In the UK’s growing world of mental health and personal development, many people wonder: Is life coaching the same as therapy or counselling?

The short answer is no but they do overlap in powerful ways. Understanding the distinctions helps you access the right kind of support at the right time.

What is Life Coaching?

Life coaching is a collaborative, forward-focused relationship that helps individuals identify goals, shift limiting beliefs, and unlock their potential. According to the Association for Coaching (AC), coaching is “a structured, purposeful and solution-focused process, with the aim of enhancing performance, life experience, self-directed learning and growth.”

Unlike therapy, coaching is not about diagnosis or treatment. Coaches work with clients who are mentally well but may feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unfulfilled in some area of life such as career, finances, relationships or areas of health. Confidence and purpose become activated with successful coaching.

In the UK, life coaches aren’t regulated in the same way as counsellors or therapists, but many have accredited training and offer integrative approaches like NLP, hypnotherapy, or EFT.

What is Counselling?

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) defines counselling as “a talking therapy that involves a trained therapist listening to you and helping you find ways to deal with emotional issues.” Counselling is often short to medium-term and may focus on specific life challenges like bereavement, stress, or family conflict.

Counsellors are trained to hold a non-judgemental space, helping clients explore feelings and patterns without necessarily revisiting deep trauma. Many work in NHS talking therapy services, charities, schools or private practice.

What is Therapy?

Therapy (or psychotherapy) often goes deeper. It includes longer-term work that helps individuals understand the roots of their distress, often in early life or unconscious patterns. Therapists registered with bodies like the UKCP (UK Council for Psychotherapy) or BPS (British Psychological Society) are trained to work with trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and relational wounds.

As trauma expert Dr Gabor Maté suggests, therapy involves “compassionate enquiry” exploring not just what hurts, but why and where it began.

The Overlap: When Counselling feeds into Therapy

In practice, many UK-based therapists and counsellors use blended approaches. For instance, a counsellor may begin by supporting someone through a relationship breakdown but refer them to a psychotherapist if childhood trauma surfaces.

Conversely, a trauma therapist might refer someone back to counselling or coaching to rebuild confidence, manage stress, or set future goals once the acute trauma has been processed.

Where Coaching comes into its own

Life coaching is ideal for those who are:

• Seeking clarity or direction in life or career
• Struggling with imposter syndrome or low confidence
• Juggling roles as a mum, leader, or entrepreneur
• Ready to set boundaries, define their values, and step into empowerment

Coaching is also powerful post-therapy, helping individuals implement insights in real life, create structure, and maintain momentum. Transformation coaches often blend subconscious tools like Hypnotherapy and EMDR with action-based strategies particularly helpful for women managing identity shifts after maternity or midlife transitions.

When to choose Coaching, Counselling, or Therapy

A complement, not a competition

Ultimately, the question isn’t whether coaching is “therapy” it’s about recognising your current needs. Sometimes a combination is best. A skilled coach will refer you to a therapist or counsellor if deep healing is needed. Equally, therapists often collaborate with coaches to help clients move forward post-recovery.

Transformation Coaching approach might be the best fit for you

As a transformation coach with years of experience, I offer clients a blended approach using a range of modalities from all disciplines discussed above.

When I offered a purely life coaching service, working with the conscious mind, I found clients were engaged and motivated but couldn’t maintain the new structures in their lives. It seemed, after time, they lacked motivation or discipline or a transition in their life would throw them off course. It was frustrating for me and them.

I delved deeper into understanding the role of the subconscious mind. Learning directly from the source, the subconscious mind and embedding instructions deeply created longer lasting change. It didn’t matter if the client was half motivated at some points in their days, they found it easier to sustain the positive thoughts, feelings and behaviours they desired.

A little later in my practice, I realised some clients were highly motivated, highly self-aware and well read. Despite this ‘something’ was preventing them from experiencing elevated levels of joy, happiness and success. This ‘something’ was often symptoms of trauma or deep conditioning from earlier phases of life.

The protective part of their mind accomplishes two things, very well. It places a cap or ceiling on what it perceives as an upper limit of joy, happiness and success. Secondly, it creates in the mind an advance interconnected web to prevent clients from experiencing notions of embarrassment, pain or danger that resemble anything like what they endured in the past. In other words, it protects clients from something they no longer need to be protected from usually with disproportionate reactions.

Clients accept and justify the parameters set by the protective part of their mind until yearning from other parts of their identity becomes louder. They can no longer ignore the choir in their head, the polarity, the opposing arguments from their mind. If they are purpose or mission led, evolving becomes a necessity and no longer a choice. Their potential cannot be wasted, they have dependants, be it in their home, community, workplace or across the globe. The urge to dig deep and do the ‘work’ competes with or becomes bigger than their need for comfort.

The approaches I use are many and varied. I work in a way that enables the subconscious mind to feel safety with me. This goes beyond creating a safe place to talk, it speaks to the inner child and wounded parts that believed they were forgotten. I use comforting phrases to create a foundation of safety and security for the subconscious mind to reveal what is essential to dissolve the blocks.

Clients access deeply suppressed memories, symptoms, sensations and from this point on, we work together to shift, uncreate, unlearn and embed new life affirming antidotes. I entertain the conscious mind with a range of activities to satisfy its needs for control, order and analysis. It’s a carefully designed dance between moving parts of the self. It’s deeply transformative.

Clients are well resourced and supported to build efficacy with range of tools to ensure their emotional stability; a key component when working to heal clients. Developing skills and practices that will serve them long after sessions are over.

Whatever your issue, whatever you have tried in the past, with transformation coaching you will elevate and expand your potential in areas of life that matter most to you.

Here’s what a client said about working with me:

Roksana transformed my life!

 

I approached Roksana in a state of constant anxiety and deep grief. I had tried other forms of coaching and therapy which all provided temporary relief before I was back in a bad state again. I couldn’t understand why I seemed to have low resilience to life’s twists and turns as a strong spiritualist and successful woman. I wanted to get to the root of the problem and become free of suffering. Working with Roksana completely transformed my life!

 

Our deep regression work and coaching techniques set me free of the traumas I was carrying and provided structure to form the life I really wanted. She is brilliantly accurate and provides the safest space to let go of all the baggage of the past. Roksana’s intuition played into my spiritual leaning too which allowed me to explore my soul’s greater purpose beyond my mental constructs.

 

Since our work together, people respond very differently to me – I’m attracting very positive circles, and am often asked ‘what’s changed, you seem so confident!’, ‘you’re glowing’, ‘who is your coach?’. Investing in Roksana was the best decision I ever made for myself.

Hi! I’m Roksana. I’m a life coach for women in St Albans, Hertfordshire. I run face to face and online sessions via Zoom. I also specialise in trauma healing. I’m always happy to answer your questions around any of my methods or approaches. Long term changes begin with a guide who has walked a similar path, has a blueprint, will give you support and accountability every step of the way. If you’re interested to know more then please book a FREE call with me.