Why I Transitioned From Psychotherapist to Executive Coach

It happened gradually.

After 15 years with a private psychotherapy practice as a licensed clinical psychologist, my days followed a familiar rhythm. Every 50 minutes I would open my office door, usher one client out and welcome another in, and then the pattern would repeat. If I happened to open my door at the same time as my office colleagues, we might exchange a quick hello before returning to our separate worlds.

The work was meaningful, my clients were engaging, and I genuinely enjoyed helping people. But over time, I began to feel as though the world was passing me by. Something was missing.

That realization led me in an unexpected direction. I started, built, and eventually sold several behavioral healthcare companies. And along the way, I discovered my true professional identity as an executive coach.

For years, I identified as a psychotherapist. But as I worked with executives, founder entrepreneurs, and leadership teams, I realized I began to think of myself differently. Becoming an executive coach meant letting go of parts of my therapist identity that no longer fit, while developing the skills and perspective the coaching role demanded.

Looking back, I don't see the career shift as leaving psychology behind. If anything, I was bringing the best parts of myself into a new context. In my work, I saw that even highly successful executives were adversely impacted by psychological patterns they couldn’t see. And instead of helping one person at a time, I was helping leaders understand themselves better, and that understanding had the potential to shape entire teams and organizations.

The Differences Between Psychotherapy and Coaching

As I made the transition from psychotherapist to executive coach, I realized I couldn't simply modify psychotherapy to a business setting. Coaching required a different way of thinking and behaving, and, ultimately, a different professional identity.

First, the models are different.

Psychotherapy exists in a healthcare system. The goal is to identify dysfunction and help to repair it. Theories explain abnormality and techniques stimulate healthy responses to life’s challenges.

Executive coaching, on the other hand, exists in a performance model. The assumption isn’t that something is necessarily wrong, but that something is interfering with the possibility of even better performance. Theories explain effective leadership, while techniques focus on education, skills training, feedback, and self-reflection. Executive coaching is more like working with elite athletes. The better the athlete, the more coaching they receive. Successful executives often don’t seek coaching because they feel something is wrong, but because they want to advance their career and perform at an even higher level.

Second, the goals are different. Psychotherapy aims to return the person to a healthy psychological state and build resilience for the future. Coaching takes the already successful, high-functioning executive and helps them elevate their performance and career.

The Mentoring ←→ Coaching ←→ Psychotherapy Continuum

Executive coaching developed alongside its sister practice of mentoring, and the two are often confused. Mentors draw primarily on their own experience. Having faced similar challenges, they offer advice about what worked for them and what might work for someone else.

But advice alone rarely changes behavior.

Although sharing knowledge about the science of leadership is an important component of coaching, executive coaches distinguish themselves from their mentoring colleagues by understanding the complexities of human personality and realizing that advice, while sometimes beneficial, doesn’t result in lasting behavior change. Advice is often useful but frequently insufficient, because to mobilize change the coach must have a conceptual model for understanding the psychology of the individual. Two executives can receive the same advice and respond very differently because they bring different personalities, motivations, identities, emotions, and behaviors to the situation.

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Psychotherapy, on the other hand, goes further than most executives need because it was designed for symptoms and disorders that are more resistant to change.

Over time, I realized that executive coaching lies somewhere in the middle, between mere advice on one end and psychotherapeutic techniques on the other, and might be defined as a relationship for enhancing performance by melding the science of leadership with the science of behavior change.

What Executive Coaching Looks Like in Practice

Understanding these differences conceptually was one thing. Living them as a coach was another.

As an executive coach, I spend less time digging for a deeper understanding of my client's inner world and more time appreciating the organizational and social systems that influence their behavior. I observe how their performance is impacted by gaps in their leadership skills and knowledge and blindspots in their self-awareness. I traded the satisfaction of having a profound influence on one individual for the opportunity to positively influence an entire enterprise.

The coaching relationship also changed. I no longer have the clear and familiar boundaries of psychotherapy. Coaching most often takes place in my clients' offices rather than mine, over lunch, on a walk, or in meetings with their colleagues. The somewhat hierarchical therapeutic relationship doesn’t exist because my clients are often far more accomplished in their professions than I am in mine. They know my hobbies, the name of my spouse, our kids, and details about our lives. Sharing meals means they know my food preferences and allergies. My life choices, successes, failures, strengths, and vulnerabilities are all exposed. And navigating this more fluid relationship requires a different set of professional guidelines.

A Fulfilling Identity

Now I understand how much of my transition from psychotherapist to executive coach required an identity shift. I had to let go of familiar assumptions, familiar boundaries, and even familiar ways of understanding the person sitting across from me.

I came to appreciate that I have always been drawn to psychology by my inherent curiosity about our infinite uniqueness and why we do what we do. I feel grateful for the diversity of professional identities available and am fortunate to have found the one that fits for me.