Personal counselling and coaching

Personal counselling, psychotherapy and coaching

I do not find it helpful to make concrete distinctions between personal counselling and personal or life coaching, or similarly psychotherapy. They each offer a safe space in which you can reflect on your life, what is working well for you and what is difficult for you.

There are some differences of emphasis:

• Personal counselling is likely to have a strong emphasis on addressing the difficult aspects of life events; painful or troubling feelings; self-defeating behaviour patterns; relationships that are not working well for you; supporting you through difficult periods in your life; strengthening your self-esteem. It typically lasts between a few weeks and six-nine months.
• Psychotherapy is likely to involve exploring deeper rooted patterns, the impacts of experiences in the early years of life or of a traumatic nature. There is often a significant emphasis on examining what happens in the relationship between yourself and your therapist, as a means of gaining understanding about experiences about which you do not have any clear memories. It will typically last one or more years.
• Personal and life coaching is often focussed on examining how you want to take your life forward and devising a strategy or plan that enables you to try out different ways of acting. It can be quite brief and some clients prefer longer sessions with gaps of some weeks between them. 

Relationship counselling

You and your partner may wish to explore aspects of your relationship, with a third person present to facilitate your discussion. This can enable you to say what you need to say to each other and hear what it may be difficult to hear from each other.  This process provides an opportunity for you to renew your relationship.

How this works

For counselling, psychotherapy and coaching to be effective, it is vital is that you find a practitioner with whom you feel safe; you are confident he or she is by your side and 'gets' you.  You can test this out by having an initial meeting, starting an exploratory conversation and testing how comfortable you feel and how well they seem to understand you. If you decide to contact me for such a conversation, I will offer you an initial free consultation, normally for an hour, either face to face or via Zoom, Skype or phone.

After the  initial session, if you wish to continue we will then have some discussion about how you want to work, what you want to work upon and how it might be best to go about that in terms of length, frequency and possible number of sessions, or a more open-ended arrangement with an agreed review point. This will depend upon the issues you are bringing, and your needs and preferences.

Fees

I currently charge £45 per hour for new or returning clients seeing me for personal counselling, psychotherapy, personal and life coaching (with no charge for the initial consultation).

Please note when I start seeing a client I do not increase the fees with that client during the time of our initial period working together. 

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