Learning to Ride a Bicycle

Here are common examples used in the coaching community to explain the differences between therapy, consulting, mentoring and coaching.
If you hired a professional supporter to help you learn to ride a bicycle…

• a therapist would help you discover what is holding you back from riding the bike. They would go back into your past to discover what kind of experience you had at an early age with a bicycle.
• a consultant would bring you a bicycle manual and tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the workings of a bicycle. The consultant would then depart and return six months later to see how you were doing.
• a mentor would share their experiences of bike riding and the lessons that they had learned. The mentor would bestow all the wisdom existing about bicycle riding to you.
• the coach will help you get up on the bicycle and then encourage, endorse, acknowledge and support you while running alongside until you felt comfortable enough to go it alone.