If psychotherapists are to survive, do they have to become coaches?

If psychotherapists are to survive, do they have to become coaches?

As I mentioned earlier, as a result of the explosion of “life (and other) coaches,” psychotherapists are becoming an endangered species. So what should a psychotherapist, therapist, psychologist, social worker or psychiatrist do?

Of course, if you want to stay as a “medical model company,” you need to start marketing like crazy to show prospects that there is an advantage to going to you instead of a coach. But that sounds like a tough argument when you consider your obligations to insurers you contract with and your dependence on them for their payments. This is especially true when you consider for-profit managed care limitations on fees, terms, and customers.

What many coach training institutions encourage is that psychotherapists don't necessarily abandon their therapy practice entirely, but rather add coaching. This can provide an opportunity to expand your therapy practice to provide “motivating, balancing and integrating” help like us, as trainer Martha Beck puts it.

For example, if someone comes to you with anxiety, you as both a therapist and a coach can directly address the anxiety and the lurking social issue that is contributing to it. The action-oriented, solution-oriented focus of coaching could help the client develop the effectiveness and greater self-confidence needed to work on their anxiety problem.

Breaking away from insurance or for-profit managed care companies offers you the benefits of foregoing a lot of paperwork and following their dictates religiously.

Another advantage is not only receiving a percentage of the fee. While some think it's crass to talk about money for psychiatrists, the reality is that psychotherapy is a business. In order for the business to survive, thrive and help people, therapists must receive necessary and sufficient compensation - which too often is currently not the case.

If you trained to become a life coach (or another variation of coach) to become a coach therapist, you would put yourself in a more viable business situation. As a life coach, you would stand out from your fellow therapists and make your practice more attractive.

But there is a potentially negative consequence of this business change. Before, you were primarily competing with other therapists and only secondarily with life coaches. Now you are primarily in competition with the numerous life coaches and only secondarily with therapists.

Since life coaches are so “smoking” right now, that means you need to have a really good marketing plan in place to stand out from all the other life coaches and all the other therapists.

You need to be able to show that you are now presenting the best of both worlds to your customers – making you the obvious choice for them. No matter what you do to survive now and thrive in the future, it must include solid, education-based marketing.

Alternative practitioner psychotherapy

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