What’s the difference between Executive coaching and life coaching?
Summary: Sometimes, we have budding coaches coming to us in our strategy sessions who may in fact be considering life coaching, and are not sure of the difference between life coaching and executive coaching. Or, indeed, which might suit them better as a career option. While we don’t offer life coaching courses, we hope to clarify the difference between the two so you can decide which one feels true to you and the direction you’d like to go in.
Author:
Ridhima Dosani
Read Time: 5 mins
Table of Contents
What’s the difference between Executive Coaching and Life Coaching?
1. What’s the key difference between the two?
The clue is in the name - life coaching would be looking at different aspects of an individual’s life experiences. You can niche towards a specific area like motherhood, confidence and self esteem, or keep it broad - but it will encompass a range of human experiences that many of us deal with at some point.
Executive coaching, on the other hand, will be more specifically geared towards the situations that people encounter in management and leadership positions. Again, you can, of course, specialise in a specific industry or niche, but the techniques here are much more defined so you can coach people at the helm of businesses, teams and organisations.
It’s important to note that life coaching is not regulated in the UK and, therefore, does not require any qualifications. In executive coaching, while you may begin to coach without qualifications, most clients will look for credentials like ICF or BCC to prove your expertise.
2. Wouldn’t some of the techniques of executive coaching and life coaching overlap?
Sure, you will find some similarities across all types of coaching. The best way to describe it is that life coaching will begin with the individual, as a whole. For example, you may have a client coming to you with a confidence issue they’d like to work on. You’d then look at what may be hindering it and how they can improve their wellbeing, their environment to unlock that confidence in themselves.
On the other hand, an executive who’s just taken over a team, may be struggling with the same thing - confidence. But your coaching relationship will be much more focused on their particular career. Of course, you may learn that there are other factors in their personal life, their habits or character traits that may be creating roadblocks in their work, however, it will all come down to how that it affects them as a leader.
As an executive coach, you will learn a wealth of advanced techniques that will help you coach leaders, groups and organisations to achieve success. It’s much more targeted to this specific environment, making quality executive coaches highly sought-after by companies spanning all sizes and industries.
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