The Wall Street Journal recently prompted a discussion among executive coaches and their clients by publishing anarticleon the blurred lines between coaching and therapy. The story has stimulated conversations about what constitutes coaching best practices versus overreach. Purists argue that coaches should stay in their lane, keeping subject matter strictly business. In their minds, a coach is a coach, a mentor is a mentor, a therapist is a therapist. These are separate and distinct roles that should be kept separate and distinct.

Or are they?

At its core, coaching is meant to help leaders tap into their full potential so that they lead in such a way that their organizations achieve success. Yet the factors that contribute to leading with full potential and success don't materialize in tidy, separate packages. Leaders are whole people who bring their lives to their work (and their work to their lives) whether they know it or not.

Today's hyper-connected world has made it possible for executives to tackle work projects from home and home projects from work. They might attend a child's soccer game on Thursday afternoon and work Saturday morning. An urgent text from the spouse can sidetrack a business meeting, and an important email from the boss can delay dinner.

For better or worse, our lives are all tangled up. We bring more professional responsibilities home than ever before and more of our personal lives to the office. This can be a wonderful thing, with work colleagues helping celebrate joyful occasions from the home front. That said, it can also compound problems. Dysfunction at the office will often breed stress and irritability at home, and vice versa.

Beyond immediate family obligations and stresses, experiences from our personal history will also influence our work performance for good, bad and in-between. Executives who grapple with imposter syndrome frequently convey that they've lived with these insecurities for much of their lives. Many suspect that feelings of abandonment in childhood can spur workaholism, citing famous and highly successful workaholics, such as Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, who were both adopted.

Coaching is blurry because our lives are blurry. One area impacts the other with ripples spreading in every direction, all the time. Such entanglements can make it impossible to help executives grow into the leaders they strive to be without delving into highly personal areas. Rather than steering away from deeper topics, I believe a good coach will steer right into them.

While coaches cannot and should not solve for all issues that come up in an engagement, they can help their clients clearly recognize them, reflecting back an accurate image like a good mirror. Once the clients can more truly see themselves (behaviors and beliefs), they can better address directly or indirectly related issues, using the best professional resources available to them. Underlying mental health conditions, difficulties coping with traumatic events and suicidal thoughts require the expertise of licensed mental health professionals and a good coach knows when and how to recommend one.

That said, not every personal hardship or challenge meet these criteria, with some better solved by others with different expertise. For example, a clinically depressed executive will have vastly different needs than an overwhelmed, struggling but otherwise emotionally healthy entrepreneur seeking help to create boundaries between work and home life. The latter might not benefit from speaking with someone who has no perspective on the demands of running startups. The advice might be all but useless.

When a coach approaches their work through the widest possible lens, seeking to create the most value for the client and the organization, they will find themselves wearing many different hats, playing different roles on behalf of their client (sometimes even within one conversation!). It's not that coaches are universal problem solvers, being all things to all clients. Instead, coaches will thoughtfully guide their clients through the process of first seeing what's really there (personally and professionally), then clarifying their options for moving toward their highest and best leading.

Coach. Mentor. Counselor. Therapist. Thought partner. It's not about the label as much as it is the outcome. Those who bring the most value to their coaching engagement don't get preoccupied with semantics. They take a holistic view of a person the complete person in order to help them gain a clear picture of and understanding about who they are as a leader, what they want to achieve and what might be holding them back. They solve for the big picture, which is the one that matters most.

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Coaching Or Therapy? Forget Semantics And Focus On The Big Picture - Forbes