I met my first executive coach in the bar of a conference hotel.

He was there to coach the CEO of a corporation who was speaking at the event. I was there for a therapy training down the hall.

We started talking, and within twenty minutes, two things became clear. The first was how similar our work actually was. Both of us worked with people who looked fine on the outside and weren't underneath. 

The second was how vastly different the context was. He earned three times what I did, worked across state lines without paperwork, and never spent evenings charting. Never argued with insurance companies. Never lost sleep worrying about a board complaint.

I Thought: I Want Some of That.

What I wanted, though, wasn't to leave therapy behind. I loved the work and still do. What wore me down was everything around it: the regulation, the administration, the paperwork that came with every single client, and the fact that once someone no longer met criteria for a diagnosis, I often couldn't keep seeing them at all.

So I enrolled in coaching training and became a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach. What I built from there was something I couldn't find anywhere else: not a coaching certification with a bit of therapy sprinkled on top, but a genuine synthesis of both. Therapeutic coaching didn't exist yet, so I built it.

Ten years later, as an international trauma therapist and coach who still sits in both chairs, I've learned a lot about what each profession misunderstands about the other — and about how much they could learn from each other, if the competition ever let them.

Coaches are my primary community now: my one-to-one clients, my training participants, and honestly some of the most skilled practitioners I know. Therapists are where I come from, and where a piece of me still lives.

So this blog is a bit of both: part love letter to the coaches I work with every day, part honest reflection on what each profession gets wrong about the other.

What Therapists Get Wrong About Coaches

Let me say this outright: coaches are extraordinary at something therapy training almost never teaches.

They make people feel good. Seen, heard, known, and genuinely excited about what's possible.

That's what therapeutic coaching clients are paying for, and the best coaches deliver it consistently, session after session.

Most therapists deeply understand how much the relationship matters, and build it deliberately over time, through trust, safety, and clinical rapport. Coaches build that same relationship differently — more overtly, through enthusiasm and encouragement that makes a client feel unmistakably valued.

Coaches Earn Every Client.

What many therapists don't always see is how hard it actually is to build a coaching practice. Coaches have to hustle, market themselves, explain what they do to a skeptical public, and fill their roster entirely through their own reputation and results.

There's no institutional safety net, no guaranteed referral stream, no caseload handed to you by a clinic or insurance network. You have to be genuinely excellent to make it.

Coaches also tend to keep investing in their own training year after year, often more consistently than therapists manage to with continuing education — not because therapists don't value it, but because licensing requirements and tight budgets don't always leave much room. Either way, coaches often end up more qualified than they're given credit for.

What Coaches Get Wrong About Therapists

The insurance and regulation piece is not what it looks like from the outside.

What coaches often don't see is everything it took just to get here: years of supervised hours, unpaid or barely-paid internships, licensure exams, and supervision fees paid out of pocket long before the first real paycheck arrives. And once you're in, what it actually takes to keep a caseload full — and what it costs.

There are late payments. Recouped payments. Clients discovering mid-treatment that their insurance doesn't cover them after all. Attorneys demanding records. The ever-present low-grade fear of a board complaint.

The regulation that looks like security from the outside feels, from the inside, like a very expensive leash.

And the assumption that therapists stay rigidly within their lanes?

In my experience at therapyjane, it's actually the other way around. Coaches worry constantly about stepping outside theirs.

They're the ones Googling "is this too clinical for a coach?" at midnight. Therapists, meanwhile, will often stray into areas they haven't been formally trained in and learn it on the job — not out of carelessness, but because the client sitting in front of them needs it.

What Each Profession Could Learn From the Other

Here's what I'd tell every therapist: learn the art of acknowledgment.

At the end of every session, spend two minutes recapping what you want to acknowledge the client for. What they brought, what they did, what shifted.

Coaches are explicitly trained to do this — it's built into the model, not something they stumbled on. Most therapists never get that training, and it makes an enormous difference to how clients leave the room.

Coaches also offer challenges. Not homework, which lands like a school assignment, but genuine invitations: "I challenge you to try this before we meet again."

Therapists could borrow this unapologetically.

What coaches could learn from therapists: the arc view.

It means conceptualizing the whole picture at the beginning, building a plan, and holding the longer story in mind rather than responding to whatever's most present in each session. That structural thinking changes the quality of the work significantly.

And this: we all tell coaches to do their own therapy. Therapists should also do their own coaching. You can only take a client as far as you've been yourself. That applies to both chairs.

There's More Than Enough Work to Go Around.

The competition between therapists and coaches is a distraction.

Scarcity can bring out the worst in any of us: toward colleagues, toward ourselves, toward the whole idea of collaboration. When you notice it, it's worth pausing rather than judging yourself for it.

Do your own work on what it means to receive. That usually takes care of it.

The clients who benefit most from therapeutic coaching online are the ones who need both depth and momentum, and who aren't well served by either profession alone.

Knowing what you do brilliantly, what you don't, and being honest enough to refer when someone needs something you can't give — that's not weakness. That's the work.

Work With an International Trauma Therapist and Coach — Or Train With Me

If you're a coach looking to deepen your capacity to work with trauma, or a therapist who wants to bring more coaching energy into your practice, I'd love to work with you. As an international trauma therapist and coach at therapyjane offering therapeutic coaching online, I'm based in British Columbia and work with clients and training participants around the world.

When you're ready, here's how we begin:

• Explore Consulting and Mentoring — for coaches, therapists, and healers looking for a trusted guide. Case consults, trauma consults, practice visioning, career pivots. I've got you.
• Explore Courses and Trainings — live and on-demand training programs for professionals who want the tools and trauma-informed wisdom to do this work well.
• Book a One-Time Healing Session — not sure where to start? Start here. One session, one issue, and a chance to experience how I work before committing to anything longer.
• Show Up From Wherever You Are — this work happens entirely online, so it doesn't matter whether you're based in British Columbia, running a practice in London, or coaching clients from a home office in Singapore. All you need is an internet connection and a private space. I'll handle everything else.

Other Ways to Work With Me

If this blog got you thinking about where your own work could go deeper, there is likely something at therapyjane that fits where you are right now.

For coaches and therapists who want to build genuine trauma-informed skills rather than just trauma-aware language, the Live and On-Demand Courses are where that training lives — practical, clinically grounded, and ICF-accredited.

For case-specific guidance on the clients who are pushing the edges of your current training, Consulting and Mentoring is available for therapists, coaches, and healers who want a more experienced set of eyes on what they are navigating.

If you are reading this as someone who recognises themselves in the client descriptions rather than the practitioner ones, International Therapy and Coaching is the synthesis this blog describes — therapeutic depth and coaching momentum held together in one relationship.

For something more targeted, a One-Time Healing Session lets you experience the work directly before committing to anything longer.

And for those exploring early developmental or ancestral patterns, Healing the Birth Story brings a different and often unexpected dimension to the healing process.

Whatever seat you are sitting in right now, there is a way in that fits.

About the Author

Jane McCampbell Stuart is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist, and Certified Professional Co-active Coach based on an island in British Columbia, though her clients are scattered across the globe. With over 20 years of experience as a trauma therapist and having lived in four countries on two continents herself, she has a particular soft spot for the expats, executives, aid workers, and globally mobile humans who are brilliant at everything except sitting still. Her approach is deeply relational, clinically precise, and just a little bit magical. She gets in, gets to the root, and gets to work. And then she teaches you how to do it too.