Two Tools, One Practice: Counselling and Coaching

People sometimes find their way to me through my counselling work and are surprised to learn I also coach. I get why that surprises people, the two get lumped together a lot, treated as roughly the same kind of "talking helper." But they're genuinely different tools, and my own path kept pointing toward needing both.

Where it actually started

I did my BSc in Psychology with Counselling, and from there went into occupational and organisational psychology, drawn by a real interest in mental health and wellbeing at work. I wanted to understand how people actually function inside organisations, what helps them thrive, what quietly wears them down.

What I found, working in that space, was harder to sit with than I expected. So much of it seemed to circle back to organisations caring more about profit than about the people actually doing the work. Wellbeing initiatives that looked good on a slide but didn't touch the actual conditions people were working in. That gap between what was said and what was done didn't sit right with me.

So I trained as a counsellor, specifically so I could keep working with the workplace, that context still matters enormously to me, but centre the person in it properly, rather than the organisation's version of what "wellbeing" should look like.

What counselling alone didn't cover

My OccPsych background left something behind that never really left me: a more applied, doing-oriented way of thinking. Not instead of depth work, alongside it. It means that when I sit with a client, I'm not only equipped to sit with what's underneath a difficulty, I'm also equipped to help translate whatever we uncover into something concrete they can actually build from, if that's what's needed.

That's a genuinely different skill set to counselling on its own, and it's what led me to train formally in coaching, with the actual framework, the ethics, the structure, rather than just an applied attitude borrowed from my OccPsych years.

I should say honestly, I've been on the receiving end of both. Counselling has shaped how I understand what it offers from the inside, not just the theory of it. And through supervision, I've experienced enough of what good coaching actually does, the accountability, the forward motion, the sense of being partnered with rather than advised at, that I know its benefits firsthand too, not only as something I offer, but as something that's genuinely helped me.

What this actually looks like now

In practice, my coaching work sits across two areas that don't usually get combined: workplace coaching, career direction, confidence, navigating a role or a difficult professional situation, and identity-related coaching, working with queer, trans, and kink-positive clients on the things that show up when you're building a life and a career while also holding an identity that the world doesn't always make easy space for.

I don't think that combination is common. Most workplace coaches aren't also doing identity-focused life coaching, and most coaches working on identity aren't coming at it with an occupational psychology background sitting underneath it. But for me it's not two separate offers stitched together, it's one lens, applied psychology plus a genuine understanding of what it's like to build a life as who you actually are, brought to whatever a client is trying to move toward.

How the boundary between the two actually works

If it looks like coaching might serve a client better than continuing as we have been, that's never a switch I make quietly or assume consent for. It's a conversation, the shift is explained properly, what coaching is, what it isn't, how it differs from what we've been doing, and the client has to actually agree to it before anything changes. And it's not a one-off conversation either, we check in on it regularly, because what serves someone at the start of a piece of work isn't always what serves them three months in.

That collaborative, consented approach reflects the same care in both directions, the same respect for the client's agency that sits underneath both counselling and coaching.

Where this leaves me

I trained in both because I kept meeting people, and moments, where one tool wasn't quite the right fit, and I'd rather have the right one available than force someone into whatever I happen to specialise in. If you've only ever thought of me as "the counsellor," that's only ever been half the picture. The other half has the same psychology underneath it, applied a little differently, toward wherever it is you're actually trying to get to.