Are you a coach but sometimes you offer advice so don’t know whether you should call yourself something else?
Or have you seen people saying they’re a coach but what they do looks consultancy?
Or have you opted out of using any common labels because it’s all so confusing!
Don’t worry, even the interweb doesn’t know how to define ‘coach’.
The online dictionary definition of ‘coaching’ mentions teaching, sharing advice and a lot of mentions of sports coaching.
I know some accredited coaches who would be very angry at that definition! (I’ll explain why later.)
People mix up the terms coach, consultant, mentor and trainer
One person might call themselves a coach, but really what they’re doing is mentoring. Another might be a consultant but they’ve labelled their service as coaching.
I’m mainly a marketing consultant but I do use some coaching techniques. And sometimes what I’m doing might called mentorship.
It’s annoying (and befuddling) that there isn’t common terminology.
Universal agreement on terminology
Having a universal agreement on what to expect from each role would not only help people make purchase decisions, but it’d help service providers decide what to call themselves!
So I thought I’d have a bash at defining them all.
Then all we have to do is get everyone in the world to read my blog and agree to stick to these parameters. Yes? Yes! : )
See what you think, and let me know whether you agree with my descriptions or not.
Definitions of coaching, consulting, mentoring and training
Here’s a quick overview of each. I’ll go into more detail further down the page.
Coach: Someone who asks intelligent questions to encourage the coachee to come up with their own solutions wherever possible. Careful listening is employed to identify subtext. The aim is to gently enable the client to stretch their boundaries and improve in the agreed area of work.
Consultant: Someone with qualifications in the topic and/ or direct experience carrying out that work for other people or organisations. The consultant’s role is as an advisor and problem solver.
Mentor: Someone has been in a similar situation to you so they can advise on what course of action they took and how it worked out. You learn from their experience.
Trainer: A professional who is teaching you a specific skill or filling a knowledge gap. The trainer will have pre-prepared materials and more than one person can be trained at once.
All definitions concocted by me, Janine Coombes.
Let’s dig in!
Mentoring, coaching, training and consulting
Here’s how I see the four roles and how they compare to each other.
Glossary of terms
- Service provider: The Coach, Consultant, Trainer or Mentor.
- Client: Person paying them for their help.
- High client input: The service provider will adapt their approach depending on what the client says and how they feel. The focus is more on the client leading the direction.
- Low client input: The suggested approach is driven by the service provider. You’ll be expected to follow their advice more closely with less variation. For example a trainer will probably be teaching you pre-agreed topics with prepared materials.
- One to one: When a service provider works directly with the client with no-one else on the call or at the meetings.
- One to many: The service provider speaks to a group of people. It could be a small handful of people. It could be a hundred or more. This means you’ll get less direct attention from the service provider than if it were just you and her/ him.
- Prescriptive: When advice is given with the understanding that it should be followed to the letter with little or no variation.
- Non-prescriptive: Guidance varies much more depending on the situation and the people involved.
1. Coaching
The way I use the word ‘coach’ is based on my experiences of being coached and from conversations with the many coaches I’ve worked with.
The focus is on the client to drive the progress. In other words, it’s a ‘high client input’ activity as mentioned in the diagram above.
Coaching is generally done on a one to one basis since it involves deep exploration into your motivations and goals. This takes time and focus. It can get very personal too and most people prefer this process to be private.
You can have group coaching calls although these usually involve more consulting and mentoring than coaching.
Coaching implies a non-prescriptive approach. In other words, you wouldn’t expect a coach to tell you exactly what to do and for you to follow their advice no-questions-asked.
Coaches can be directive or non-directive. And often you’ll get a mixture of the two.
Non-directive coaching
This is when the coach refrains from giving any specific advice and relies solely on their ability to draw out the solutions from you.
A lot of coaching accreditation bodies including the ICF (International Coaching Federation) train their coaches to be totally non-directive. No advice should be given at all. It all has to come from the coachee. I’ve heard it described as ‘don’t pollute the space that you’re holding for your client’.
Directive coaching
Directive coaching is when the coach uses their own experience to advise their client on what their next steps should be.
I don’t know any coaches who are exclusively directive. That would be more mentorship or consulting, not coaching.
I can see that a purely non-directive coaching approach can work, but it’s not my style. If I have a client who is in a very similar pickle that I have previously been pickled in, I’ll tell them what I did to become de-pickled. It’d be cruel not to!
Should a coach be accredited or not?
There’s a debate constantly raging about whether someone must be accredited (by a coaching accreditation body) to call themselves coach.
At the moment the coaching industry is not regulated so any Tom, Dick or Sally could call themselves a coach with zero training or experience.
But not all accreditation bodies are created equal. In other words, knowing that a coach is accredited doesn’t guarantee quality. And without supervision (a lot of accredited coaches have supervision by a seasoned coach so they can maintain standards) people might stray from their teachings no matter how good they are.
I was having a chat with two well established leadership coaches recently and this topic came up.
I asked one of them ‘do you believe you need to be accredited to call yourself a coach?’
“Accredited by who?” Was his reply.
Neither had gone through an accreditation process and, the way they saw it, they were more skilled and experienced than a lot of people running the accreditation bodies.
The way I see it is that here are marketing experts who don’t have marketing qualifications or experience of carrying out marketing on behalf of other people (like I do). But if they’re able to get results for their clients they clearly have huge value to share nevertheless.
Since you don’t have to pass exams to call yourself a consultant, mentor, trainer or even expert, I have to side with the looser usage of the word coach; you can be a good coach even if you’re not accredited. (But obviously you’d never claim to be accredited when you’re not!)
That said, it feels like the tides might be changing. I went to The Future of Coaching Conference and awards in February 2025, run by Angela Cox of Paseda365. Angela’s talk was all about blending of therapy methods with coaching based on neuroscience- including the point that, although you don’t have to dredge everything up from someone’s childhood to help a client, some acknowledgement and management of scripting and blocks established in their early years is very powerful.
Another one of The Future of Coaching speakers, Professor Ian Day, was talking about congruence and spoke out against ‘not polluting the space’ and instead suggested we bring our whole selves to coaching calls.
For the record: I am not an accredited coach. My qualifications are in marketing and business. I do however use a coaching approach when working with clients. I try and draw out your own ideas and solutions whenever possible.
On the flip side of that- you could be the best coach in the world, but if you have no clients, you can’t help anyone…
If you’re looking to get more clients in your coaching business right now, check out my blog 7 ways to get more sales of your high ticket services today or buy my book at easy-yes.com.
2. Consulting
Consulting draws on the consultant’s experience and training to find solutions to problems when you can’t see a clear way through for yourself.
Whereas coaching could be for business or personal, consulting is usually business related. But not always; you could have a personal style consultant or a Feng Shui consultant for instance.
Since consultants are known for working with larger companies they have the reputation of being more expensive. This isn’t because they’re greedy wotnots! It’s because the results can be huge in monetary terms.
There are plenty of consultants who work with very small companies e.g. solopreneurs or coaches, but they won’t necessarily use the word ‘consultant’ because of this preconception that consultants charge a lot and work for bigger companies. So some use the word ‘coach’ instead, which further confuses the issue!
A good consultant relies on their in-depth knowledge of the subject and how it applies to your objectives. Their role is advisory and the advice is tailored to your business.
Their objectivity is almost as valuable as their knowledge.
When I work with my clients I’m part coach, part mentor and part consultant. Problems that seem unfathomable to you, are easy for me to spot. Partly because I’m looking with fresh eyes, and partly because I’ve got oodles of marketing experience.
3. Mentoring
Mentors help their clients from place of experience. In theory a coach or consultant could help anyone, even if they hadn’t been in that situation before. My definition of a mentor is that they have been in the position you are now and so can help you move on to the next level e.g. a business mentor who has the kind of business model that you want.
Confession time; I am prone to the odd rant about people with no marketing training, or experience of doing marketing for other people, saying that they’re marketing experts.
They come at it from the point of view of ‘I did XYZ and I got this result. You do the same thing and you’ll get the same result’.
I worry about this because marketing is all about getting clear on:
- Your objectives and how to achieve them
- Your customers and how to reach them
- Your offers and how to promote them (and whether you have the right offers at the right price in the first place)
- And making the most of your unique blend of personality, skills, experience and likes/ dislikes
In short, working out how you want to run YOUR business, which is probably different to the person giving the advice.
However, I can now understand the value of this approach if I consider it as mentorship.
They’re not saying ‘I have all the answers’ (I mean, no one is!) but instead they’re saying ‘I’ve been where you are and I can show you the path I took’.
It’s a valuable approach and can be the best choice for some people who have a very similar type of business, lifestyle and/ or background as the mentor.
In fact, I can now see that part of what I do with my clients is mentorship. For example, if someone wants to know how to use video for LinkedIn, I have lots of experience to share on that topic. Will my approach work for everyone? No. And that’s where I have to bring in a more coaching approach.
4. Training
Training is a type of teaching. Usually in a formalised, preplanned way. In other words, the trainer will have materials that they want to take you through. Perhaps there’ll even be a test at the end. More often than not, training is one-to-many or even ‘self service’ through an online training platform.
Generally speaking, the area of training is the least contentious definition-wise. It’s the one we tend to know what we’re getting when we’re buying it.
Can you buy or offer a mixture of coaching, consulting, mentoring and training?
In short, yes! I do it so it must be ok. 😜
Most coaches will do a bit of mentoring. Many mentors will do a bit of training. Most trainers will adapt their approach to their clients. And a lot of consultants will try and impart some knowledge based on their personal experience as part of what they do.
This is the reason I invented the phrase ‘coach-shaped-people’. Because of the blurred lines between these four things. Also, I often work with people who offer a range of services e.g. leadership coaches who offer private coaching as well as team facilitation and consulting.
As for me, I’m mostly a consultant — specialising in service offer positioning, messaging and pricing. If the offer is solid I can then help people with how to promote and sell it in the easiest way possible.
But the coaching element of what I do is so important that I often call myself a marketing coach.
Are you a coach, consultant or mentor?
Are you fabulous at what you do but clients aren’t flowing to you as smoothly as you’d like?
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