadness, to know I could tolerate it for as long as it needed to be there. No amount of exploring possibilities would have helped; I felt sad and therapy was the only place I could let that feeling be in its entirety, where it could be witnessed and accepted.
The sadness shifted in time, I gained a sense of possibility in my unexpected life journey and moved on. This is where a coaching mindset became more helpful – what do I want to do now this is my reality? I don’t think I could have done that if I hadn’t attended to the depth of feeling evoked by what happened.
When someone approaches me for coaching, one of the things I will do is try to assess where they are in their journey. I will ask what relevant past or current support they have. It’s important to me that if people are paying for professional support, that this is the right type for them. I may, therefore, suggest that therapy is more appropriate.
Sometimes, it might seem that someone is starting to need a different kind of support whilst we’re working together. My approach is always to have a conversation; I will share what I notice and we can think together about any next steps. I appreciate that sometimes when you’ve built a relationship with someone you don’t want to go do the same with someone else – but the priority is always what is the best type of support for that person and if it’s not what I offer, we need to agree together what happens next.