You’d like some support. Now, apparently, you need to work out what category your difficulties belong in.

Is this a therapy thing? A coaching thing? Are you anxious, lacking direction, or just thoroughly fed up with the current arrangement?

You don’t need to correctly categorise your difficulties before you’re allowed to discuss them.

I draw on CBT, hypnotherapy, mindfulness and coaching within my practice. We can talk about what’s happening, what you’d like to change, and which approaches might help. You don’t have to choose from the menu before we’ve had a conversation.

What does coaching involve?

Coaching gives you space to think carefully about what you want and how to move towards it.

That might mean making a career decision, setting boundaries, finding more fulfilment, or getting started on something you’ve been talking about for quite some time.

We explore what matters to you, question assumptions, consider options and turn intentions into practical steps.

“I want things to be different” is a perfectly reasonable starting point. Eventually, though, it helps to establish what “different” would actually look like on an ordinary Tuesday.

My role is to ask useful questions, share observations and help you examine possibilities you may have overlooked. You know your life. I can help you take a closer look at it.

How is that different from therapy?

There’s overlap. Therapy can also involve goals, decisions, practical exercises and changing what you do next.

The distinction isn’t simply that therapy looks backwards and coaching looks forwards. We can explore past experiences in either conversation when they’re relevant, and therapy certainly doesn’t require us to spend every session discussing your childhood.

Coaching often centres on a particular goal, decision or area of development. Therapy can address psychological distress and the thoughts, feelings and behaviours involved in keeping a difficulty going.

Coaching isn’t a substitute for appropriate mental health treatment. If something needs therapeutic attention, we need to recognise that and work within the right scope.

But you don’t need to work all of this out yourself before getting in touch.

A goal can come with a few complications

Perhaps you want to change jobs.

We could explore what you want from your work, consider your options and plan the next steps. That’s useful coaching territory.

But every time you open an application, you think you’re not good enough. You predict rejection, close the tab and decide to do more research.

By this point, you know an impressive amount about the company. They remain entirely unaware of your existence.

The practical goal still matters. So does what happens when you try to pursue it.

Or perhaps you want to set better boundaries. You know what you’d like to say, but the possibility of disappointing someone makes it difficult to say it.

Another beautifully organised action plan may not address that on its own.

We can look at both: what you want to do and what makes doing it difficult.

How I bring the approaches together

We start with what brings you here.

What would you like help with? What have you already tried? Where do you get stuck? What would make our work useful to you?

From there, we agree on a focus and draw on approaches that fit.

We might use coaching questions to clarify a decision, CBT to examine an assumption, mindfulness to practise responding differently to a thought, or hypnotherapy to rehearse a response you want to develop.

That doesn’t mean every session needs a bit of everything. We choose with a purpose, discuss what we’re doing and review whether it’s helping.

There’s room for the focus to develop, too. Sometimes the goal you arrive with becomes clearer once we understand what’s behind it.

“I need to be more productive” might become “I need to stop agreeing to things I don’t have time for.”

A rather different task. Potentially a more useful one.

Will you tell me what to do?

You can expect me to be involved.

I’ll ask questions, share what I notice and challenge an assumption where it helps. I may suggest an exercise or a way to test something out.

But I won’t decide what a successful life should look like for you.

We can examine whether a goal is yours, whether it still matters, and what pursuing it would involve. You get to make the choices.

Sometimes that includes admitting you don’t actually want the thing you’ve spent years telling yourself you should want.

That’s useful information, even if it’s slightly inconvenient for the five-year plan.

So, which should you book?

A conversation is enough to begin.

You can tell me what’s happening without choosing between “therapy” and “coaching”. We’ll discuss what kind of support fits, whether I’m the right person to offer it, and how we might work together.

You don’t need a diagnosis, a polished explanation or three measurable objectives.

“I’d like some help figuring this out” will do.

Book a free 15-minute consultation.