Coaching, Therapy, or Both? Where to Invest for the Best ROI.

If you’re struggling with your mental health, feeling stuck in life, or wondering whether life coaching or therapy is the better investment, this episode is for you. As someone who has worked as both a therapist and a coach, I’m breaking down the real differences between the two — without the black-and-white internet hot takes. We’ll talk about when therapy is the smartest place to start, when coaching can help you grow faster, and why some people benefit from both. 

We’re diving into everything from anxiety, trauma, and depression to stress, burnout, boundaries, habits, career transitions, and personal development. Plus, I’ll share some surprising exceptions to the “rules,” including why some coaches can be incredibly effective for deeper emotional work — and why finding the right practitioner matters more than the title on their website. If you’ve ever wondered where to invest your time, energy, and money to actually feel better and move forward, this conversation will help you make a more informed decision. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Climb Your Mountain, the only podcast that teaches you how to use coaching, neuroscience, and mindfulness to overcome life's challenges. I'm Sarah Mauer, a certified life and performance coach, frontwork facilitator, and trance geek. Each week I show you how to change your brain fast for good and without struggle. Whether you're training to climb an actual mountain, building a business, dating, or claiming a fucking rebellion, these tools will help. Listen and learn so you can enjoy more of what you want. Happiness, fun, connection, creativity, courage, and the occasional mountaintop moment. Ready? Let's do this. Hey friend, how you doing? I am pretty good. As you can hear, I am kind of getting over a cold, so I'm gonna try really hard not to make any big snotty snorts into my mic. If I do, I'll definitely try to remember to edit them out so that you don't have to hear them, because that would be pretty gross. Um, probably TMI. When I was leading breath work online earlier this week, I got this crazy hair to lead the group in the breath of fire, which, if you know anything about that, it's it's all through your nose, right? So I started to lead them, and on the very first breath, I just like blew a big snot rocket right onto my mic and it hit so hard it made a noise. And I don't think anybody in the group actually heard it or was disturbed by it, but man, I was pretty grossed out by it, and I was also trying so hard not to laugh at myself. I was like, what was I thinking? That was a really bad idea. So hopefully there won't be anything like that in this episode. If there is, I'll try to edit it out. I'm always here to educate and entertain, not like gross you out while you're working out or driving or whatever you're doing while you're listening to the pod. Well, welcome back to the money series. This is a series that I started last week. It's for people who want to just really improve their minds, their emotional health, their performance, their mindsets, and they want to know what's the smartest way to do that. What kind of investments should they be making? So in the last episode, we got pretty deep into what's a coach, what's a therapist. I feel like I have a unique perspective as someone that is trained in and has practiced as both. So we did a deep dive into what the training looks like for each of those. Kind of a quick recap: therapists are the mental health professionals, they are graduate trained, they are licensed and regulated. And then, whereas coaches are personal development professionals, and the coaching industry is completely unregulated, although coaches can pursue optional credentials if they want to. And we talked a little bit also in the last episode about the relationship. The therapeutic relationship tends to be very formal, very objective. There's thinking that there just needs to be a certain distance in order to make the therapeutic process work in that modality. And whereas coaching can look all kinds of ways, it can also be very formal, but usually tends to be a little bit less formal, a little more friendly, things like that. So if you want to review, you can always go back to last week's episode. And today I'm really gonna focus on getting into the investment part, and we're gonna answer the question: should you go to a coach, a therapist, or both, or potentially neither, neither. And kind of the way I'll set up the difference, the the answer to this question, is with an imperfect saying, but I think that there's a lot of value in it. And the saying is that the therapist is the archaeologist. They're all about uncovering and understanding the past, how the past is affecting the present. Whereas the coach is the architect. They're really helping you build for the future. And I'm gonna give you a few just useful guidelines and recommendations kind of along that framework, just to help you decide where you want to invest your money when you're looking for a mental health, emotional health, performance type professional. This is my professional advice on where to invest when you're getting started. And at the end, I'm also gonna tell you some exceptions to my own rules. Because as we talked about last week, the question of whether, what is coaching, what is therapy, how are they different, really the it's not a black and white answer. They overlap quite a bit in several ways. So I'll give you the the the gray area at the end of this one. However, just to kind of help make it clear, there are a few times I would definitely start with a therapist rather than a coach. And that's anytime you are looking for help with either a diagnosed or suspected mental health condition. Therapists really are the ones that are trained to treat those coaches, it's considered generally outside their scope of practice. And what do I mean by mental health conditions? It would be things like an anxiety disorder, including a panic disorder or PTSD, a mood disorder, like major depression, something like ADHD, OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, an eating disorder, and generally any kind of substance use disorder where you suspect you might be actually physically addicted. Another time I would go to a therapist first is just if you are not functioning well. So, for example, if you are just you're really down in your mood and you're so down, it's actually causing you to miss a lot of work or have a hard time leaving your house. And if it's actually causing you to avoid things that used to give you joy, those would be examples of just not functioning great. And a therapist might be the better choice. I generally would recommend a therapist anytime a big part of your life is at risk and the stakes are high. So, for example, if you are having a problem that is threatening your job, your physical health, your primary relationship with your partner, or maybe your money is at risk, definitely might be good to start with a therapist. And I also recommend using therapy if you're gonna really process a traumatic experience, especially what we call a big T trauma, which is any time that your you felt like your life or the life of someone else was really threatened, or your personal integrity, your your body was threatened, even if you knew probably you weren't gonna die, something very bad and painful was gonna happen to you or another person. And also, as I alluded to at the beginning, therapists really are the really good archaeologists. So anytime you're working on family and childhood issues, going back in time, understanding how the past is affecting you today, and how you can really start to get free of that. Therapy is really good. So these are kind of the standard answers of when to start with therapy. And I'm gonna give you one more that I often talk about with not necessarily sometimes with my clients too, but usually often with people who are coming for that free consult where you talk about what you want to work on in coaching. Once in a while I'll suggest that someone start with therapy. And here's what I'm actually listening for in that conversation. If you have had just a really difficult experience that you are still processing, that you just still need space and time just to kind of grieve and process and move through and feel your feelings, I think that is a good time to go to therapy and maybe put coaching on hold, depending on the circumstances. And here's why. Often coaches will be super future and present focused. And what that's gonna look like is they're really gonna encourage you to take responsibility for your feelings. So when you go in to talk about this thing that is very raw, that is very upsetting, that is very close to the surface, depending on the coach, they may they might say something like, Well, why are you making yourself feel bad? Why do you keep thinking these thoughts that are creating these shitty feelings? And I think like most coaches would not say it that directly, but there that's kind of the coaching mindset really is about taking, in most cases, responsibility for your own feelings, for your own thoughts, and doing the work to really master that. And I am all for that, by the way. And I think like having control over your own thoughts and feelings in state is one of the secrets to the universe. It is one of the best things you can learn in coaching. It is really life-changing, and I think there's also a time and a place for it. It feels really awful to hear something, is hear it suggested to you that you should just snap out of it and change your thoughts and change your feelings when you are just still processing something really hurtful. Hearing that is actually gonna make you feel worse, not better. I think it's so important after tough things happen, just to take time to honor your own painful experience and really feel those feelings. That is not victim mentality, as some people might say. It's it's a really important part of the healing process. And I think therapy is often more helpful than coaching and helping you move through that. So those are all my thoughts about when to start with therapy. When would you maybe consider starting with a coach instead? I would say it's when you're you're functioning just fine and you want to feel better, perform better, develop new skills, or reach a new goal. Some of these things that are in the realm of personal development. And just like therapists, there are general life coaches. I am actually one that can help with all areas of your life. So, some examples of things that you can bring to coaching that maybe wouldn't necessarily be a therapy thing because they're very present and future focused. Things like habits. If you want to start working out, eating better, getting up early, writing your book, stop scrolling on your phone, stop overdrinking or emotional eating, coaching can be really helpful with that. Stress. If you are feeling time-starved, overwhelmed, stuck on the hamster wheel of obligation. If you don't have time for the stuff that matters because you're so busy with other people's stuff, coaching can be really helpful with that. Relationships. I would say the number one thing I coach on, which is very interesting. I am not a parent, but the number one thing I coach on is probably parental guilt. Not being a good enough parent, not doing enough, not doing as much as other people, whether it's your friends or the people on social media, having kids that just drive you crazy to the point where you yell, feeling taken advantage by of by adult children, but not feeling comfortable or worthy or allowed to set boundaries. And in general, boundaries are a great thing to coach on too. Um, like I said, often with kids is a great is one we coach on a lot. It can also be bosses, could also be elderly parents, those are all common ones. Boss and coworker issues. My coworkers don't communicate, my boss doesn't give proper credit, folks at work are rude, they're dismissive, they don't appreciate me. What the hell am I doing in this toxic job? How do I get out of it? Coaching, very helpful for this. I also coach a lot on fears, things that maybe don't rise to the level of like terror or phobia or don't stem from trauma, but might be something like things that I've actually, fears that I've actually coached on are running after dark, driving in the wintertime, failure, public speaking, dogs, job and money worries. You can bring all of these to coaching. And then specific goals, things like starting a business, your job search, you can definitely bring to a general life coach, um, which which kind of feels a bit like therapy depending on the how the coach sets it up often. But it is, like I said, more feature focused, focused not so much on the past and why things are the way they are. It's really focused on where do we go from here, tends to be very action-oriented and tends to be really geared toward moving forward and getting you results. One other time I would definitely think about coming to a coach is if you want help with a really specific issue. So while both coaches and therapists can be generalists, many coaches specialize in very, very specific problems. So just a few that I know, I actually know these people. These are people in my in my network. There's someone that does weight loss for quilters, there's someone that does emotional support for farmers, there's someone that does mental toughness for ultra-marathon runners. There is really a coach for just about every sort of problem you could want to help with. And sometimes it's really, really cool to go to someone that specializes in that problem. That's what they're doing all day. That's the only thing that they're working on. And are there therapists that specialize too? Yes, but I would say with coaching, it's more common and often the niche is deeper and more specialized. So, are these absolute rules? No. I'm gonna give you some exceptions to the rule. And the first one is that I'm talking about coaches and therapists as if like the therapists only do therapy and the coaches only do coaching. Did you know a lot of therapists are also really good coaches? There are forms of therapy that are actually very much like coaching, I would say indistinguishable. And I've talked a little bit last week about when I was a counselor and I practiced for six years, so trained more in the kind of the medical mental health model. But even though that was true, I spent the majority of my time doing things I would now consider coaching. Really talking to people about here's what's happening now, what do you want to, what what how do you want to move forward? What's what's what might help you move forward, what thoughts are stopping you, what are your options, what decisions do you need to make? Like that's what I was doing with, I would say, 90% of my my counseling practice. And part of that was the setting I was in. I was in a school, so if someone needed in-depth therapy, I was counseling like a large number of kids, hundreds were on my caseload. So if someone needed to actually do therapy, even though I was trained in some of the therapeutic modalities, I would actually refer them out. And then, like when the kids or parents or teachers were in the office, we spent most of our time coaching. And while I would say it's not as common, I think the opposite also can be true. This is a little bit of a hot topic because technically, if you look at all the big coaching organizations and a lot of the big coaching schools, they will tell you that coaches doing mental health is frowned upon, that is really out of the scope of coaching. I will also tell you that I have met coaches who are really great at helping at some of the more intense problems like trauma, phobias, and substance use. They're not trained as therapists, but maybe they have additional training in therapeutic techniques like hypnosis or internal family systems or somatics. And I don't say that because I want to encourage people to practice outside their scope. I just say it because it's an absolute reality. And I know it's true because I've actually gone to coaches like that and gotten good results. I went to a weekend intensive with a hypnocoach to work on some childhood trauma type stuff, and bam, it was like 10 years of therapy. It worked really well, and it honestly kept on working. I would love to tell the story of that. It might be a story for another podcast, but yeah, super effective. So I don't think you can 100% write off coaching for the bigger issues. I'd also proceed with a bit of caution here. We'll talk about in the next episode some tips for choosing a practitioner, whether that is gonna be a coach or a therapist or both. And I would definitely just just proceed slowly if you're gonna hire a coach for something that's more in the mental health realm. And then, kind of the third exception, and I'm living proof of this, a lot of coaches are also practicing therapists, or I'm I was originally trained as a therapist. I don't I no longer practice, but I still have that background and years and years of experience. And there are actually a lot of reasons that therapists today are taking on coaching clients or switching to coaching altogether. In the United States where I live, one of the big reasons is they want to get away from dealing with insurance companies, which are an absolute nightmare. The therapists get paid more and they get paid faster when they work directly with their clients and get paid directly by their clients. They don't have to do as much paperwork, they don't have to cut people off after a certain number of sessions because their insurance ran out. There's just so much hassle being a practitioner that takes insurance that not that therapists don't take insurance, many, many still do, but I think more and more people are either offering a private pay option or going full private pay. That's their whole practice. They may also do this as a therapist because they want to practice across state lines. Remember, therapists are licensed in the state where they states where they practice. Now we have things like online therapy. They have the option to coach or do therapy with people in other states. And rather than getting a license in all the states where they have clients, they may just call that coaching. And then it becomes a behavior that's not subject to regulation. It becomes a practice that's not subject to your state licensing body telling you what to do. And I think the third reason, and I think this often gets overlooked, is some therapists just really like focusing on that coaching population. The coaching population tends to be the cool kids. They tend to be really interesting people, capable, motivated. They are working on cool, fun things. They are happy to come and talk about them. And generally, coaching clients get results. Coaching is really, I mean, I personally, if I'm coaching someone and they feel like they're not getting results, I'm like, let's definitely talk about that. We need to change something because that is why you are here. It's a little bit different than therapy, where the results may not be as tangible and you're maybe looking into the past and trying to understand something. Usually with coaching, you're coming in because you want something to change, and that and really in the coaching sessions, we are working on changing that thing so that not always right away, but over time, especially if you are coaching for a few months, you're gonna go out into the world and experience the world differently, feeling better, behaving differently, and moving towards the goals that you want. So, therapists, like especially if they work with really tough populations, if they work with people that maybe are being forced into therapy, which which can happen. You don't know when you're a therapist, maybe not all, depending on the setting you're in, all your clients might not necessarily be there, be coming to a session with you voluntarily. You may be working with big issues. It may be really nice and really good for your own mental health and your own practice to have some coaching as well. So there are people that do both, there's overlap between the two, and there's also good reasons to use each one. So, friend, I hope this has been helpful. I will be back next week to continue this series, and we're gonna talk about when you're actually choosing the person you're gonna work with, some good ways to do that. I'll give you some of my best tips. I'll talk to you a little bit about how I hired some of my own coaches. I think therapists are easier to hire. There's usually a directory, or there's one that works with your employee assistance program, or there's one that your insurance covers. I think coaching is harder because, like, literally the world is the limit. Any coach on earth you can hire, and I'll talk to you about doing due diligence and how to make a a good and wise investment when you're doing that. So, talk to you next week, and until then, take care. I just realized that the title of this podcast says that sometimes you might You might want to work with both a therapist and a coach, and I haven't addressed that. So this is 100% true. And I would say that I would actually recommend this. I definitely have personally done this, and I've also had many clients who have done this. And I think it really is where the magic happens, where you have the archaeologist kind of working on one end of it, and then the architect, the coach, coming in and working on here's all the stuff you discovered in therapy, here's all the progress that you've made, what now? Where are we going now? What are we going to do with all this newfound insight, energy, freedom, whatever therapy has opened up in your head? So one way that this can look is often if you go to therapy, let's say, for you're you go to therapy because you have a lot of social anxiety, you in your therapy might get pretty good treatment for that social anxiety. You're able to be out with people and not feel these really intense, scary sensations in your body. And now you're at the point where you could actually start to build more of a social life. And that's where the coaching can be very helpful. Working on some of those specific skills. How do you start conversations? How do you make friends? In the coaching session, you have a really safe place just to talk about it, to practice, to get some good tips, to come back and have to go out in the world and give yourself homework and little things to try, to be accountable, to come back, to report. And over time, that's gonna add up to probably you taking a lot more action, creating a lot of new relationships and doing things that may feel a bit uncomfortable and scary because they're new, because they were once very scary if you had a lot of social anxiety. Um, so that's a good example of how one can kind of naturally lead to the other. And sometimes your therapist will actually recommend coaching. They will actually say to you, I actually had a client who this happened to recently. She had been just like working on some things around her personal life. And she, as she started to feel better, as she started to kind of clean up some things with her job, with her relationship, she noticed she was coming into therapy and she was talking to her therapist and saying, Now that I have more energy and clarity, I'm really excited to start my business. I feel like it's time. And that's where the therapist said, you know, let's keep meeting as long as you want. But I think with the starting the business thing, life coaching is a good way to go. So she recommended that she try that. Um, it was someone that listened to my podcast. She's now in my world starting her business, and it's really fun. So um, really good example there. It sometimes works the other way too. Sometimes people come into coaching, and I realize that maybe there is something that they maybe they have like a very present-focused goal, like, for example, finding a new job, but maybe they have just a lot of anxiety, for example, that is getting in the way that is a little bit outside my realm to treat. We do talk about anxiety and coaching, but maybe this anxiety is something that like is very strong in affecting their functioning. I might recommend they do some sessions with a therapist and really explore that further if there's that's something they're open to. It's just potentially something that's going to speed up the process. We'll keep working on the job search stuff. There's always often, even if the there's anxiety that's holding them back, there's always often like so many other things we can be working on in coaching that they can do both at the same time. So I hope that gives you an idea. Sometimes coaching and therapy go really well together. You may want to invest in both, and you may invest in one, and it may lead to the other. This is very common. So, friends, that's my my little coda on the podcast. I hope that's helpful, and I will see you here next week.