What Therapy Won't Teach About Executive Performance

Therapy is valuable, and it is valuable for specific things. There is a category of difficulty that executives bring to it which sits slightly outside what it was built for, and confusing the two costs time, money and momentum.

What follows is a question of scope. This publication sells a coaching product, which makes it exactly the wrong place to be careless about what therapy does.

The Distinction That Gets Drawn, and Why It Is Wrong

The usual version goes like this. Therapy looks backwards at where something came from. Coaching looks forwards at what you want to do. Tidy, memorable, and inaccurate.

Cognitive behavioural therapy, the most widely used approach, is explicitly oriented to the here and now. It acknowledges that early experience shaped current beliefs, then concentrates on how present thoughts and behaviours keep a difficulty in place. The backward-looking description fits psychodynamic work, which does examine how past experience and unconscious motivation shape the present. It does not describe the field.

Anyone who tells you that therapy is about the past and coaching is about the future is describing one school and calling it the whole profession. Often while selling the alternative.

Where the Line Actually Falls

The honest distinction is one of purpose rather than time horizon.

Therapy exists to treat distress and disorder. It is a clinical activity, carried out by licensed practitioners, held to clinical standards, and appropriate when something is wrong in a way that affects how someone functions.

Coaching exists to develop performance in a role. It assumes a functioning person who wants to operate differently, and it has no clinical remit whatsoever.

An executive who freezes in board presentations may hold beliefs about authority and visibility that have never been examined under pressure. That is development work. The same executive may be carrying something that genuinely needs clinical attention. The two are not ranked, and only one of them is a matter for a coach.

What the Evidence Says About Coaching

Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen pooled the available studies in 2014 and found that coaching produced meaningful effects across five outcome categories. The effects ranged from 0.43 for coping to 0.74 for goal-directed self-regulation.

One qualification belongs with that number, because it is usually left out when the figure gets quoted. Later meta-analyses criticised the review for including studies that were not conducted in workplaces. The evidence for coaching is real and it is less settled than its advocates suggest.

Stating that plainly seems preferable to the alternative, given who is writing.

The Questions Each One Asks

Coaching concerned with self-worth and identity works in the space between who you take yourself to be and how you operate. The questions sound like this:

What beliefs are driving your decisions right now, and when did you last test them?
Where is self-doubt showing up as a business problem instead of a private one?
How does your relationship with failure shape the risks you are willing to take?

These are performance questions with a psychological dimension. They are not clinical questions, and a coach who starts treating them as clinical ones has left their competence behind.

The Overlap, and Why It Matters

Plenty of people benefit from both at once, and the two do different jobs while they run in parallel.

Treating them as interchangeable produces two familiar frustrations. One is spending years in therapy waiting for business confidence to arrive as a side effect. The other is taking up coaching to avoid something that needs proper attention, where the coaching then fails to land and the failure gets blamed on the coach.

Knowing which you need, or that you need both, is itself a piece of self-knowledge that high performers tend to skip.

The Question Worth Asking

If you are not performing the way you want to, the useful question is about fit. What is the right instrument for this particular problem?

And if something in your life has moved beyond a performance question, that belongs with a licensed professional. No assessment on this site, including ours, substitutes for that.

Working Out Which Problem You Have

If the difficulty sits in how your sense of worth is currently funded, that is a development question and it can be mapped. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying too much. It takes about ten minutes, and it is a starting point for a conversation rather than a clinical instrument. Begin your profile here.

If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.

References

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum.
Ibarra, H., & Barbulescu, R. (2010). Identity as narrative: Prevalence, effectiveness, and consequences of narrative identity work in macro work role transitions. Academy of Management Review, 35(1), 135–154. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2010.45577925
Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499

What Therapy Won’t Teach You About Executive Performance