A few distinctions to help you understand what coaching is... and what it is not.

Coaching vs Therapy

Coaching is not therapy. Coaches don't work with clients on "issues", healing pain or trauma, or spend much time pondering the intricacies of human behavior. That knowledge may come as clients move towards the life they really want, but it is not the focus of the coaching relationship. Coaching is about empowerment. It's about taking action to achieve the things a client values, needs and wants.

You might say therapy is about healing/fixing/getting over the past, while coaching focuses on creating a perfect present and designing an extraordinary future. Coaches are not particularly concerned with how/why you got to be who you were... they are far more interested in who you are, who you want to be, and how you're going to get there. While therapists are interested in knowing "why?"... coaches want to know "how?"

And finally, therapy generally operates from a paradigm of pathology, while coaching embraces a paradigm of possibility. In other words, therapy is about moving from dysfunctional to functional; coaching is about moving from functional to ... exceptional.