Counselor versus Consultant or Coach

I am often asked about the difference between counseling and consulting.   My businesses are intentionally labeled Consulting.    Why?

Formal online definitions of both, follow.   Direct experience with a marriage counselor, and indirect experience with dear friends who received counseling due to severe trauma, showed alignment around an ability to “listen and probe through the variables leading UP TO the client’s current situation”.   What I refer to as their Personal Reality.

Incidentally, these are also the qualities of a good consultant, or a good leader, spouse, etc etc.  So what is the true difference between Counseling and Consulting / Coaching?   I searched online and spoke with professional colleagues in both tracts.

The outcome of the searches were very interesting.  There was some overlap in meaning, for example:

counselor : One whose profession is to give advice in law, and manage causes for clients in court [a public, regulated forum]; a barrister

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998

consultant: A physician or surgeon [add any trade label here] who does not take actual charge of a patient, but acts in an advisory capacity to the patient’s primary physician [add same trade label here].

Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc

A counselor is one who applies his domain expertise (eg: law) into the client situation, as those involved understand it to be, while conforming to a regulated environment – the intrinsic rules of the current Game in Play.

Whereas a consultant tries to help a client redefine the problem [opportunity] itself and attempt for, perhaps radically different solutions to enable a client reach their goals, on their terms, in their chosen timeline.   During a consulting engagement, there is no artificial sense of urgency, since the client’s situation is not labeled “a problem” or “inappropriate / unacceptable”.   Contrast that with any imposed judgement by legal authorities in society, under which, counselors may be highly regulated in their services.

Thus the goals of a counselor and consultant are quite different. The counselor seeks to give a client the best out of a current conforming situation. The consultant tries to help a client alter the situation itself, keeping in mind their goals and objectives.

Counseling is often painful, exploring trade-offs and regressing through someone’s past as part of fact-finding evidence towards fighting for a fair outcome in the current, limited reality.  Consulting & Coaching often requires more time and invested energy by the client, but ultimately is more rewarding, because it is the client’s responsibility to continuously apply the guidance in their go-forward, evolving Shared reality.

Harmony Consulting (HC) helps people reconnect in a Shared Reality through direct witnessing and adaptation of evolving Shared understanding with ‘other’, on a Go Forward basis.   We do not attempt to regress someone through their past.   The Present moment is what HC is influencing.

To use an analogy, the Present Moment is approximately what you can see within a moving car on an open rural highway – about 10 minutes in front of you and behind you.

HC helps people reclaim Presence to witness the evolving moment, and Acceptance for what IS, empowering them with simple tactics to Plan, Act, Reflect and Adapt with and through others, on an ongoing basis.   This is referred to as Sharing Reality with Life and works beyond just Human relationships, which are often distorted and biased by sexually-oriented myopic views, which narrow one’s ability to witness Shared Reality.