Differences between a coach and a psychologist

The life coach is often mistakenly confused with a kind of alternative to the psychologist. Not knowing how to distinguish between the roles and functions of these professions in society can be detrimental to the client when it comes to finding a solution to their problems. While it is true that the coach has many valuable tools, acquired from psychology, it is important to distinguish between a coach and a psychologist.

During the development of this guide, we will be addressing some of the fundamental differences that exist between the life coach profession and that of a psychologist, in order to further delimit the roles and particularities that the life coach presents to meet the needs of clients who demand their services.

Field of action

The psychologist is a professional who has tools focused on addressing problems originating in the patient's psyche. Through the psychologist's work, it is possible to identify disorders and affectations that threaten the normal development of social, family and professional relationships of those who suffer from them. The psychologist is a health personnel, not an advisor or orientation guide.

A life coach is a person who has acquired training in conflict resolution through empirical and theoretical experience, which allows him/her to outline strategies and actions to respond to his/her client's problems from a neutral perspective. A life coach does not specifically work with mental health, at least not professionally.

The mechanisms used by the coach may be useful in restoring the client's emotional state, but his work is not aimed at curing psychological disorders, since this requires tools that can only be acquired from the field of psychology.

The psychologist is not a consultant

The psychologist, contrary to the coach, does not fulfill an advisory function.

The psychologist makes a clinical diagnosis of the patient and orients a series of actions to follow in order to heal the patient's ailments. The fundamental difference, in this sense, between the coach and the psychologist, lies in the fact that while the coach proposes strategies to solve the problems from his experience, the psychologist directly orients a treatment and directs his patient through a clinical methodology previously conceived to treat a certain type of affectation.

The coach works on emotions, not illnesses.

The psychological tools that the coach possesses, as a result of his acquired experience and previous work, are focused on working on the client's emotional state. This work is limited to the emotional level, without intervening in the mental health itself. A coach will not solve a compulsive disorder in the client, it may help to calm and relieve stress through everyday tools, but once a diagnosis of an existing pathology is made, a referral should be made to a health professional specialized in these issues, either a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

The coach's insight and astuteness leads him to establish guidelines that in one way or another will have an impact on the emotional benefit, but this should be seen as a collateral benefit that the client will perceive, not as the end of the coach's work.

In the same way that a psychologist cannot face certain problems in his patient's life, because they are outside his field of competence, a coach must know how to measure where his limits are so as not to affect his clients.