The Difference Between Mentoring, Coaching & Therapy
Self-actualisation is the process of becoming “everything you are capable of becoming.”
There’s no script for that. Everyone has to find their own unique ways to hear the inner wisdom that can help them live a life of truth. Only you can determine what living your fully expressed truth means for you.
Self-actualisation doesn’t involve perfection or things always going smoothly. You can become self-actualized and still face difficulties. But it’s not something you can do alone. You will always be influenced by the level of guidance, support and mentorship you receive.
We live in a culture that values instant gratification, superficial beauty, lavish possessions and excessive consumption making up for what it lacks in emotional depth, community, creativity and meaningful connections.
When things don’t work out or we don’t get what we want or feel empty inside we often try to fill our time, space and home with more perfunctory things, people and experiences. Every dysfunctional human behaviour is an attempt to escape suffering. We don’t stop for a moment and consider that perhaps what we feel we are really feeling is the disconnection from our truth.
This is where mentoring steps in. A heralded guidance back your own potential, knowledge, wisdom and heart. Your return to self-actualisation.
But first, let’s explore the difference between mentoring, coaching & therapy.
Therapy also called psychotherapy or counselling is a treatment process about healing hurts, re-parenting, and bringing resolution to personal pain. It focuses on problems, their sources, the symptoms that result from those problems, dysfunctions, trauma and diagnosis of disorders. It is a doctor/patient relationship where the therapist/psychologist diagnoses and prescribes remedial ‘solutions’ to the patient.
Coaching is a process of using questions and feedback to facilitate the client’s capabilities and resources into self-generated change and action. Action that is designed to achieve goals and take a client from where they are in life now, to where they want to be. A coach assumes the client is the expert in their own life, and that the coach is simply there to help the client elicit their own answers. This unique distinction enables the client to develop their own capability, creativity and resourcefulness from the coaching process.
Mentoring is an approach that involves providing advice, guidance, and sharing one’s own personal story. The focus here is on a particular skill, knowledge or experience that a mentor has deeper background knowledge in, that is passed on. Mentoring is particularly effective because it offers you access to someone who has been there and done that and can guide you through the same thing. They can understand you and where you are at so intimately because they have experienced it.
Mentoring also tends to be a longer-term relationship in nature. Many of my private clients work with me for a year or more. Coaching, in contrast, tends to be shorter-term, as it is only necessary to help people achieve certain goals. Once a person has achieved a goal, they are typically done with that coaching experience.
Mentoring tends to be a more informal and friendly relationship, than perhaps coaching and therapy because instead of deflecting and separating yourself from your client’s experiences you openly offer vulnerable and truthful insights into your own experiences and challenges which makes them feel less alone. By holding space and witnessing someone without judgement you help them to feel when they are not able to and thereby regulate their emotions and experiences. You co-regulate by being calm, loving and compassionate and liberate people from their “self” stories, narratives by holding them accountable to them.
Neuroscience tells us that brain development depends on a human to human responsiveness. Many of us had times in our lives when those around us were not able to be present with and available to us. Mentoring as per The Mentor Training program ensures that your clients feel heard, seen, witnessed, accepted and enjoyed to restore and repair imbalances in their lives. So they can return to your natural state of living a fully expressed life. A self-actualised one.
What I am teaching is an intelligent heart-mind-body approach to holding space for people in a safe and beholden way. If you have lived life and moved through challenges, whether personally, in a specific career, in your spiritual journey, your relationships and more, you certainly have the natural skills there already. What this training will give you is a framework with which to move forward.
It’s about building trust, knowing and owning your own projections so that they don’t interfere with your clients, and offering a container that allows them to self-remedy. Because we all have access to the answers but need to feel seen, heard, and witnessed in our human journey. Like the way small children always say “watch me!” when they are trying and learning something new… we never stop needing to be validated and supported in our growth end evolution.
Mentoring offers that witnessing that we would otherwise receive from our elders, community and wider family that is lacking in our societies today, from someone who naturally falls into that position because of their unique insights, experiences and predispositions. The fact that you have both: extensive life experience and an intuitive knowing and ability to tune into people and hold space for them, makes this training the perfect springboard into turning these skills into a service that is sorely needed.
