Coaching Archives - Parts with Presley

The difference between coaching and therapy

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series How to Choose a Coach

The most common question I get is “what is the difference between life coaching and therapy?”

And I’ll answer it, I promise. But unlike most articles on this topic, I want to start by acknowledging that they are similar and explaining why that’s okay.

Convergent evolution of the helping professions

I think it’s a really good sign that some therapists, coaches, and spiritual guides are starting to converge on similar methods and share their modalities with each other. I think that’s happening because we’re finding what works for the human psyche.

What to look for in a coach

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series How to Choose a Coach

It’s intimidating to look for a coach, because there are amazing coaches out there and terrible ones, and it’s hard to know how to tell them apart. I posted about some red flags to avoid, but what green flags should you be looking for?

Why certification isn’t a silver bullet

The most common answer to how to identify a good coach is to hire one who’s certified. But coaching certifications vary wildly. So a “certified coach” could range from the most competent and ethical person you’ve ever met, to someone who fell for what’s basically multi-level-marketing scam.

Organizations have sprung up to accredit coaching schools or vet coaches across schools. By virtue of being so large and comprehensive, though, they can be a bit generic and a bit influenced by what corporations want in their coaches. I don’t think they’re bad, but I currently think that my path to being the best coach I can be is to spend my time and money on lesser known but more cutting-edge workshops rather than the accredited courses that would get me a corporate-friendly stamp of approval.

So what are you to do? While being aware of a coach’s training and credentials is still a good idea, I think it’s important to take ownership of the decision yourself. In order to make that more feasible, I want to demystify the coaching industry for you a little bit and give you some guiding principles to use.

Painful Productivity: A Guide to Avoiding Toxic Coaches

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series How to Choose a Coach

This is the annotated version of my April Fool’s post, Painful Productivity. I’ll break down the toxic patterns I see in the coaching industry to help you spot them.

Are you wasting your life away in your mom’s basement because you’re too lazy to follow through on anything?

Toxic coaches judge your pain points. Good coaches empathize with them.

If you don’t get out soon, you’ll never be able to catch up! You’ll die alone!

Toxic coaches stoke fear by pretending they can tell the future.

Are you willing to settle for that?

They ask leading questions to prime you to agree to with them.

You need to get your life together. You could try to buckle down, but who are you kidding? You’ll fail. You need to hire a coach if you’re going to stand a chance.

Toxic coaches claim that you need a coach to succeed. Good ones know they’re just one option.

Introducing Painful Productivity!

Painful Productivity

Are you wasting your life away in your mom’s basement because you’re too lazy to follow through on anything?

If you don’t get out soon, you’ll never be able to catch up! You’ll die alone!

Are you willing to settle for that?

You need to get your life together. You could try to buckle down, but who are you kidding? You’ll fail. You need to hire a coach if you’re going to stand a chance.

Introducing Painful Productivity!

How Long Does Life Coaching Take? Speed vs Efficiency

When I first started learning about parts work, I read that it worked very quickly. And the demos seemed to back this up: IFS founder Dick Schwartz can go from meeting a person, to working with their protectors (defense mechanisms) to unburdening an exile (healing and transformation) in the middle of a podcast, and still have time to chitchat before the episode is over.

But as I read more first-person accounts and started doing my own work, I realized it’s not always like that. People with highly traumatizing childhoods still spend years in IFS therapy. It might be more like three years instead of the ten or twenty years they’d spent in talk therapy, but it’s years.

What about people who aren’t focused on healing intense trauma, but soothing the bumps and bruises of life so they can accomplish their goals—people in coaching rather than therapy? Sometimes people have a breakthrough in one session, but often it takes months to get to know a person’s protectors, gain their trust enough to go deeper, and reconsolidate a key memory, ushering in tangible change in the person’s life. And they may want to keep doing the work for longer than that, because we humans tend to have more than just one bruise!

At first, I was a little bit disappointed. It’s common in the helping professions for people to tout their best-case outcomes instead of their average outcomes, which can be misleading. At the same time, I’ve realized that speed is not the goal. Instead of trying to maximize speed, I focus on efficiency—going no faster than your system wants to go, but also not wasting time.

How to Have a Breakthrough: Memory Reconsolidation

Emotional learnings keep us safe

Imagine your great-great-etc grandparent, a hunter-gatherer, stumbling across a new type of berry. Is it a good source of energy? Or poison? They take a risk and taste a tiny bit—AGH! It tastes terrible. They’re probably tasting the bitterness of toxic alkaloids and would get sick if they ate more. Fortunately, the human brain adapted to protect them from making that mistake more than once. They’ve just acquired the emotional learning “this kind of berry is bad for me.” It’s an emotional learning because they learned it in the presence of the strong emotion of revulsion.

Unlike the facts you crammed for your history test, emotional learnings die hard. Imagine that years later, your ancestor came across the same type of berry, and, like you in your history test, they’ve forgotten their mental diary entry of the day they first found this berry. (They would remember it if prompted, but it’s not “active” right now.) Consciously, they don’t see anything wrong with this berry. But subconsciously, their emotional learning is guiding them. Their stomach gets a little queasy. Something feels off. They lose their appetite and decide not to try the berry. Their emotional learning is keeping them safe from illness even without their conscious awareness of it.

When to fire me

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series How to Choose a Coach

A lot of service providers have an onboarding process. Not many of them use that process to tell you when to fire them. But after watching The Shrink Next Door and reading about the true story behind it, I decided that it’s essential to my ethical practice.

The Shrink Next Door is the story of Isaac Herschkopf’s thirty-year career of exploiting his clients to such a degree that he even ended up taking over client Marty Markowitz’s house. Finally, Markowitz had a wake-up call, freed himself from Herschkopf’s spell, and reported him to the health department in 2012. Seven years passed without an investigation. In 2019, two things happened, and I don’t know which happened first, but I have my suspicions: a journalist found the story and made a podcast about it, and the department finally started investigating. Two more years passed before Herschkopf’s license was finally revoked in 2021.

The difference between coaching and therapy

Convergent evolution of the helping professions

What to look for in a coach

Why certification isn’t a silver bullet

Painful Productivity: A Guide to Avoiding Toxic Coaches

Introducing Painful Productivity!

Painful Productivity

Introducing Painful Productivity!

How Long Does Life Coaching Take? Speed vs Efficiency

How to Have a Breakthrough: Memory Reconsolidation

Emotional learnings keep us safe

When to fire me

What's Your Procrastination Type?