134. What Coaching Actually Is (and Isn’t) for SLPs

If you've ever heard me talk about coaching and wondered, "But what IS coaching, exactly?" you're not alone. This episode was inspired by a real conversation in my Facebook group that made me realize a lot of SLPs don’t actually know what coaching is and how it can help. (I didn’t either before I found it.)

So today, I’m breaking down five things I wish every SLP understood about coaching and why it might be the missing piece if your life looks fine on paper, but feels heavy in practice.

What You’ll Learn

• I’ll explain why coaching is not advice, mentoring, or someone telling you what to do
• I share how coaching is similar to — and very different from — therapy
• We’ll talk about how coaching helps you build a life that actually fits your brain, especially if you have ADHD
• I’ll break down why coaching is evidence-based and not “woo”
• I explain who coaching is actually for and why you don’t have to be falling apart to benefit

If This Resonates

If this episode had you nodding along or thinking, “Oh, that’ sounds helpful,”  I’d love to talk with you. 

You don’t need a perfectly defined goal. Clarity is something we build together.

📌 Book a free 1:1 consult → https://cutt.ly/KtwII93a

Keywords (SEO)

SLP coaching, ADHD coaching for SLPs, work life balance SLP, executive dysfunction, productivity coaching, overwhelmed speech pathologist, time management ADHD

To find out how I can help you improve your work-life balance, click here.

Come join the SLP Support Group on Facebook for more tips and tricks!

Learn more about Theresa Harp Coaching here.

Transcript

Theresa Harp: [00:00:00] Hello podcast listeners. Welcome back to the show. This is episode 1 34, and it is actually something that was inspired by a scenario that came up in the Facebook group, the SLP support group on Facebook. Somebody in the group a while back had posted a question about how different SLPs handle canceling sessions when you, as the business owner and the therapist, have to cancel a session that's scheduled with a family.

And when I replied to the post, I asked if she wanted. advice or if she wanted coaching. And what I realized in that exchange was that a lot of SLPs don't actually know [00:01:00] what coaching is, which makes sense because I didn't know what coaching was before I discovered it. So today I wanna share five things that I wish every SLP knew about coaching.

So I'm gonna walk you through. Overall, just a general description of what coaching is and how it works, but also, like I said, five things that I wish other SLPs knew about the field of coaching and what it can do for you as an SLP. Alright? And not just as an SLP, by the way, but as a human in every role that you play, not just the role of SLP.

Okay, so let me talk with you first about what coaching is, and I'm gonna try and do this in a way that is as simple as possible without going on too much. But when I first [00:02:00] started in, let's see, back in 2020. 

At that time I was an SLP with a private practice, and that was primarily what I spent my days doing, was providing intervention for kids with hearing loss through the practice. And when COVID happened and I discovered coaching. Well, I remember having a conversation with the director who was in charge of a coaching certification program, and I remember she asked me, do you know what coaching is?

And I naively. I don't know exactly how I said this, but naively, I said yes. I said, yeah, I do coaching all the time. I mean, all of my speech sessions are with caregivers, the parents, the grandparents, the babysitters are in or were in my intervention sessions in the type of therapy that I was doing, you know, early intervention and then listening and spoken language therapy.

[00:03:00] That was the. The core of our intervention was parent coaching and caregiver coaching, and I loved it. I love that part. So that's what I thought of when I thought of coaching, and it wasn't until I enrolled in the coaching certification program and started learning more about this field, this field of coaching, and that I really began to understand the difference between.

Caregiver coaching through, you know, in an SLP model and coaching, coaching in a personal development model. Okay. And I wanna be super clear here. This is not about, you know, one is better than the other. There are apples and oranges. 

Services. Okay. So if you hear coaching or you hear me talk about coaching, or maybe you're hearing other people talk about the field of coaching and you're thinking about it as what we have been trained to do as SLPs [00:04:00] with our patients, our clients, our clients families, there is a difference. Okay? And the best, simplest way that I can think of to convey this.

is what coaching is by telling you what coaching is not. Coaching is not the coach giving a client advice, mentorship. Guidance. Now, that's not to say that a coach never gives advice or a coach never guides, but coaching at its core is about partnering with the client.

Let's say it's you, the SLP and I, me the coach, and partnering with you as the client to help you make a change. You have something in your life that is not working for you, or you have a goal that you would like to hit [00:05:00] that you've never hit before. Maybe you wanna start your private practice, right?

Maybe you want to leave work by a certain time of day and not be up late. Spending time on documentation when it is your time at home with your family, whatever those goals are for you. The coach works with the client on number one, identifying what that goal or what those goals are, and then helping.

The client hid it, but not helping the client hit it by me telling you what to do. Instead, it's about me asking you questions, asking you questions that take you on a journey of a deeper, broader understanding of. You, your way of thinking, your brain, your patterns, your core values, your core needs. It's essentially [00:06:00] how to understand yourself better, how to show up differently as you work towards whatever result you're trying to create.

Okay. So the first thing, I kind of already alluded to it, but the first thing that I wish every SLP knew about coaching is that coaching is not advice, it is a partnership.

So this was a big adjustment for me because as an as an SLP, we're trained to give recommendations to create goals, to write measurable goals, to provide expertise and strategies and action plans, treatment plans, right? And so. That was, that's the lens that I was coming into this coaching field with, right?

And what I discovered is that's actually not what coaching is. Coaching is not about telling you what to do. It's about helping you as the client [00:07:00] figure out what you wanna do. It is client led and helping you as the client figure out why you don't have that result 

yet? What are the things that have gotten in the way? So as a coach, I don't hold the answers. I essentially hold the space so that you can hear your own answers. I am asking you the questions for you to come up with your answers, and then I'm reflecting it back to you so that you can have a better understanding of your way of thinking.

Okay. The second thing that I wish every SLP knew about coaching, and really every person, not just therapists, not just SLPs, but people in general. I wish people knew that coaching is similar and different from therapy. Now I'm not talking speech therapy here.

I'm [00:08:00] talking. mental health, social work, counseling, psychology, that type of therapy. there is a difference, I'll hear this from my clients a lot actually, where they'll ask me how it's different from therapy. Many of my coaching clients have a therapist that they work with currently or have had therapy in the past, so they're familiar with.

Therapy, the traditional therapy model and all of that. And then other people may, just sort of want to understand how coaching is similar and different from therapy in an effort to better understand what exactly coaching is. So when we think of working with a therapist on something, it is essentially.

traditionally when we think about therapy, we think about people going to therapy, when they are struggling with something, right? You are struggling with something and you want a therapist [00:09:00] to help you work through process, you know, and work through all of that.

Stuff, let's just say, right? Whereas with coaching, you don't necessarily have to be struggling to work with a coach, and this was something that was a big aha moment for me because I had always sort of mistakenly assumed or believed that coaches were professionals that helped people. We're struggling in life, just like struggling to get it together, struggling to do like the daily tasks, the daily activities, the daily tasks, and function in a way that.

In which they're meeting expectations, holding down a job, earning income, taking care of themselves, so on and so forth. I used to think that you had to be riding the struggle bus in order to [00:10:00] work with a life coach. That's what I thought. But what I came to understand is that in many cases it's the opposite.

it's those who are a. I shouldn't say the opposite, but in many cases people will come to a coach and have lots of strengths in place. Their life is not falling apart. They see something that they want and they wanna figure out how to create it 

For themselves, but they haven't figured out how to do it. They want to learn how to do it. So coaching, all you need is a goal, and a lot of times coaching clients. Come to me, and they may not know exactly what that goal is, but as we sort of work through what is challenging for them or what they wish were different, we get clarity on what that goal is.

Other [00:11:00] times, coaching clients will come to me with a very clear goal. They know what they want and they want me to help them hit. And then sometimes they'll come with a goal that they think that they want, and then we start going and they actually realize, oh, I thought I wanted to be caught up on reports, but I actually just want to know how to be okay when I'm not caught up on reports.

So there's lots of different things that we can work on in coaching, but coaching is not therapy. It is more action-based. Coaching is helping you figure out less so about the past and. Much more so about the future. What are you working on this week? what are some things that might get in the way?

What can I help hold you accountable for? How are you going to help yourself overcome obstacles this week? Right? What are we learning in the process? Those are the types of things that we do in coaching that you don't see in traditional [00:12:00] therapy. Okay? Number three. I wish that SLPs understood that coaching is how you build a life that fits your brain, especially for those with A DHD, right?

So many of us are trying to use systems and meet expectations that weren't designed for a neurodivergent. Brain coaching helps you build ones that are optimized for your brain. Coaching helps you to hit goals in a way that works with your learning style, your executive functioning challenges, and your executive functioning strengths.

Now, I wanna be clear here, not every coach has a background in executive functioning. This was something that my training program was very heavily centered on, and I have gotten. Increasingly interested and gained additional experience working [00:13:00] through, you know, in, during that certification process and beyond.

So not every coach approaches it this way, but with my clients, we're looking at, okay, what are your goals? what's the change that you wanna create? What's the thing that you want to be different in your life? Personal life, professional life, both. Something else. Right. And then what role, if any, is your A DHD playing?

And spoiler alert, it's playing roles. It's definitely playing roles, but if you have a DHD, how is your A DHD showing up here and what do we wanna do about it? And if you don't have a DHD, that's okay too. Coaching is also helpful in that case, 

What are your strongest processing modalities? How do you best learn? How do you best take in information How then can we use that information, use that knowledge about what's best for you and your brain and [00:14:00] work with it. Incorporate that into the goals that you're setting and the actions that you're taking.

So it's customized to match your brain, your lifestyle. The fourth thing that I wish people knew about coaching is that it's evidence-based, and this is really specific to my SLP, friends, colleagues, clients, et cetera. As someone who came from the SLP world, we are very research-based, evidence-based. Right, and in the beginning I had a misconception about coaching 

It is, you know, more thinking and feeling and less objective research-based evidence in what I have come to learn. Is how wrong I was. There is a plethora of evidence that is out there that supports [00:15:00] the benefits of coaching, especially in the world of A DHD, which is where I have landed.

So. And I would love to talk through what some of those, some of that evidence is. If you ever wanna talk through, you know, interesting studies and, you know, cutting edge research. I am game. Send me a message. We'll do it. Okay. And then last but not least, I've kind of alluded to this earlier, but I, I want to sort of separate this out and just echo one more time, is that coaching is for anybody who is open to growth.

It's not just for people whose lives are falling apart. Coaching is for those who want more. They want to feel differently. They wanna think differently. They wanna show up differently. They wanna make different choices. They wanna have [00:16:00] different thoughts. They wanna have different feelings. They want to create a life that is working for them.

They don't want to be working for their life. That is what coaching is about. That is what that is, who coaching is for people who know that there's a better way, they're just having trouble figuring out what it is. People who know that there is more to life than being stuck on this hamster wheel. They just want somebody to partner with them in the process to help them get there.

I hope that this was helpful. It hopefully answered some questions about what coaching is, and if it raised new questions about what coaching is, let me know that too. I would love to hear what's coming up for you and what, if anything, I can clarify what you wanna know about coaching that maybe I didn't say.

You can always pop into the SLP support group and share your thoughts there, [00:17:00] or you can always reach out to me.