What exactly is Relationship Coaching?

Relationship Coaching is the application of coaching to personal and business relationships.

While many become motivated to seek help when struggling with their relationships, coaching and relationship coaching are positive, results-oriented professions. Coaching helps functional people achieve their personal and relationship goals. It is not a substitute or replacement for therapy provided by a licensed clinician trained to treat mental, emotional, and psychological disorders. While relationship coaches might be experts in relationships, the art and science of coaching is to facilitate success for the client without providing advice or “professional opinions.”

Origins

The label “relationship coach” has been used for many years by professionals; Psychotherapists, Psychologists, Marriage and Family Therapists, and Social Workers and entrepreneurial para-professionals with a wide variety of backgrounds. With the evolution of personal/life coaching as a recognized profession in 1995 with training standards and certification initially established by the International Coach Federation, relationship coaching as a coaching specialty with its own professional training, standards, certification and methodologies was first developed by David Steele, a California based licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who founded the Relationship Coaching Institute in 1997.