Executive coaching vs life coaching vs career coaching: what's the difference?

Executive coaching focuses on how you lead: decisions, influence, performance, how you show up to your team and your stakeholders.

Career coaching focuses on your professional trajectory: what role, what industry, what's next, how to get there.

Life coaching focuses on the whole picture: relationships, purpose, how you actually want to live, of which work is only one part.

That's the high level answer.

Here’s my additional perspective…

People are multi-dimensional and our brains don’t align to these categories.

A senior leader struggling with how he shows up in the boardroom is often not struggling with leadership technique. He's struggling with the same question underneath: identity, know how and effectiveness:

• Who am I now?

• How do I adapt to my new role?

• How can I make a positive impact?

That's not really an executive coaching question or a life coaching question. It's the same question, from a different perspective.

I stopped treating these as separate disciplines a while ago, because in practice they aren't.

So how should you actually choose what type of coach to work with?

Less by the label, more by where the conversation needs to start. If your immediate problem is a specific leadership skill, a promotion decision, or a board relationship, start with someone who names themselves an executive coach, they'll have the vocabulary and frameworks for that world.

If your problem is broader, a sense that the whole shape of your life needs reconsidering, not just your job title, look for someone who works across the whole picture rather than one slice of it.

What I actually do with clients

My own practice sits deliberately across all three, because the people I work with are usually accomplished professionals for whom the real work is not fixing one part of their life while ignoring the rest. It's understanding where they've come from, working out who they actually are now, and deciding what they genuinely want next, career included, but not career alone.

If you're not sure which category you fall into, that's usually a sign you don't need a category. You need someone willing to work with the whole question. More on how that actually looks in practice soon.