Helping you decide: do you need a Life Coach or a Therapist?
Let’s look at several case stories together, showing the interventions a Life Coach would do, and what the work with a therapist would entail. By reading through these different options, hopefully you will get a real feel of what resonates with you, and which approach you would benefit from most. It might also give you an idea of what type of work still feels a little scary at the moment, but could be exactly what you need.
Below you’ll find three subjects people often bring to a professional for guidance: increasing confidence, reducing stress & anxiety and developing a fulfilling love life. Find out how a Life Coach and a Therapist work in a unique way to support you through these challenges. And once again, at Vitalis each practitioner is qualified as both Coach and Therapist, which means that all of these techniques are available to you.
Working with a Coach or Therapist on lack of confidence and low self esteem - exploring approaches
A Life Coach approach
A Life Coach might approach the subject of lack of confidence or low self esteem by helping you identify what confidence means for you. You might be invited to freely associate with words and build a clear description of that state for yourself. What does confidence look like? How does it feel? What does it sound like? What happens in your body when you are confident, while speaking your truth and believing in yourself?
Life Coaches might encourage you to create a Pinterest Board or Vision Board with visual representations of how confidence looks. You might be invited to explore the edges of where confidence can slip into its more undesirable qualities like arrogance, self-righteousness or superiority. In this way you well get a really clear sense of each ‘state’ of confidence, and what a healthy image of confidence looks like for you.
Life Coaches might invite you to find role models to help you get a more rounded idea of what it would be like to embody and step into that state. You could play with exercises and practice trying on the state of confidence for size, generating some practical tools for applying confidence in different situations. You might be invited to explore yoga or breathwork, vocal or postural exercises. A Life Coach would likely help you determine the situations where you’d like to increase your confidence and importantly, those aspects of your life where you feel like you already have it, and “borrow” some of those behaviours, attitudes, and beliefs to apply to other contexts. Good coaching will likely resource you to tackle some of the limiting beliefs around the subject of self-esteem for you, so you can enjoy more confidence when you need it most. A Life Coach might be able to point out a negative recurring thought, and suggest a mantra to repeat instead, so you can establish a more positive thought pattern.
versus A therapist approach
A therapist / counsellor initial focus might be on the origins of (lack of) confidence for you. For example by doing some work on the timeline of your life to find situations where you did experience more confidence and self-esteem, and importantly exploring what the internal landscape looks like for you when you both feel confident and when it is absent. They might invite you to explore your earliest memories of feeling confident, and especially where it might have been crushed or undermined. Perhaps there were times when your body failed you, or when you were bullied as a child, or more recently by a superior a work. They would explore your relationship to your parents / caregivers around confidence and the messages you received in your formative years and how those contributed to your Life Script (more on that in our post on Transactional Analysis) and your Inner Critic. The way our primary care-givers treated each other, the (lack of) confidence in them, and the way our primary care-givers treated us all informs our own self-worth.
A therapist would work with the part of you that feels the opposite of confident, in order to help ‘reparent’ it. It’s likely that we might disown, reject or even be disgusted by the part of ourselves that isn’t confident or has low self-esteem. We might perceive it as weak, spineless, worthless and have developed an internal relationship based on shame, or even hatred. A therapist would be concerned with getting to the root of this and support you in developing a more compassionate relationship with the less confident aspects of yourself. You would be encouraged, perhaps through ‘chairwork’, journaling and other practical exercises, to befriend that rejected part of yourself, and to offer deep healing. There is an understanding that the part of you that may be keeping you small or less confident was created in order to keep you safe, in order to fulfil a deeper need. Perhaps it’s no longer serving you as well as it might have done in the past, but rather than reject it, the work is to develop a sense of safety in that part of yourself so that you can heal and grow up into a more confident thriving self. A good therapist would be able to lead you back to the early memories where negative conclusions (so called limiting beliefs) originated, and will help you reparent your inner child into a healthy adult, reframing not only with language but with many different practical, somatic and spiritual exercises. In this way you’ll build a new foundation to rely upon for the rest of your life.
All this work would enable that wounded child part of yourself to grow up into a more accepted, more confident Self, so that the vulnerable part no longer gets to be in the driving seat and, having resolved the issue at the root, you can enjoy more confidence in your day-to-day life.
When you decide to work with a Vitalis practitioner, both the therapy and coaching approaches to help you increase and heal your self-confidence are available for you.