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Virtue Medicine Coaching is an optimistic, positive self-discovery process that explores each individual’s unique forms of creativity and flourishing, with insight-building questions and tools that identify strengths, discern core commitments, build deep awareness, and result in strategic, meaning-centered change.

While the profession of coaching does not require graduate education for licensure, our coaches bring doctoral-level and interdisciplinary post-graduate training, expertise, and credentialing to meet, on an extraordinary level, the International Coaching Federation (ICF) Core Competencies and Ethical Standards.

What is the difference between coaching and psychotherapy?  Glad you asked!  This is a really common question.

• Coaching, like psychotherapy, is client-focused and committed to the fundamentals of building trust, active listening, collaborative decision-making, and facilitating awareness.  But unlike psychotherapy, coaching is not a diagnosis-oriented medical process and does not include exploring past health history or illness symptoms.  Coaching focuses on leveraging a client’s potential for growth and success in life and work; psychotherapy focuses on healing and wholeness.
• Coaching stays in the here-and-now, collaboratively identifying action plans that support the powerful achievement of a client’s goals. Psychotherapy more deeply explores a patient’s past and present story, inviting the integration of many facets of being and experiencing towards a healthier life.
• Coaching success is measured by the client’s accomplishment of agreed-upon goals, through strengths-based growth and accountability. Psychotherapy focuses on developing a deep understanding and compassion for one’s motivations, emotions and patterns, even when demonstrable action is slowed by the process of reflection and insight-building.
• Coaching holds clients responsible for setting an action-oriented agenda and for identifying solutions to their challenges with the coach’s collaboration and discerning questions.  Psychotherapy accommodates a more open-ended exploration of suffering, self-knowing, and wondering as normative aspects of life’s healing journey, with more directive support.
• Coaching is still early in the process of professionalization, with nascent certification and training options, while becoming a psychotherapist has extensive educational requirements and professional competencies with statutory and licensing oversight.  Our coaches are trained in both coaching and psychotherapy standards, and we confidently maintain the highest integrity of both fields’ strengths and distinctiveness.

Whether coaching or psychotherapy, our doctors always bring their fundamental commitments to promoting their clients’ authenticity and integrity through person-centered, meaning-centered interventions. Clients who are unsure if they wish to engage in coaching or psychotherapy are invited to call and speak confidentially with our executive assistants about these options. Call us at 319.338.5190.