W5 Coaching - The Difference - Consultant vs. Coach

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Mark: Hi, it’s Mark from Top Local Lead Generation, we’re here with John Nieuwenburg, he’s a business coach in Vancouver, BC, one of the premier ones in the province. . You were mentioning you were interviewed about the difference between a consultant and a coach, and I guess that’s something that’s really a question you get asked a lot. So what is the difference a consultant and a coach?

John: Well, there is a couple of dimensions to this that I’d like to talk about. A consultant, it’s a little bit like a biblical parable of if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, you teach him how to fish you’ll feed him for a lifetime, and a consultant is more like the former than the latter. In other words, the consultant is there to pretty much set the tone, set the direction, offer the service of whatever it is that you need to do. Whereas the role of the coach is not to actually deliver product, but rather to help an owner in my case, is a client, the business owner to figure out the answer that is right for them. This is known as the Socratic Method of teaching, so Socrates had the idea that we don’t actually teach something to someone, what we do is help them figure it out for themselves. And this came up in the interview that I did yesterday, because someone the interviewer had talked to, another coach, said this whole idea of the Socratic Method and helping a client work out an answer that’s right for themselves is total b.s. so I wanted to talk a bit of an issue with that. For sure, one part of what this coach said that I do agree with is that if it comes down to using a particular system, tool or strategy and that’s new to the business owner, then yeah, you kind of operate in the mode of a consultant or you offer a tool or some kind of strategy that is going to help that business owner. But at the end of the day, whether the owner decides to take that tool forward or use that or implement that strategy is up to the owner and the role of a coach then is to help them figure out that answer based on their values, their goals, what they deem right. So the role of a coach is more to help the client stay accountable for the things they’ve chosen or what want to be held accountable for. And so that’s the big distinction. The other feature of the Socratic Method is that the goal of the Socratic Method is to have your client or mentee or whatever may be the case, to come up with their own answer because the thought is that when it’s their answer, they are much more likely to own it and in that way, they’re much more likely then to do whatever is necessary to make it happen, to implement and take it forward. So as a consultant, we’re kind of in the you should business. You should do this, you should do that and that’s the very opposite of coaching.

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