Personal Consultancy
The Idea Behind Personal Consultancy
The concept of Personal Consultancy is a simple yet powerful one: integrating therapy and coaching.
General Trends
The two most commonly accessed therapeutic services are counselling and coaching. Although they are often seen as quite different, they share a number of important features.
Generally speaking, counsellors undergo longer and more rigorous training. They typically join professional bodies (such as the BACP, UKCP, or BTCP), engage in regular clinical supervision, and undertake ongoing professional development.
Coaching, by contrast, is currently a less regulated field—anyone can set up practice as a coach. However, it's worth noting that there are highly skilled and ethical practitioners in both disciplines.
Why the Split Between Counselling and Coaching?
Practitioners themselves often highlight the distinctions between the two fields. Coaches, for instance, tend to charge higher fees and may wish to avoid the marketing challenge of appearing too similar to counsellors. Counsellors, on the other hand, often emphasize their more in-depth psychological training and prefer to maintain a clear boundary from coaching.
Ultimately, clients decide which service best suits them. Some feel more comfortable "seeing a coach" than "being in therapy," and vice versa.
Bringing It Together – Complementary Disciplines
Counsellors are typically trained to work at psychological depth—to repair the foundations—and thus offer a reparative experience. Coaches, meanwhile, are trained to help clients build on those foundations by setting and achieving meaningful goals, providing a generative experience.
Personal Consultancy integrates these two approaches: first ensuring the foundations are strong, then building upon them to support growth and achievement.
Bringing It Together – Overlapping Disciplines
In practice, the boundaries between counselling and coaching often blur. Many counselling approaches are solution-focused, future-oriented, and strength-based—qualities traditionally associated with coaching. Similarly, many coaching methods draw on techniques that promote deep personal change, offering effects that are reparative, much like counselling.
Thus, the two disciplines not only complement each other but can also be powerfully combined.
If the foundations are weak, the structure cannot stand; yet once the foundations are secure, why stop there? Personal Consultancy is about both repairing and building—helping clients to heal and to grow.
The Personal Consultancy Approach
Personal Consultants focus less on whether the work is "therapy" or "coaching," and more on whether, in each session, the client's needs are reparative (healing and restorative) or generative (growth- and goal-oriented). Depending on this, practitioners draw from the most appropriate techniques across both counselling and coaching traditions.