How Do I Know if I Need a Life Coach or a Therapist?
It can be difficult to know what kind of help you need when you understand that something in your life needs to change, but you cannot yet see what would help you change it. Fuckin frustrating huh?
Do you need to work through the past? Do you need practical support with your current life? Do you need someone who understands ADHD or general “being on the spectrum?” And not just someone with a general coaching method? The reality is becoming a general life coach doesn’t take much. That’s why there are a lot of bad ones. Finding a good one takes a little work. I don’t know about you but I have a high bar I set for myself. Shouldn’t the people I work with be held to that standard too?
🔸You’re smart. Deep. Capable. Yet something keeps you circling the same patterns.🔸
Choosing between a therapist and a coach isn’t about deciding which profession is better. It is about understanding what kind of work you need right now. Sometimes the work is healing. Sometimes it is building. Often, one leads into the other. Either way you’re gonna be looking at how you think and how you feel. What’s goin on in there? That’s pretty much all there is….keep it simple.
The difference between therapy and coaching
I’ve done a lot of both at different times in my life. There’s a lot of overlap. The goal is to choose the right tool for the job, and know that the person carrying that tool is important. I often describe therapy as moving down into the feelings and back toward the feelings that are driving the behaviors in your way. Coaching moves up into possibility and forward toward the life someone wants to create. “Are you getting what you want?” is something I often ask clients.
Deeper coaching, which I practice, focuses on the internal changes the person must make in order to create that life. It’s not about the secondary behaviors, it’s about the originiating identity. WHO you are BEING vs what you are DOING.
🔸You don’t have the life you want because you are not YET the person WHO can get it.🔸
This distinction between coaching and therapy is useful, but not absolute. Many therapists help clients change their present behavior, learn practical skills, and build toward the future. Coaches also explore emotions, beliefs, and previous experiences when those patterns affect current struggles.
The main difference is scope and focus. Therapists are licensed mental-health professionals who can assess and treat trauma, depression, anxiety, and other mental-health conditions. Therapy helps someone understand what happened, process the old emotional pain, reduce distress and anxiety, and build the ability to feel and regulate emotions better, if not safely. It’s a bit of a slow burn typically.
Coaching usually begins with the client’s current life. It focuses on goals, choices, functioning, identity, relationships, behavior, how they see the world, and the person they are becoming. It’s a bit more action oriented with poignant moments of deeply felt understanding to release ya from where you’re stuck.
Therapy: What happened to me, and how is it still affecting me?
Coaching: Where do I want, what is getting in the way, and who do I need to become to move differently?
Both questions matter. If there are wounds they’re never really left behind but integrated into WHO you are becoming.
You’re not meant to process forever.
When should someone choose therapy over coaching?
Therapy is a stronger starting point when the emotional pain or mental-health symptoms are making it hard for basic functioning. And I don’t mean “functioning” as in surviving. That may include big trauma symptoms, depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal thinking, substance dependence, abuse, severe instability, or distress that overwhelms daily life. I’ve been in that. It’s a craptastic place to be but not because you’re broken. Typically it’s because you learned to operate in the world in a way that isn’t working anymore.
Shame isn’t needed here.
Another sign, the one I struggled with years back, and one I often see with clients, is the difficulty ofconsciously feeling your emotions. An active awareness or ability to sense and make sense of them when needed. While they are always there, it’s the awareness of them that may need some work. Some people can explain their history logically but feel shut down, numb, disconnected, or “walled-off” from feeling it. This can happen when emotions from the past were too much, too uncomfortable, or too often overwhelming. The problem is learning to feel them again, despite that avoided discomfort, so you can learn to manage them as WHO you are today. Not impossible. Just hard.
🔸You are your greatest project. Great works of art take great effort.🔸
One client told me, “When we work together I can feel something opening up. But by the next day it feels like it closes again.” Classic language. He’d been betrayed by mental-health care workers in his youth. Our work was about helping him learn to trust again.
The person may know what they want to do and genuinely intend to do it, but something repeatedly prevents them from engaging in action. They cannot explain what is happening because the barrier is not fully available to conscious awareness. They have logic without enough emotional information. Simply put, fear may keep them from acting. Fear they cannot see.
That matters because logic does not make decisions alone. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and his colleagues studied people with certain forms of brain damage who retained much of their intellectual ability but struggled to make effective real-world choices. They could analyze possibilities, yet had difficulty using emotional signals to assign value and direction to them.
Emotion does not replace reason. It helps reason know what, who, and why it matters.
A person can understand exactly why they should change while lacking the emotional connection, safety, energy, or belief required to act. Therapy can help restore that connection. Coaching can strenghten it into something manageable and useable moving forward.
When is someone ready for coaching?
Someone may be ready for coaching when they can feel and identify their emotions with some degree of safety, have developed basic regulation skills, and are no longer primarily trying to survive the past.
They may understand their history and have made meaningful progress in therapy, yet still struggle to create new behavior. Therapists have told me they sometimes help clients do substantial trauma work, only to see them struggle when it is time to execute the changes they now want.
Understanding an old pattern does not automatically create a new one.
🔸You’ve outgrown who you had to be. Now build the person who can live what’s next.🔸
Old habits often formed for understandable reasons. They helped someone manage criticism, avoid conflict, reduce disappointment, or create safety in an environment they could not control. Once that environment changes, the pattern may remain and get in the way of today’s goals.
The person now has to practice taking risks, making decisions, tolerating discomfort, trusting their judgment, and behaving in ways that match the life they want. Coaching helps turn awareness into acceptance and action. - And frankly more cool stuff later like alignment, actualization, and transcendence. Big concepts that have a real path to them.
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Difficulty taking action does not always mean trauma
Trauma is one possible reason a person may understand a goal but repeatedly fail to act. It is not the only explanation.
The goal may be too large, vague, or poorly defined. The method may not fit the person’s way of thinking. Poor sleep, exhaustion, physical health, medication issues, anxiety, depression, untreated ADHD symptoms, family demands, work conditions, or the surrounding environment may also interfere. The person may not genuinely value the goal, or the relationship with the coach may simply be a poor fit.
A good coach does not immediately decide what the problem is. They become curious.
When a client does not complete something, the coach should not simply apply more pressure or repeat the same instruction. The missed action is information. It gives the coach and client something real to investigate together. Failure is data on the path to success.
That curiosity is especially important in ADHD coaching.
What does it mean for a coach to understand ADHD?
ADHD coaching commonly helps with planning, organization, time management, goal setting, problem-solving, and follow-through. Those are real needs, but a coach who understands ADHD should know that someone’s difficulty using a calendar may not be solved by explaining calendars more clearly.
Motivation is complex. Many people with ADHD have spent years struggling with things that appear easy to their peers. When ADHD goes unrecognized, the person may conclude that they are lazy, irresponsible, behind, broken, or unmotivated. Those conclusions can become part of their identity.
Eventually, they may rely on fear, urgency, stress, and last-minute pressure to create movement. It works often enough that pressure becomes their primary way to act, but over time that becomes exhausting.
I put myself in the hospital several times living this way. I had a “great on paper” life with a family and six figure career in the video game industry but was empty and stressed inside.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition. Trauma and stress should not be treated as its universal cause. At the same time, chronic stress, exhaustion, shame, poor sleep, and trauma-related responses can resemble or intensify many difficulties associated with ADHD. If that sounds like you then know that you’re really strong already. It takes a lot to carry neurodevelopmental differences and the incurred stress and shame.
In my own work, and in conversations with younger trauma-informed therapists who use body-based and polyvagal-informed approaches, I repeatedly hear the same observation: the overlap can be substantial.
Difficulty concentrating, restlessness, disorganization, sleep disruption, emotional overwhelm, and trouble initiating tasks may be influenced by more than one system at once. That does not mean ADHD is simply trauma. It means a capable professional should be curious about the whole person instead of treating every difficulty as a permanent feature of a diagnosis.
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I’ve seen people I work with change dramatically when the underlying, often self-imposed, stress is reduced. Capability increases greatly despite the underlying differences.
ADHD/ AuDHD / 2e clients are not aliens
People with ADHD struggle with many of the same things all humans struggle with. Certain difficulties just appear more often, with greater intensity.
Some of the ADHD, autistic, AuDHD, and gifted clients I have worked with process information quickly and associatively. They connect ideas, memories, possibilities, and interpretations faster than they can sometimes organize them. A single moment of guilt quickly connects to every previous moment in which they felt guilty, followed by imagined future situations in which they expect to feel it again. Bing bang boom = Overwhelm!
What began as one uncomfortable event becomes a judgment about their entire identity.
Emotional intensity also needs to be taken seriously. My daughter once described having something in her eye by saying, “My eyes burn as hot as the surface of the sun.”
The description was “dramatic” because the experience was equally big to her. Children who repeatedly hear that they are too sensitive or making too much of something learn to distrust or suppress what they feel. Adults carry those lessons forward. It’s very real and very rough. You’re not alone.
An ADHD/Spectrum-aware coach should be able to validate the person’s experience without automatically confirming every interpretation attached to it. The feeling can be real even when the feared outcome is not inevitable or realistic. The rules governing the behaviors may also be false, even if the belief in them is true. Personally I love this work partly because this unraveling of how people are stuck is part trust in them to find the way out, part logic puzzle for me to spot the potential issues, and simple intuitive diviniation where things come to me out of the blue. You put all that together and you can have magical conversations. Geez. I just said “magical.” But that’s what it feels like.
What makes a good ADHD coach different?
A regular coach may have excellent listening skills, ask useful questions, and help clients clarify goals. An ADHD-aware coach needs those abilities plus a working understanding of how ADHD may affect motivation, time, executive function, emotional regulation, sleep, overwhelm, and self-perception.
They should understand why a person can perform exceptionally under pressure but struggle when no deadline exists. They should know that forgetting is not always carelessness, and that overwhelm cannot always be solved by making a smaller list.
Most importantly, they should know how to adapt.
🔸You don’t need someone to slow you down. You need someone who can keep up.🔸
For highly logical and brilliant but stuck people, “cognitive fit” matters. Some people are skilled at analyzing their own problems. They can explain their patterns, generate solutions, and understand several psychological frameworks, yet their insight may remain largely intellectual.
One mentor expressed this well: “You can’t read the label from inside the jar.”
No matter how intelligent we are, we interpret ourselves through the same internal lens we are trying to examine. We need other people who can see the pattern from a different position without getting lost in the systemic, spatial, or associatively connected miasma that a linear thinker may get lost in.
The right coach does not compete with the client’s intelligence or ask them to simplify themselves. They follow the client’s thinking, notice what needs to examined, and help translate insight into something the client can actually use. This is also a “right time right place” scenario that is part intuition and visual and auditory cues.
If you have struggled to make effective change with a therapist or coach it may because you are more complex, and think quicker, than they do. You want to find someone who doesn’t slow you down but keeps up with you and spots the patterns you can’t see.
AND is able to translate them in a fashion that you understand, feel, and can move forward and grow with. The people that helped me the most were also very brilliant themselves. If you don’t have a good match it can feel maddening that you see what the person helping you cannot.
That will drive you nuts. It did me at least.
When the practical tool is not the real answer
One client I worked with wanted to create a specific behavioral change but was not completing even the small action we had discussed.
The exercise was simple. He would write a statement in large letters on a card and place it somewhere visible:
“I’ll feel like a responsible and in-control person when I get the dishes done.”
The emotional reward came first in the note to keep it from becoming another to do item. The goal was to interrupt an automatic pattern of thoughts and feelings that kept them from the action. This would later connect everyday actions to identity development.
Two months into our work, he had not placed any cards on his wall let alone the near the sink. We hit the common ADHD barriers but nothing seemed to stick. Had he forgotten? Was the task unclear? Did it feel too large? Was he overwhelmed? None of those explanations fit. I let the moment sit for a long moment, recognizing the subtle emotional shifts in his body. Underneath the inaction was something emotionally uncomfortable that needed space to show itself. Once I caught it I knew it, “You don’t think this is going to work do you?” Boom tears.
He said, “Why try when I will probably fail again?” - There it is.
We discussed the repeated disappointments beneath that belief and allowed the emotion connected to them to come forward. There were tears that needed to be felt and an experience that needed to be validated. Once the hopelessness could be seen, accepted, and felt, he moved forward. And I mean quickly. That one moment proved the importance, to him, of his emotions in relation to his actions. It was pretty amazing!
Hopelessness is not exclusive to ADHD. It’s a human response, but common among people who have spent years trying harder, receiving criticism, and watching ordinary strategies fail them. That creates a reality defined by child like thinking, “I’m the problem.” Not more mature thinking, “I don’t know how to do this.”
The ADHD knowledge helped us check the likely surface barriers. The deeper coaching helped us find the very human issue underneath.
How to find a coach who actually understands ADHD?
Credentials and certifications can provide useful information, but they do not guarantee insight, judgment, or adaptability. One of the best coaches I worked with didn’t have the usual credentials. They were just really good at it. Coaching is less regulated than therapy, so clients need to evaluate the person, not just the letters after their name. There are a lot of bad coaches out there so finding the right one for you takes a little effort, and frankly gut feel. “Is this the right person for me, for right now?”
A good question to ask is:
“What will we do if what you suggest doesn’t work?”
Listen closely to the answer.
Does the coach assume the problem will be your lack of commitment? Do they simply have another worksheet ready? Or can they explain how they would investigate what interfered, adapt the approach, and look at both practical and emotional barriers?
You can also ask how they approach overthinking, judgmental thoughts, sleep difficulties, emotional overwhelm, and executive-function problems. Ask whether they are comfortable working alongside a therapist, when they would refer someone to a therapist, and how much they believe identity affects behavioral change. That latter question won’t be something most basic coaches may fully grok.
The coach does not need a perfect answer to every question. They should demonstrate curiosity, self-awareness, flexibility, and respect for the limits of their role. AND, importantly, show an ability to push you if you want it. Actually that’s a good question too! Ask how they go about “pushing” their clients when they seem stuck. The way they go about it should feel safe enough without coddling.
🔸You are looking for someone who can work with who you are, not merely apply a system to it.🔸
Can someone work with a therapist and a coach at the same time?
Yes. For many people, the two roles complement one another or are useful for different things.
A therapist could help process trauma, reduce the emotional distress, understand triggers, or treat anxiety and depression. A coach may help that person practice the new behavior, build structure with the calmer system in place, take risks that once felt like too much, clarify values that were never conciously chosen, and create a life that reflects the progress being made in therapy.
Some people need therapy first. Some are ready for coaching. Some benefit from both. Their needs may change as they grow. Personally, I used both at different periods of my life. And sometimes you’re super capable to move forward but can’t see what’s blocking you. Those clients may just need a straight answer vs a long session of slowly finding the answer. It all depends on the persons capability.
No one builds a life alone
There is a strange idea in our culture that capable adults should be able to figure everything out by themselves. But that not how it works.
We learn through parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, partners, communities, mentors, coaches, therapists, and the people willing to tell us what they can see from outside our perspective.
Anyone who has built something meaningful has been influenced, challenged, supported, taught, or encouraged by other people along the way. Different guides become useful during different chapters of life. Seeking support does not reduce the importance of your own effort. The work is still yours. You are the one who has to tell the truth, feel the emotion, challenge the belief, make the decision, and take the action. The power is in you, but the truth is we don’t always have the power to overcome everything alone.
A good guide knows they are not the source of your empowerment. They are simply the means, or path, to what you want. You do the work. What they can do is help you see what you cannot see alone, carry an amount of effort that stretches you without breaking you, and remind you of what is possible when your own perspective has narrowed. And honestly help you not feel alone. It’s much easier to lean into the wind when you know someone is there to catch you if you take on too much.
Growth is personal, but it is rarely solitary. Well it is solitary, but that’s work for a later day.
If you need healing, find someone qualified to help you heal. If you are ready to build, find someone capable of helping you build. If ADHD and being on the spectrum in some brilliant way is part of your experience, look for someone who understands the diagnosis without reducing you to it. A diagnosis isn’t meant to limit you. It’s meant to provide clarity of yourself. The good and the bad. The weaknesses and the strengths.
The goal is not to become someone who never needs help. It is to become someone who understands what kind of help they need, knows when to seek it, and is willing to travel through life with other people beside them. We all need connection and challenge. Deeper meaning comes from the people we journey alongside.
🔸Jump into a free call to map the patterns you’re stuck in and find what moves you forward.🔸