At nine on a Wednesday, in a meeting room in Business Bay, Bronagh sits down opposite a new coaching client.
He's a founder, forty-one, deciding whether to take on investors or keep the company small. He's clear about what he wants from the hour: a decision he can live with by the end of the month. Bronagh has been a counsellor for fourteen years. She's sat with grief, panic and every kind of family story. A man weighing up a funding round shouldn't be hard.
Twenty-five minutes in, he mentions in passing that his father lost a business in 1998.
Bronagh glances down at her notepad. In the margin, in her own small handwriting, she's already written "father, business failure, 1998" and drawn a box around it. Beside the box, half a sentence: "fear of repeating?" It's exactly the note she'd make in a clinical file. Part of her is already building a picture of why he is the way he is.
He's still talking about the term sheet. She hasn't heard the last minute of it.
Nothing went wrong, exactly. He'll leave satisfied. But driving home along Al Khail Road, Bronagh knows she spent part of that hour in the wrong chair.
Can a therapist become a life coach?
Yes, and much of what you've learnt comes with you: deep listening, steadiness with strong emotion, and the habit of keeping a confidence. What changes is the contract. Coaching partners with a functioning client on where they want to go, and the client sets the agenda. The real work is learning a different seat.
This guide is for counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists weighing that move. If you're still sorting out where coaching, therapy and mentoring each begin and end, start with our guide to coaching vs therapy vs mentoring. Here we take the line as given and look at what it asks of you.
What carries over from therapy, and what has to change?
A great deal carries over. You've spent years practising some of the hardest parts of coaching before anyone called it that.
You can stay with feeling. When a client's voice breaks, you don't rush to fix it. In our experience, that takes new coaches months to learn.
You can hold a confidence. Agreements, notes, what's shared and with whom: you've lived inside these questions for your whole career.
Three things change, and they're the ones that catch therapists out.
The direction of attention. ICF's guide for people thinking about working with a coach puts it simply: "Therapy often focuses on 'why,' coaching focuses on 'how.'" (coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026). The past isn't off limits in coaching. It comes in when the client brings it, in service of where they're going. It isn't the material you go looking for.
The picture in your head. Clinical training teaches you to build an understanding of the person: history, patterns, a working hypothesis. In coaching, a private theory about the client can quietly steer the session. Bronagh's margin note wasn't wrong. It just wasn't what the founder hired her for.
Who holds the expertise. In coaching, the client is treated as the expert on their own life. You still bring skill. You don't bring the answer.
Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, is a good person to think aloud with about a move like this. A free Zoom with her is a place to lay your two kinds of work side by side and see what you'd want each one to be. Arrange it through our apply page. Or read on.
How do you keep a therapy practice and a coaching practice apart?
Decide, before the first coaching client arrives, how every client will always know which room they're in. Five habits help.
- Two descriptions, not one blend. Describe your counselling and your coaching separately, each in its own words. A single line promising to "heal and coach" leaves a reader unsure what they're buying.
- Two agreements. A coaching agreement sets out what coaching is and isn't, confidentiality and its limits, and what happens if the client needs a different kind of support. Write it for coaching rather than editing your therapy contract.
- Two intakes. A coaching intake asks what the client wants to be different and how they'll know when it is. Leave the history questions for your other work.
- No quiet transfers. In our view, a current therapy client shouldn't drift into coaching with you because the work has got lighter. If coaching seems right for them, name it openly, and consider whether a different coach would be the cleaner choice.
- Two kinds of notes. Write coaching notes in the client's language, about their agenda. If you catch yourself writing a formulation, notice it, as Bronagh did.
There's an ICF point here too. ICF defines a client coaching hour as "A full 60-minute session with a client who has hired you specifically as their coach", and counts hours completed after you begin your coaching education (coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026). Your therapy hours, however skilled, don't go in a coaching log. Our guide to keeping an ICF coaching log covers the rest of the counting.
Why can a skilled therapist still find the coaching seat hard?
For Bronagh, at least, the pull toward understanding isn't only a habit of training.
Fourteen years of making sense of people has made her very good at it, and in a counselling room that skill serves her clients well. In a coaching session it shows up as a reflex. The founder says 1998, and her pen moves before she's chosen to move it.
Here's how the RS Method would look at that pen. Somewhere along the way Bronagh settled on a quiet rule, roughly "I'm only useful once I can see why". The rule on its own is just an idea she could question over coffee. What moves her hand is the unease stuck to it, the small alarm that goes off when she doesn't yet know why. Spotting the habit afterwards, as she did on Al Khail Road, won't stop it next Wednesday at nine. The method works on that alarm. When it quietens, her years of looking for causes are still hers to use in her other practice, and they stop tugging her hand toward the margin. A client's passing mention of 1998 can stay his, and she can keep listening to the term sheet.
That's why RSCI starts with the trainee rather than the technique: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Whatever personal work you've already done, you also spend time here as the one being worked with, while you learn the method. For someone who has always been the one who understands, being the one who's understood can be the real stretch.
If the margin note sounds familiar, talk it through with Sara before you decide anything. She'll want to hear about both chairs you've sat in. Book a free Zoom with her.
How can you test which chair you're sitting in?
Try a margin test on your own notes. It takes about forty minutes and two highlighters.
- Gather the notes from your last three coaching or practice sessions. If you haven't coached yet, use a role-play from a course or workshop.
- Highlight every line about the past in one colour. Family, origins, earlier events.
- Highlight every line about what the client wants in a second colour. Use their own words where you wrote them down.
- Count each colour. No judgement yet. Just the ratio.
- Beside each past line, write who brought it in. Did the client raise it as part of their agenda, or did you go looking?
- Rewrite your opening question for the next session using only the second colour. One sentence, in the client's words.
- Before that session, write one line and read it twice: "Today I don't need to know why." Notice what happens in your chest or stomach as you read it.
Steps 1 to 6 show you the habit. Step 7 shows you where it lives in you.
One rule keeps the two practices clean: if a coaching client needs a different kind of support, help them find it rather than switching hats inside the same relationship. If anyone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. Our guide on what to do when a client cries looks at the moments that test this.
Is RSCI the right training for a therapist moving into coaching?
It's a good fit if three things are true for you.
- You want coach-specific education alongside a method. ICF-accredited education sits inside both programmes, Level 1 in RS Method Coach and Level 2 in RS Method Complete, so the coaching side of your work stands on training built for coaching.
- You're willing to sit in the client's chair again. Our method page says it in one line: "Every RSCI pathway sequences inner work before outer practice." Experienced clinicians do that work too.
- You want a coaching method that stands on its own. The RS Method works with patterns and identity, and we teach it as a coaching method with its own agreements, kept separate from any other practice you run.
RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 with ICF Level 1 education included, and RS Method Complete is AED 35,000 with ICF Level 2 education included. Both are mostly online and self-paced, with included live training days. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
Underneath it all sits the razor we train to. To witness. To hold. To walk them home. A therapist already knows a good deal about the first two. The third, walking beside a client while they find their own way, is where the coaching seat asks something new.
Therapists know how rarely people find words for a change that goes deep. Talya Whitaker, writing about her own experience of the RS Method, found these: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being." That's one woman describing her own life, and it isn't a measure for yours or for anyone who'll sit across from you.
How the method works, and how we train practitioners to deliver it, is set out on The Method.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Somewhere in your next set of coaching notes there'll be a line in the margin you didn't decide to write. Before that session, read The Method and see what the coaching chair is built to hold.