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Wondering if I’m a good fit for your needs? Here are some of my takes to help you get to know me!

Things I can do as a coach that I can’t do as a therapist: give advice

As a therapist, my thoughts on giving advice are nuanced. As a coach, they’re simple: I give it.

There’s a reason therapists are taught not to give advice, and it’s not because advice is inherently bad. (Excluding therapeutic orientations where the therapist has to be a blank slate which is increasingly uncommon.) There are some clients for whom direct advice really can backfire. Some people are naturally oppositional and if you tell them what you think, they’ll immediately argue the other side and get stuck. Others are still developing a strong sense of self and can be overly influenced by the therapist simply because the therapist is the “expert” in the room. Those clients need a different approach.

But most people aren’t in either category. Most people can hear an opinion, consider it, disagree with it, add context, and keep exploring. A skilled therapist can facilitate that by saying things like, “I wonder if…” or “I’m having the thought that…” instead of presenting their perspective as the only answer.

Here’s where I’ll say something controversial. I think “therapists shouldn’t give advice” is sometimes used as a crutch. Giving good advice requires judgment. You have to know when to give it, what advice to give, and how to present it effectively. You also have to be comfortable being wrong. It can be easier to hide behind “I can’t tell you what to do.”

DBT has a significant coaching component, so I have ten years of experience on how to help people explore their own answers and how to give direct guidance when that’s what they need.

As a coach, I get to be much more explicit about it: I’m the expert in the room. I’m going to give you advice. You get to decide whether you want to take it.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from clients about therapy is I just want someone to give me advice. I’m happy to! I can’t wait to.

You don’t have to take it. You can disagree. We can talk about why you disagree. But you’re going to leave every session with something concrete to think about, try, or do differently.

Things I can do as a coach that I can’t do as a therapist: experience you in real life.

This is one of the biggest differences between therapy and coaching, and it’s more important than people realize. Therapists are taught to be very careful about dual relationships such as friendships, social connections, business relationships, or other interactions outside the therapy room. There are good reasons for this. A therapist has a lot of power in the relationship, and boundaries protect the client.

But there’s also a tradeoff. As a therapist, I only see the version of you that you bring into my office. I can’t know with certainty whether what you’re telling me is accurate. I can make educated guesses based on experience, but I’m still working with self-reported information. Collateral sessions (bringing someone else into therapy) can help, but they’re relatively uncommon and can be difficult to arrange.

Coaching gives us a different opportunity.

If we’re part of the same community, I might see how you interact with other people. If we attend the same social events, I might observe you in situations you wouldn’t think to tell me about. If we collaborate professionally, I might experience how you communicate, handle conflict, make decisions, or respond to feedback. That’s observational data, and it can tell me things self-report can’t.

But this doesn’t mean coaching gets to throw ethics out the window. I was trained extensively in ethics as both a therapist and a lawyer, and I still hold myself to those same underlying ethical values. The difference is that I think about why the ethical rule exists, not just whether I technically followed the rule.

Confidentiality, for example, exists partly to create safety so people can be vulnerable. That value absolutely belongs in coaching. Avoiding dual relationships, on the other hand, protects against the therapist having inappropriate influence over a client. That concern is particularly important in therapy because the therapeutic relationship itself is part of the treatment.

With coaching, though, I’m not trying to recreate a therapeutic relationship outside the therapy room. I’m using different kinds of interactions to understand you more fully and, when appropriate, help you more effectively. That distinction creates possibilities that simply don’t exist in traditional therapy. 

Things I can do as a coach that I can’t do as a therapist: focus almost entirely on the goal

Of course therapists work towards goals but in therapy goals are often signposts and not the destination. Therapy should be focused on treating an underlying condition, which can mean doing deep, slow work with very little visible progress from one week to the next. The therapeutic relationship itself is part of the treatment and building trust, intimacy, and new interpersonal patterns takes time.

That work is incredibly important but clients understandably want to feel better now. And sometimes they don’t just want insight. They want to know: “What can I actually do differently this week?” As a DBT therapist, I learned how to integrate goal-setting with deeper mental health treatment. As a coach, I can take that goal-focused piece and make it the entire focus.

Sometimes the client has a specific goal that doesn’t require therapy at all: improving communication in a relationship, navigating a divorce, experimenting with relationship structures, or doing deeper anti-oppression work. Other times, they’re already in therapy and want help practicing what they’re learning in real life.

For example, imagine someone in therapy working through complex PTSD and chronic invalidation who struggles with rejection sensitivity and becomes defensive during conflict. There may be much deeper trauma work happening in therapy that needs time and attention. But as a coach, I can focus specifically on the defensiveness. We can actually practice conflict. We can slow it down, try something different, troubleshoot what happened, and do it again.

A therapist can absolutely do this too. But sometimes there are simply more important things to work on in the therapy room. Coaching, on the other hand, can create space for the practical work happening alongside the deeper treatment. And I think this matters because clients sometimes leave therapy not because therapy isn’t working, but because they aren’t seeing enough tangible progress. Sometimes they came in wanting help with a specific problem while their therapist is appropriately working on something deeper. Other times, the deeper work genuinely needs to take priority, and the short-term goals have to wait.

Either way, it can be frustrating for everyone. I love coaching because it can bridge that gap.