Why People Think Solution Focused Brief Therapy is Coaching (And Why They’re Wrong)

I want to have a conversation about something that I just don’t really fully understand. Earlier this week, I did a training, which I often do. Obviously I teach a lot of people how to practice Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

Almost every time I do this, someone in the audience, if I do a demonstration, or as I talk about and teach the intricacies of Solution Focused Brief Therapy, someone in the audience will say, “This sounds to me like coaching.” And I never understood that.

There seems to be a rivalry between psychotherapists and coaches. And for sure, psychotherapists look down upon coaches. And I don’t understand it. So I wanted to say a couple things about this, and see if we can come to some bit of a greater understanding.

The first thing I want to say is, it’s not that Solution Focused Brief Therapy sounds like coaching. If anything, you should say coaching sounds like Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

Solution Focused Brief Therapy is a psychotherapy approach with a body of research behind it. It’s been around since the 1970s, whereas coaching really had an explosion in the 1990s. But we have been taught, and I was taught this, here in America, we’ve been taught that coaches are like unlicensed therapists; coaches are an unregulated field where anybody could do it.

So it causes this level of, like psychotherapists that are very academic and highly educated and managed by licensure. We look down on something like that. We’ve been taught that coaching, the difference between psychotherapy and coaching — and I think this is the issue here — the difference between therapy and coaching is that coaching is about a goal and psychotherapy is about a problem. So if you’re doing something like Solution Focused Brief Therapy, which is about an outcome which is closely related to a goal, then it starts to feel like coaching to psychotherapists, who don’t want to associate someone with coaching for the reasons I said before.

But the truth is that is a very pop culture definition of what coaching is. And I know that because…. And like I said, I was taught these things too. These are the things that I was taught when I was in grad school, when I was growing up. And now I travel around the world teaching people. And I’ve literally been to every continent. And I will tell you, outside of the United States, the majority of people delivering mental health services are coaches. The majority of people doing work in this field, they identify as a coach. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s just the truth.

There have been people over the years that have gotten mad at me that I will do trainings for coaches, and I’m like, “What would you have me do?” The majority of people in the world who do this kind of work, in the helping professions, identify as coaches. So if I refuse to teach them, then there’s a lot of people out there that are not getting the best services.

So I think we need to understand that the pop culture definition of coaching, which is it’s not about a problem, and the pop culture definition of therapy, it’s about solving a problem, is not accurate. That is absolutely not true.

So we have to understand that these are two completely different fields and Solution Focused Brief Therapy is a very credible, a very evidence based, form of doing psychotherapy. And when you’re hearing it, and you’re watching it being done and you start thinking to yourself, “Oh, this is not about a problem, so thus it’s coaching.” I instead want you to be thinking, “This is not about a problem, which is just a different way to do psychotherapy.”