Life coaching and kids

Where are we going to place the line between coaching and counselling? 

I have noticed a distinct increase in the number of books aimed at teaching coaching to counsellors. One that is useful is Dave Ellis’s Life Coaching: A Manual for Helping Professionals, recently republished. Another is David Skibbins’ Becoming a Life Coach: A Complete Workbook for Therapists. 

I make no apologies for mentioning them here because, at the upper end, our clients are young adults and may well prefer a more action-oriented approach to their problems. And in any case, for those who do not have serious mental health issues, how is this so different from any solution-focused form of therapy?

If we are honest, the dividing line between counselling and coaching is somewhat vague. There is a continuum of therapy models offered in counselling, according to either how deeply we want to work, or how deeply embedded the problems are, or how directive or nondirective we wish to be. The younger the client, the more sense it makes to work indirectly via play. But by age nine or 10, some clients are wanting to actively discuss options because it empowers them. And besides, there are some things which they are not in a position to know, and we have to ask ourselves how ethical it is to withhold certain information, if, by sharing it, the child or young person could make a better choice. This acknowledges the expected cognitive deficit rather than a cognitive dysfunction.

Compare this to Ellis’s continuum of nondirective-to-directive coaching:

• Listen and affirm (the least directive)
• Listen fully and feed back celebrations, dreams and action plans
• Ask the client to generate a few new possibilities
• Ask the client to generate many possibilities
• Present at least 10 possibilities (some contradictory)
• Present at least three possibilities
• Teach a new technique
• Offer an opinion (the most directive – after this, it becomes advice)

Not so foreign as we might wish to believe? It starts – as we do – from the changes the client wishes to make. We could almost be brothers-in-arms and dwell in the same camp if times got bad. 

Whether life coaching per se had actually entered the child and young people market eluded me until I read this article featuring parents whose children attend coaching sessions. That’s not coaching as in revising your Maths or English for SATs or GCSEs. That’s life coaching as in the adult occupation of wishing to seriously improve your life outcomes. Amazing.

And then I stumbled across the Develop Your Child website, where this British organisation sends a family coach into your home (as opposed to the family attending a clinic appointment) and delivers a programme of help under the auspices of their charity arm, Every Family Matters.

I know that various organisations have family workers, but this is specifically labelled ‘coaching’. If you have families who might need or want this kind of service, I guess it’s the sort of information we therapists should be keeping track of, even if it means crossing some kind of mental barrier.