✨ Understanding the difference — and how each can support your wellbeing and growth abroad
Many people who come to me for outdoor coaching ask one key question: “Do I need coaching or therapy?”
It’s an important distinction. Both can help you grow, feel more balanced, and reconnect with yourself — but they work on different layers of experience. Understanding how they differ can help you choose the kind of support that fits your needs right now.
🌱 Coaching: Working with the Present and Moving Forward
Coaching begins in the here and now. It’s about exploring your current reality — what’s working, what feels stuck, and what you want to move toward.
In coaching, we don’t focus on diagnosing or healing the past. Instead, we look at how you can use your strengths, awareness, and values to create meaningful change today.
The process is future-focused and action-oriented. It’s about clarity, confidence, and taking aligned steps forward.
When I work with expat women outdoors, nature becomes a co-coach in this process. The rhythm of walking, the sound of birds, the feel of fresh air — all help you gain perspective. What may feel tangled indoors often becomes clearer once we step outside.
Sometimes, coaching is simply about creating space for the right question — and the time to hear your own answer.
🌿🌿 What Coaching Can Offer
Coaching is particularly helpful when you want to:
- Clarify your direction or next steps
- Strengthen boundaries or self-trust
- Reconnect with balance and calm
- Navigate change (such as moving abroad or starting a new role)
- Build sustainable habits or self-leadership
Rather than focusing on what’s “wrong,” coaching focuses on what’s possible.
It invites curiosity instead of judgment and supports you in taking small, meaningful steps that lead to lasting change.
For many expats, coaching feels powerful because it meets you exactly where you are — between cultures, languages, and identities. It offers space to pause, reflect, and reconnect with who you’re becoming.
Explore this further through my New Roots Program — designed to help expats grow, connect, and thrive abroad. 🌱
🌾 Therapy: Understanding the Undercurrent
Therapy works on a deeper emotional level.
While coaching asks, “What do you want to create?” therapy often asks, “What is holding you back?”
It looks at the emotional patterns, past experiences, and protective mechanisms that influence your behaviour today. Therapy explores the why — why you might feel stuck, anxious, or disconnected.
In therapy, there’s space to bring awareness and compassion to earlier experiences that might still affect your nervous system or sense of safety. Healing those deeper layers allows more stability, freedom, and self-acceptance to emerge.
When we work with the undercurrent — the things unseen or unspoken — we create space for long-term change to take root.
🌸 Coaching Looks at the “What Now”; Therapy Looks at the “Why”
A simple way to see the difference:
- Coaching focuses on the what now — what you have, what you want, and what steps you can take.
- Therapy focuses on the why — why certain patterns repeat, why you feel blocked, and how past experiences may still shape your present.
Coaching is like tending the garden you already have — pruning, planting, and helping things grow toward the light.
Therapy is about nurturing the soil beneath — understanding what’s hidden below the surface and making sure the roots are strong enough to support growth.
Both are valuable and often work best together.
🌿 When the Two Meet
In practice, coaching and therapy often overlap and complement one another beautifully.
As a trauma-informed outdoor coach and therapist-in-training, I see this every day.
Sometimes coaching helps you move forward from a stable place — creating clarity and action.
Other times, you might notice that progress feels blocked or heavy — a sign that something deeper needs attention first. That’s where therapy can help bring understanding and release.
And often, after a period of therapy, coaching provides a gentle way to look ahead again — transforming insight into action.
Both paths honour your story: one focuses on what’s next, the other on what’s within.
🌾 Finding the Right Fit
If you’re unsure which path fits you best, ask yourself:
- Am I looking for tools, structure, and guidance to move forward?
→ Coaching may be right for you. - Do I feel stuck, anxious, or held back by the past?
→ Therapy might offer the depth you need right now. - Do I want both understanding and movement?
→ A combination of the two can be especially powerful.
The most important thing is to choose what feels safe and supportive for you. Change happens most naturally when you feel grounded and seen.
🌿 The Role of Nature in Both
Whether through outdoor coaching sessions or mindful walks between therapy appointments, nature plays a quiet but powerful role in both approaches.
When we step outdoors, our nervous system begins to settle. The body finds rhythm. The mind clears.
Nature invites calm, perspective, and a gentle reminder that growth takes time — and that you already belong to something larger.
You don’t have to think your way through everything.
Sometimes, clarity comes when you experience it differently — through movement, stillness, and connection to the natural world.
🌼 Closing Thoughts
Coaching helps you take meaningful steps forward.
Therapy helps you understand what shaped the path beneath your feet.
Together, they create a fuller picture of growth — grounded in awareness, moving toward possibility.
If you’re curious about which approach fits you best, or if you’d like to experience what outdoor coaching feels like, I’d love to hear from you.
đź’¬ You can reach out to me directly or book a walk and chat.
Let’s take a walk together — and find what you need to move forward feeling calm, clear, and connected. 🌿🌿