The business coaching industry is still in its formative years. As knowledge of its existence grows, it is natural that the concept of business coaching can be confused with other professions. Mentoring, consulting, training and therapy are the four most common industries in which this occurs. The below descriptions may help you to understand the differences in what business coaching offers and compares it to mentoring, consulting, training and therapy.
Mentoring
Mentoring is distinct from coaching in the dynamic of the relationship between mentor and mentee. In such arrangements, it is the mentor who provides the knowledge and guidance toward answers by sharing their own relevant experiences. In this sense, the learning is quite directive, since development is gained through seeking advice from the mentor. So, a mentor can be seen as an 'experienced advisor'.
Consulting
The role of a consulting firm is to enter a business, collect data on its operations and analyse it for insight into areas of improvement. Those improvements are based on existing models and concepts and data analysis is used to find anomalies which can be corrected. Development comes from aligning behaviours to these previously tested models. In this sense, a consultant can be considered to be an 'expert analyst'.
Coaching
Coaching bears considerable distinctions from mentoring, consulting, training and therapy. The intention of coaching is to focus on a future state of being for the coachee and to help them achieve it. The agenda is set by the coachee, who provides their own experience and knowledge as a learning platform for development. Coaches use their listening and questioning skills to help re-frame opportunities, visualise the future and reflect on learning. They provide a process by which you can draw on your own expert knowledge, capabilities, thinking mechanisms, emotions and perspectives to create new ways of working. Then, with new goals set, your coach will work to keep you accountable to their achievement. It can be seen, then, that a coach can be described as a 'thinking and achievement partner'.
Training
Training differs from coaching in its directive, agenda-driven structure. In training, pre-determined, specific material is delivered, most often to a group of individuals, where the trainer is the subject matter expert. In this sense, participants often lack opportunity to drive the topics addressed beyond the initial brief that the training provider is given. Therefore, a trainer can be more simply described as a 'deliverer of information'.
Therapy
When an individual seeks therapy, most often they are seeking remediation of some kind of psychological pathology. Either in a one-on-one or group setting, a therapist provides an opportunity to discuss personal concerns that need external assistance to "fix" them. An individual in therapy therefore may not have the tools within them to improve. In this case, it can be seen that therapy has more of a 'doctor-patient' dynamic.