(If you'd rather take this in at your own pace, keep reading. If you want it less tidy, the version where I think out loud, go off script, and probably contradict myself more often — that's the audio above).
Originally published 8 October 2024. Substantially revised August 2026.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute therapy, diagnosis, medical advice or legal guidance. Regulations vary by jurisdiction, so please consult an appropriately licensed professional for advice specific to your circumstances.
Why I’m revisiting this
I first wrote this article in 2024 because of a question that kept coming up in conversations with clients and collaborators: what exactly is the difference between coaching and therapy?
At the time, I gave an answer reflecting a somewhat oversimplified general consensus: therapy delves into the past while coaching looks towards the future; therapy addresses the “why”, coaching concentrates on the “how”.
The article did reasonably well. People found it, shared it and told me it had helped them understand what kind of support they might need. I still stand by its intention, but another two years of working with creatives and undergoing fairly intensive training of my own, my understanding of that distinction has changed considerably.
I could simply replace a few paragraphs and leave it at that, but the shift in my understanding has a lot to do with a lot of personal study I’ve been doing this past year. Neuroscience, Somatics, Martial Arts philosophy, studying with teachers like Peter Crone, Ryan Hurst. Delving deeper into my yoga practice. All of that needs to be a part of this conversation now.
There is also a more pressing reason.
The state of the creator economy. Particularly the arts.
Some bullet points.
- 86% of more than 2,000 artists and music professionals surveyed reported significant mental strain. (Ditto Music, 2026)
- Almost 12% of music professionals surveyed reported serious thoughts of suicide, up from 8 per cent the previous year. (MusiCares Wellness in Music Survey, reported by CD Baby)
These figures won’t be particularly surprising to anyone who has spent enough time in the independent music world.
Artists are expected to create, perform, produce, promote, sell, tour, remain visible, understand an industry changing faster than most people can keep track of and somehow stay psychologically intact while doing it.
The details may look different for a writer, filmmaker, dancer, designer or any other independent creative, but the underlying collision is the same: the work is personal, the conditions surrounding it are unstable and the person making it is increasingly expected to be both artist and infrastructure.
My own expertise comes from music. I shouldn't pretend every creative vocation operates identically, but what follows applies to creative people whose inner lives, identities and livelihoods are unusually entangled with what they make.
Many of us are looking for support because the conditions surrounding our work have become increasingly difficult to sustain.
What is often far less clear is:
- What kind of support is being looked for
- What the person offering it is actually qualified to do
- What words such as coach, therapist, facilitator or somatic practitioner tell us in the first place.
(Not necessarily very much, as it turns out.)
Where I’m coming from
My college degrees are in music with artist management being one of the major modules I took up later, with psychology included in the coursework. I later completed a certification in psychotherapy because the psychological component of working in music had become impossible for me to treat as an incidental part of the job.
That certification did not make me a licensed psychotherapist, something I took my time to figure out the exact mechanics of working internationally, and a large part of my subsequent training has involved getting much more precise about the exact differences between completing training in a therapeutic modality and being licensed to assess, diagnose or treat mental-health.
I think it is important to say this because the language surrounding certification is often misleading, particularly in the coaching and online education worlds. A person can complete a substantial programme, learn valuable skills and become far better equipped to support others without that programme granting them the legal or professional scope associated with a licensed clinician.
The two do not cancel each other out, but they are not interchangeable either.
My work as a coach grew out of my work as an artist and educator. Anyone who has taught music for long enough knows that the work rarely remains confined to scales, repertoire, harmony or technique. You are working with somebody’s relationship to being heard, their fear of being judged, their sense of whether they are entitled to take up space, the identities they have built around being talented or untalented and often the residue left behind by teachers who had enormous influence over them and very little understanding of the responsibility that came with it.
Music education has always involved the psyche. Some of its worst traditions came from acting as if it didn’t.
There is also the influence of yoga, which I did not first encounter as a wellness product or specialist training. I grew up with it during twelve years of schooling in India, including sitting examinations in it as part of physical and mental education, long before I heard many of the same practices described through the language of somatics or nervous-system regulation, let alone a fashion statement.
This is the position from which I’m writing: a practising artist, educator, yogi and coach whose work has always sat at the meeting point between inner life and outward practice, and who has become considerably more aware of both what he can offer and cannot.
A coach for what?
One of the problems with asking whether somebody needs coaching or therapy is that 'coaching' has become an almost impossibly broad category.
A business strategist may call themselves a coach. So may somebody working with executive leadership, grief, relationships, creativity, breathwork, fitness, spirituality, money, identity or the nervous system. Even my physiotherapist friends have to coach some of their clients.
Some in this often motley crew have decades of direct experience, others a weekend certificate, some clinical training, and some no formal training whatsoever despite the word 'coach' beneath their name.
In the original version of this article, I wrote that a coach should ideally have a background in psychology. I’m not sure that is a particularly useful statement anymore because it assumes coaching is one defined activity. Whether somebody needs psychological training depends on what they are offering to coach.
Three of the people who have coached or mentored me most significantly do not have psychology degrees.
Ryan Hurst has coached me around business, ethics and life. He has four black belts, decades of teaching experience, a deep knowledge of martial arts developed during almost 30 years in Japan and a successful business he built himself. I did not choose him to work with a mental-health condition. I chose him because the way he has lived, worked, taught and conducted himself gave him experience directly relevant to the questions I was bringing him.
Kenny Werner’s work as my mentor has never been limited to the mechanics of music. Effortless Mastery deals directly with fear, perfectionism, identity and the relationship artists have with their own creativity. His authority in that territory does not come from a psychology degree, but from a lifetime spent examining these patterns through his own work as a musician and educator.
Peter Crone works with identity and the mental constructs through which we experience our lives. I can only speak from my own experience, but his work has helped me more than that of any psychologist or therapist I have personally worked with. Again, he does not have a psychology degree. What he does have is an unusual degree of depth, articulation and precision in the work he actually does.
This does not mean credentials are irrelevant. There is another version of this in my friend and peer Vivienne Aerts, cutting-edge New York-based Dutch singer-songwriter, producer and educator who also holds a degree in clinical psychology. Vivienne worked in private practice before developing work that brought psychology, mindfulness, improvisation and music education into direct conversation with one another, including her teaching at Berklee College of Music.
Where does consulting fit into this?
There is another role which gets folded into coaching so often that many people no longer realise they are different: the consultant.
A coach is generally there to help you examine what is happening, identify what you want and develop your own capacity to move towards it.
A consultant is hired precisely because they know something the client does not.
If I bring in somebody to examine my business model, analyse a release strategy, improve a marketing system or advise me on a particular area of the music industry, I am not primarily paying them to help me discover the answer within myself. I am paying for knowledge, diagnosis of a non-clinical problem and recommendations based on expertise I do not currently possess.
That distinction becomes especially important in creative work because a lot of what is sold as coaching is consulting with coaching language wrapped around it. Someone presents a predetermined business model, teaches it as the correct path and then calls the process coaching because questions and accountability are included along the way.
There is nothing wrong with consulting. It can save years of unnecessary experimentation when the consultant has real experience, understands the context and is honest about what they know. The problem begins when advice is presented as discovery, when the practitioner’s preferred method is treated as something the client reached by themselves or when resistance to that method is interpreted as a limiting belief rather than a reasonable disagreement.
It also matters because consulting requires a different kind of authority. A coach does not necessarily need to have built the exact career their client wants, provided they are skilled in coaching the area they have agreed to address. A consultant claiming to advise an independent artist on touring, audience development, contracts or release strategy should be able to demonstrate relevant knowledge of those things. Listening well and asking powerful questions cannot substitute for expertise when expertise is what has been sold.
Much of my own work moves between coaching, mentoring, education and consulting. Sometimes, my client doesn't need another question, they need specific information they think I might be able to provide them with; an experienced reading of the situation or a direct answer.
With others, offering 'answers' would interfere with something more important: helping them hear their own.
The responsibility lies in knowing which role I am occupying, making that clear to whoever I'm working with and not using one form of authority to smuggle in another.
A useful question when choosing support then, is not just “Do I need a coach or a therapist?”, but “Do I need help to find my own answer, or advice on a problem from somebody with relevant experience?”
Often the answer will involve both. What matters is that the shift in the dynamic is by mutual consent.
There Is No Universal Line: Geography
One of the clearest discussions I have encountered on this took place during my training at a class led by Kai Cheng Thom and Dr Scott Lyons.
Kai began with something that is easily lost when conversations about scope take place online: the answer depends partly on where you're located.
Mental-health practice, licensing and protected professional titles are regulated differently across countries and, in some cases, across states or provinces within the same country.
In some parts of the world, particular titles are legally protected. Elsewhere, almost anybody can call themselves a therapist. The same training may allow one person to work under a particular title in one jurisdiction while offering no equivalent status somewhere else.
The internet complicates this further. A practitioner may be based in one country, their client in another and the training organisation that certified them in a third. Each may be operating with a different understanding of what the title means, what standards apply and what recourse exists if something goes wrong.
This is why no responsible article can give you a universal legal definition of therapy or coaching. You need to check the rules governing the place in which the practitioner works and, where relevant, the place in which you are receiving the service.
As a broad guideline, however, Kai identified three areas commonly restricted to regulated mental-health professionals: the assessment of a mental-health disorder, the communication of a diagnosis and the treatment of a diagnosed condition.
Assessment in this context does not simply mean noticing that somebody appears anxious or asking how an experience is affecting them. It means evaluating symptoms in order to determine whether they meet the criteria for a disorder and how severely that disorder is affecting the person’s life.
Diagnosis means telling somebody that they have PTSD, clinical depression, an anxiety disorder, a personality disorder or another mental-health condition. Kai pointed out that diagnosis is restricted even among many mental-health professionals because recognising a few matching symptoms is not the same as carrying out a differential diagnosis. Similar symptoms can have very different origins, and a diagnosis can significantly affect somebody’s access to insurance, funding and treatment, as well as how they understand themselves.
Treatment has an equally specific meaning here. It involves claiming to work directly with a diagnosed disorder in order to improve it, place it into remission, or cure it. A coach or somatic practitioner cannot claim to treat somebody’s PTSD simply because breathwork, movement, parts work or another practice may help that person feel better.
Depth is not the same as scope
This is where an important distinction emerges: the difference between scope and depth.
We have become accustomed to treating emotional depth as the property of licensed professions. If someone cries, speaks about grief, becomes angry, remembers something painful or tells a story involving trauma, a coach may fear that the session has crossed into therapy merely because the emotion is intense.
That is not what determines scope.
As Kai put it, emotion is not regulated by law. Human beings are allowed to be with one another in pain. Healing can happen between friends, within families, through movement, music, spiritual practice, education, community and countless other relationships that do not belong to a clinical system. Peer workers and outreach workers without advanced degrees often accompany people through experiences of enormous intensity, including addiction, hospitalisation and death. Their work is not shallow because it is not psychotherapy.
None of this grants a practitioner permission to do whatever they like. It just asks for a more accurate understanding of the boundary.
Example: A coach using parts work might notice that
- One part of an artist wants to release an album while another is terrified of what will happen once it is heard.
- A writer may be desperate to finish a book while simultaneously finding increasingly elaborate reasons not to return to the manuscript.
- A dancer may want greater visibility while another part associates being seen with danger.
- A CEO wants more overall freedom on one hand but is still clinging to an 'employee mindset'.
The framework can help somebody understand these conflicts, relate differently and make a decision. But what the coach cannot do, without the appropriate professional scope, is use the same framework to diagnose them 'officially' with PTSD and definitely not claim to be 'treating' it.
The method alone does not tell us whether the work is coaching or therapy. The purpose for which it is being used, the agreement between practitioner and client, the practitioner’s competence and the claims being made about the work all matter.
Scope is not the only boundary that matters
My first experience of anything I understood as therapy was with a practitioner whose qualifications sat largely within territory that much of the Western world would dismiss as “woo”.
I worked with her for almost seven years. The first three were life-changing. That is part of what makes the way it ended so important to speak about. This was not somebody whose work had never helped me, nor an experience I could dismiss as 'fraudulent'. Something of enormous value happened within that relationship, followed later by a breakdown of professional boundaries that contributed to one of the most disturbing weeks of my life.
Over time, she had begun offering unsolicited advice that I found increasingly out of context. During a particularly complex breakup, she also began holding sessions with my former girlfriend. When I eventually asked her to be more mindful of the boundaries surrounding our work, her response was implying my actions hurting her feelings and making the situation about her, while citing her own teachers as the people who had directed her to act as she did.
By that point, she had also asked for my advice about her daughter’s education and attempted to discuss entrepreneurial advice from me, none of which had anything to do with the relationship I believed I was paying her to hold.
I subsequently discovered that she had not left her home since the pandemic. Whether agoraphobia or another condition was involved was neither mine to diagnose nor determine, but the extent of her isolation had never been disclosed to me despite its potential relevance to her ability to work. She then dropped me during the same week in which I lost somebody to cancer.
Experiences like this are not confined to people using the title therapist. Over the years, I have lost count of how many coaches I have tried to work with, some of whom ran extremely successful businesses while using practices that left me confused about myself, my judgement and, on some days, devastated about the direction of my career.
Their commercial success often made the situation harder to assess because that success was also being presented as evidence that their methods worked. This points towards another problem running through the entire field: the commodification of services built around people’s uncertainty, ambition, pain and desire for change. Coaching, consulting, mentorship and therapeutic work are all sold in a marketplace, sometimes at considerable prices, where the ability to build authority and sell an outcome can be mistaken for the ability to support another human being responsibly.
Navigating that distinction is complicated, particularly when somebody seeks help precisely because they no longer trust their own ability to find the way forward. I recovered, in large part, because of my own training and the presence of some very sensible friends. I am not convinced everybody placed in the same situation would have had access to either.
This experience is one reason I resist simplistic arguments on both sides. The fact that somebody is not licensed does not mean their work cannot change a life. Mine was changed. The fact that the work can reach great depth does not mean it is being held responsibly. Mine eventually wasn’t.
Nor would the same situation have carried identical ethical implications everywhere. Depending on the country, the title she used, the certification she held and the way her services were described, there might have been a professional body, complaints procedure or legal framework through which her conduct could be examined. In another jurisdiction, there may have been no meaningful recourse at all.
Assessment, diagnosis and treatment are crucial parts of scope, but they are not the only ways a practitioner can cause harm. Conflicts of interest, dual relationships, unmanaged disclosure, emotional dependence, failure to maintain the agreed role and making the client responsible for the practitioner’s feelings can have serious consequences whether or not anybody has mentioned a diagnosis.
A practitioner may remain technically outside the restricted territory Kai described while still behaving in ways that are profoundly irresponsible.
This is where licensing, regulation, ethical codes, supervision and professional accountability can matter beyond the qualification itself. They cannot guarantee that somebody will act well, but they can create standards against which their conduct can be assessed and somewhere for a client to turn when it cannot.
Co-creation, competence and referral
Another aspect to explore (Kai spoke about this too), is the emphasis on co-creation.
Rather than introducing a psychological or somatic technique because the practitioner has decided it is what the client needs, the coach reflects what they are hearing, explains why a particular framework may be useful and asks whether the client wants to work with it. The person receiving the coaching remains an active participant in determining what happens.
That may sound obvious, but plenty of harmful work begins when a practitioner becomes more attached to applying their method than listening to the person in front of them.
Competence matters just as much. Being permitted to use a framework does not make somebody skilled in it, and completing training in one approach does not equip them for every response that might emerge. Ethical practice includes recognising the point at which additional support is needed, having a network of appropriate practitioners and referring somebody when the work moves beyond what you can responsibly hold.
Referral should not mean telling somebody that they have become too much and ending the relationship at the moment they most need support. Kai made a point I found especially important: referring out can mean adding to the person’s circle of care while continuing to support them within the work you originally agreed to do.
The aim is neither to act as if a coach must remain at the surface nor to turn coaching into unlicensed psychotherapy. It is to know what work you are doing, why you are doing it, what you can genuinely support and when another kind of expertise needs to be brought in.
A recent BACP discussion of practitioners trained across coaching and therapy raises the other side of the same issue. Additional therapeutic training can help a coach recognise distress and work with greater sensitivity, but it can also lead them to overreach, particularly when the impulse to care expands the work beyond what the client requested or what the coaching contract was created to address.
More training does not remove the need for boundaries. It makes our relationship with those boundaries more informed.
Therapy is not automatically deep and coaching is not automatically shallow
During the same class I refer to above, Scott pointed out that fear of emotion is not confined to coaching. Some forms of therapeutic training are far more comfortable changing thoughts and behaviours than remaining with what somebody is actually feeling.
This matters because much of the popular conversation rests on an assumed hierarchy in which therapy deals with the serious material while coaching deals with goals, habits and productivity.
In practice, there are coaches with an extraordinary capacity to stay present with complexity and licensed therapists who are not the right fit for a particular person or problem. There are also coaches operating far beyond their competence and therapists doing work that could not responsibly be replaced by coaching.
The title does not settle the question.
Neither, for that matter, does possession of a degree. Training, regulation and supervision matter enormously, especially when clinical conditions and risk are involved, but the quality of a helping relationship is also shaped by experience, self-awareness, judgement, cultural understanding, the practitioner’s relationship with power and their ability to recognise what they do not know.
Western psychotherapy did not invent healing
Scott added another point during the class which felt especially relevant to my own background. The first parts-work tradition he encountered came through Tantric Buddhism and predated Western psychotherapeutic approaches by centuries.
This does not make contemporary clinical models redundant, nor does it mean that an ancient practice and a modern psychological framework are identical. It does, however, challenge the idea that legitimate work with the human mind began when Western institutions found names, qualifications and professional categories for it.
Entire traditions devoted to attention, identity, suffering, embodiment and the nature of mind existed long before modern psychology. Yoga, Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are not primitive approximations of ideas the West eventually completed. They emerged from their own histories, philosophies, disciplines and forms of practice.
The modern wellness industry has often extracted techniques from those traditions, removed them from their cultural and philosophical contexts and returned them to the world as new discoveries. I find it difficult to discuss qualification and legitimacy without acknowledging that history, because the Western clinical frame is too often treated as the sole authority on human interiority while older systems are accepted only after being translated and often appropriated into its terminology.
This is not an argument against psychotherapy. Clinical knowledge, ethical frameworks, research and capacity to work with mental illness are invaluable. It is an argument against mistaking one system of knowledge for the entire landscape.
Healing has never belonged to one profession, institution or civilization. Assessment, diagnosis and clinical treatment may require a particular professional scope. Human beings helping one another meet grief, fear, conflict, identity and change did not begin there.
So which one do you need?
The first question is not whether coaching or therapy is better. It is what you need help with, how severely it is affecting your life and what the person offering support is claiming to do.
If you are experiencing symptoms that may indicate a mental-health condition, if your ability to function is significantly affected, if you feel you might be at risk of harming yourself or somebody else or need assessment, diagnosis or clinical treatment, seek a licensed mental-health professional or an appropriate crisis service.
If you are looking for support with professional decisions, artistic direction, creative blocks, accountability, performance, leadership, the business surrounding your work or the relationship between your inner patterns and what you are trying to build, a coach with relevant expertise may be the better fit.
That coach may work at considerable emotional depth too. The relevant question here is of that depth serves the purpose you agreed upon and whether they are competent in the approaches they use and recognise when your needs have moved beyond their scope.
You may also benefit from both. Working with a therapist and a coach at the same time is not a contradiction, provided each person understands their role and the work is not pulling you in incompatible directions.
When choosing either, look beyond the language on the website. Ask about training, experience, scope and supervision. Ask what happens if something emerges that they are not equipped to work with. Ask which professional or legal standards apply where they practise and whether any independent complaints process exists. If you are working across borders, ask which jurisdiction governs the relationship.
Observe if they listen before telling you what they think is happening. Notice whether their method leaves room for your own knowledge of yourself. Notice whether they can describe the limits of their work without becoming evasive or defensive. Pay attention to whether the relationship remains centred on the work you agreed to do or begins drifting towards their emotional, personal or professional needs.
If you are a creative, consider whether they understand the field you inhabit. Creative blocks do not exist separately from careers, bodies, histories, identities, money, relationships and the conditions under which art is now expected to survive.
My understanding of these conditions was built in music, and that remains the centre of my professional experience, but my coaching is not always limited by vocation. During my tenure as a music tutor and coach, I also worked extensively in social projects with people from very different backgrounds, many of whom were dealing with questions that reached far beyond music and needed my support in. I was trained throughly before hired to navigate the delicate nature of these situations.
Over the years, that work has shown me how similar the underlying architecture can be across professions and creative disciplines: the relationship between identity and work, the fear of judgement, the tension between intuition and expectation, and the patterns that shape how somebody responds to visibility, responsibility, uncertainty and change. My experience in the arts informs how I recognise and work with those patterns; but doesn't confine it to musicians or creatives alone.
That still does not make me the right coach for everyone though--which is why the person, their context and what they are actually asking for matter more than fitting them into a professional category.
Where I have landed
I used to think the difference between coaching and therapy could be explained primarily through time and direction: one turns towards the past, the other towards the future.
I now think the distinction is better understood through scope, purpose, competence, agreement, geography, boundaries and accountability.
I find myself thinking back to my university course in artist management and psychology, when the director of the psychiatric department at a local hospital was invited to lecture us on personality disorders and the particular susceptibility of artists to them. By the end of the session, every person in the room appeared to be wondering whether they had one.
Almost two hours into the lecture, I raised my hand and asked whether any of the conditions he had described could actually be healed. I was the only student who asked. The lecturer seemed genuinely surprised, as though the question did not belong to the material he had prepared, and the answer that followed was hesitant enough to leave me with considerably more questions than I had before.
Make of that what you will, but the memory has stayed with me. We had spent almost two hours learning how to identify and categorise pathology without addressing the question any person living with it would surely want answered: what possibility is there for healing?
Therapists do not own depth. Coaches do not own action, and diagnostic language does not by itself contain the full truth of the person being diagnosed. A licence grants a specific professional scope; it does not make every licensed person right for every client or equip them to answer every question that matters.
Training outside the licensed professions on hte toher hand can create enormous capacity, but it does not grant permission to assess, diagnose or claim to treat mental-health disorders.
Inner work can be
- Life-changing without being clinically regulated,
- Be ineffective when qualifications are mistaken for competence
- Dangerous when the absence of regulation is treated as freedom from responsibility.
The more I learn, the less convincing I find any attempt to turn this into a clean contest between coaching and therapy. Both can contain radically different schools of thought, levels of training, relationships with diagnosis and ideas about what healing even means. The subject is more complex than most practitioners, institutions or clients are given the language to understand, which makes clarity about what we know, what we offer and where our limits are all the more important.
At the Holistic Musician Academy, I work with the artist as a whole person because I do not believe their creative work, professional life, identity and inner world can be separated into convenient departments (hence 'holistic').
I draw from decades as a practising artist and educator, coaching, psychotherapy-informed study, somatic training and the practices I grew up with. I am equally responsible for knowing where that combination is useful and where somebody needs support I am not qualified to provide.
That does not reduce the work.
It tells me what the work actually is.
If you are carrying more than you can currently manage, please reach out to somebody equipped to support you. Music Minds Matter and the MusiCares Mental Health and Addiction Recovery programme offer support specifically for people working in music.
Join my free training.
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