Coaching for Women
The coaching industry has a language problem.
The titles are everywhere and they mean different things in different people's hands. Life coach. Business coach. Executive coach. Career coach. Mindset coach. Transition coach. A woman trying to work out what kind of support she actually needs can easily spend more time navigating the terminology than finding the right person.
This piece is an attempt to cut through that. I am a transition coach, so I have a perspective. I will be honest about what that means, where it overlaps with other kinds of coaching, and where it does not.
"I did not know there was a difference until I hired the wrong kind of coach and spent six months getting business advice when what I actually needed was someone to help me work out who I was becoming."
That was a client reflecting on an expensive lesson. It is a common one. The right support at the wrong time is still the wrong support.
Type 01
The Life Coach
Life coaching is the broadest category. It typically covers personal fulfilment, wellbeing, confidence, relationships, habits and general life direction. A life coach helps you get clearer on what you want and more consistent about working toward it.
The quality varies enormously. Life coaching is largely unregulated, which means credentials, training and experience differ significantly between practitioners. A good life coach can be genuinely useful. A mediocre one can be expensive and vague.
Life coaching tends to work best when the challenge is personal rather than professional, when what is missing is clarity on values and direction rather than navigation of a specific change, and when the work is primarily about general self-development rather than a particular transition.
Tends to suit women who are
Type 02
The Business Coach
Business coaching is more specific. It focuses on building, growing or improving a business, covering areas like strategy, revenue, marketing, operations, leadership and team management. A business coach brings expertise in business mechanics and helps you apply that expertise to your specific situation.
The best business coaches have built something themselves, or worked closely with businesses that have. They are interested in your numbers, your model, your systems, your market. The conversation is grounded in practical outcomes.
Where business coaching has limits is at the identity level. A business coach can help you build a better business. They are not usually equipped to help you work out whether this is the right business for who you are now, or what to do when the business is working and you are not.
Tends to suit women who are
Type 03
The Transition Coach
Transition coaching sits at the intersection of the personal and the professional. It specialises in helping people navigate significant change: career pivots, relocations, business rebuilds, identity shifts, return to work, midlife reorientation.
What makes it distinct is that it works at two levels simultaneously. The practical level: what are you building, what decisions need to be made, what is the path forward. And the identity level: who are you in the middle of this change, what are you holding onto that belongs to the last chapter, what does the next one actually require of you.
Transition coaching is not therapy. It does not look backwards to understand the past. It looks at where you are now and what is needed to move forward, with rigour and honesty and the specific skills that major transitions require.
In practice
A client who had previously worked with a business coach came to me mid-transition. She said: "My business coach was excellent at helping me build my business. But when the business needed to change because I had changed, she did not know what to do with that. That is a different conversation." It is. And it is the one I am trained for.
Tends to suit women who are
| Life Coach | Business Coach | Transition Coach | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Personal fulfilment and direction | Business growth and performance | Navigating significant change |
| Works at the level of | Values, habits, wellbeing | Strategy, revenue, operations | Identity and practical decisions |
| Best when | Life is stable, growth is personal | Direction is clear, execution is the challenge | Change is underway or imminent |
| Asks | What do you want? | How do you get there? | Who are you in this, and what does next actually require? |
| Not ideal when | You need business expertise | The issue is identity, not strategy | You need specialist business or therapeutic support |
You probably need a business coach if you are clear on what you are building, clear that it is right for you, and the challenge is execution: growing revenue, building a team, improving your model, getting better at marketing. The question is how, not what or who.
You probably need a life coach if you are in a relatively stable place and want support with personal development, confidence, habits or general direction. There is no specific transition underway. You are working on yourself within the life you have.
You probably need a transition coach if something significant is changing, or needs to, and you are finding that the practical questions and the identity questions are tangled up together. You are not just asking what to do next. You are asking who you are in this, and what the next chapter actually wants to look like.
You may need more than one, at different times. These are not competing categories. A business coach and a transition coach serve different purposes. Many women work with a transition coach during a period of change and move to a business coach once direction is clear and execution is the priority.
The right coach is not the most impressive one.
It is the one who is trained for exactly the problem you are actually trying to solve.
I am a transition coach. My work is specifically designed for women who are navigating significant change, and it operates at both the identity level and the practical level at the same time.
I bring 25 years of experience in HR, executive coaching and business transformation to that work, which means I am not purely a personal development practitioner. I can hold the business questions and the identity questions in the same conversation. But my primary expertise is in the space where they intersect: who you are becoming, what that requires you to build or shed or decide, and how to move through the uncertainty without losing yourself in it.
In practice, the majority of women I work with are building or rebuilding a business at the same time as navigating a personal transition. The two are rarely separate. They come to me because they need someone who can hold the business questions with the same rigour as the identity ones, and who has the commercial background to do both credibly. That combination is not common in the coaching space, and it is where my work tends to sit.
If you are in the middle of a transition and working out whether this kind of support is what you need, a discovery conversation is the most direct way to find out. No obligation. An honest conversation about where you are and whether working together makes sense.
A discovery call is a straightforward conversation about where you are and whether transition coaching is the right fit. If it is not, I will tell you honestly.
Or read more about Transition Intelligence and signs you are ready for a transition coach.