A picture going round LinkedIn jokes that everyone outside the profession calls every coach a “life coach”. It’s a fair joke, but the more useful question isn’t which kind of coach ranks higher. It’s which kind you need, and why.
It’s a good joke. But I want to take the question at the end seriously, because it deserves a better answer than a laugh. Behind it is a real person trying to work out what kind of help they need. When the person asking is a CEO, a parent going back to work, or a manager deciding whether to leave a career of twenty years, choosing the wrong kind of coach costs them time, money and sometimes a moment that won’t come again.
One profession, two different jobs
It helps to start with what the two have in common, because that’s more than many executive coaches like to admit.
The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. That definition covers both. The ICF assesses its credentials against the same core competencies whether the coach works with a CEO or a schoolteacher. The skills sit underneath both kinds of work: deep listening, powerful questions, staying present with strong emotion, and turning insight into action.
Life coaching also has a serious evidence base. In 2006, Green, Oades and Grant published a controlled study in the Journal of Positive Psychology. It found that a ten-week cognitive-behavioural, solution-focused life coaching programme produced significant increases in goal striving, wellbeing and hope, and some of those gains were still there thirty weeks later. That is real change in real lives.
So the difference between the two isn’t about depth, rank or seriousness. It’s about whose agenda the coaching serves and who else is affected by the outcome.
Life coaching serves the whole person. The client owns the agenda completely, and the subject can be anything they bring: a career change, health, relationships, confidence, purpose, a life that has drifted from what they value. Success is measured by the client, against what matters to them.
Executive coaching serves a person inside an organisational system. The ICF’s own competencies describe partnering with the client and relevant stakeholders to agree the coaching relationship and its goals. Often the organisation pays. A board, a chair or an HR director may have expectations of the work. Success is partly measured by whether other people notice the change: the leadership team, the board, sometimes the whole organisation.
In short, one coach walks alongside a person through their life, and the other walks alongside a person through their role and everyone that role touches. Neither is a lesser version of the other.
Where people choose badly
In my experience, the most common mistake isn’t choosing an inexperienced coach. It’s choosing the wrong kind of coach for the question you actually have. This happens in both directions.
A senior executive is quietly asking whether this is still the life they want. They hire an executive coach and the work slides straight into delegation frameworks and stakeholder maps. The real question never gets asked, because the arrangement with the organisation was never built to hold it.
A newly appointed CEO is facing a divided board and a leadership team that agrees in the meeting and disagrees in the corridor. They hire a gifted life coach. The coach listens beautifully and helps them think, but has never sat through a budget review that turned political or a succession discussion everyone knew was really about one person. The coach struggles to hear what is going on underneath what’s being said.
Both coaches were good, and both were in the wrong room.
A grid for choosing wisely
The grid below is the test I would offer anyone choosing a coach. Read across the rows and notice which column sounds more like your situation right now.
“A comparison of life coaching and executive coaching across nine questions: the central question, who sets the agenda, who pays, who else is involved, typical topics, how success is measured, confidentiality, what the coach must know, and when to choose each.” ]
Many senior leaders will recognise themselves in both columns, and that’s normal. Leaders are whole people. The question is which need is more urgent now. A good coach of either kind will tell you honestly when you need the other.
Questions to ask before you sign
Whichever column you’re leaning towards, these questions will tell you a lot in a first conversation.
“How would you work with the one conversation I can’t currently have with anyone else?” Notice whether the coach asks you questions or starts describing their programme.
“Who else, if anyone, would be part of this?” A life coach should say the work is yours alone. An executive coach should want to understand your stakeholders. Be wary of a coach who has the answer the wrong way round for the work you’re buying.
“How will we know it has worked?” For life coaching, the answer should come back to your own goals. For executive coaching, it should include how others will see the change. Marshall Goldsmith built his stakeholder-centred approach on that point.
“What are you trained and credentialed in, and who supervises your work?” Coaching is largely unregulated. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, carried out with PwC, put the number of coach practitioners worldwide at almost 123,000. A credential won’t guarantee quality, but it does tell you the coach has been assessed against a standard and has signed up to a code of ethics.
“When would you refer me to someone else?” Every good coach knows where coaching ends and therapy, medical care or specialist advice begins. A coach who has never thought about this question is a concern.
Then trust the first conversation, but carefully. Erik de Haan’s large controlled studies of executive coaching found that the working relationship between coach and client was consistently linked to results. His later work suggested that the client’s own resilience matters a great deal too. Chemistry is necessary, but it isn’t enough on its own. Choose someone you can be honest with, and make sure they’re someone who will be honest with you.
For coaches: know which room you build
Now I want to turn to my own profession, because the picture asks something of us too.
If your website looks like that left-hand column, ask yourself which circles you would stand in alone, with full confidence and evidence behind you. Look back at your last fifty clients. Where did the real shifts happen? Who came back to you, or sent a colleague? After which conversations did you leave certain you had been useful?
If the answer is people rebuilding their lives after a divorce, a redundancy or an illness, you are a life coach, and that’s a fine thing to be. Say it clearly and proudly. If the answer is leaders working through boards, teams and transformation, say that instead. The clients who need you can only find you if you tell them plainly who you are.
Being clear helps the person choosing more than it helps your marketing. It also lets you refer someone on when they would be better served by a colleague in the other column, and that is one of the most professional things a coach can do.
A better answer to the question
“So you’re a life coach then?” is really someone asking, in the only words they have, what exactly you do. Our profession has answered it badly for years, either by getting defensive or by reciting a list.
A better answer describes a room and who it is for. One kind of room holds a person while they work out what their life should become. Another holds a leader while they work out how to carry a role that affects hundreds or thousands of other people. Both rooms matter, and plenty of people will need each of them at different points in their lives.
If you’re choosing a coach, first work out which room you need. If you are a coach, be clear about which room you create.
It begins, as it always does, with knowing what you are really there to do.
S. Neroshan Silva, MCC. Written from Ratmalana.
