Janet Florence
NLP Life Coach · Founder, The Up Collective
Therapy and coaching are not competitors. They are different tools for different jobs. The problem is that most women don't know which job they're actually trying to do — and that confusion keeps them stuck, cycling between modalities that are each doing half the work, wondering why they still feel like they're not moving.
I want to clear this up. Not because I have anything against therapy — I don't. Therapy saved my life at a point when I needed it most. But I also know, from personal experience and from the women I work with, that there comes a moment in the healing process when looking backward stops being useful and looking forward becomes the only thing that matters. That's the moment coaching — and specifically NLP — becomes the most powerful tool in the room.
Let me break this down honestly.
What Therapy Is Actually For
Therapy — good therapy — is a clinical intervention designed to diagnose and treat mental health conditions, process trauma, and help you understand the psychological roots of your patterns. A licensed therapist is trained to work with the past. They help you excavate, examine, and make sense of the experiences that shaped you. They create a safe container for grief, rage, confusion, and the kind of pain that has nowhere else to go.
If you are in crisis, if you are dealing with clinical depression or anxiety, if you have unprocessed trauma that is actively destabilizing your daily life — therapy is the right first call. Full stop. I am not here to tell you otherwise.
But here is what therapy is often not designed to do: help you build something new. Help you figure out who you are now that the healing has happened. Help you translate insight into action, identity into behavior, understanding into an actual life that feels like yours. Most therapeutic frameworks are oriented toward the past — toward understanding how you got here. They are not always equipped to answer the question that comes next: Now that I understand all of this, what do I actually do with it?
What Coaching Is Actually For
Coaching — real coaching, not the Instagram version — is a forward-facing discipline. It starts from the assumption that you are not broken. You are not a diagnosis. You are a capable adult who has the resources you need to build the life you want, and what you need is not more analysis of your past but a clear-eyed, honest, structured process for moving into your future.
A coach does not ask you to lie on a metaphorical couch and free-associate about your childhood. A coach asks you: Where are you now? Where do you want to be? What is actually stopping you — not the story you've been telling about what's stopping you, but the real thing? And what are you going to do about it, specifically, by when?
This is not soft. This is not cheerleading. Done well, it is some of the most confronting work a person can do, because it removes every excuse and puts the responsibility for your life squarely back in your hands. Which is exactly where it belongs — and exactly where most of us have been afraid to let it land.
Where NLP Changes Everything
Here is where I need to talk about NLP specifically, because this is where the real distinction lives.
Most coaching works at the level of behavior and strategy. It helps you set goals, build habits, create accountability structures, and take action. That's valuable. But it often misses the layer underneath — the layer where your beliefs about yourself live, where your unconscious patterns run, where the identity that is quietly sabotaging every strategy you implement is operating completely outside your awareness.
NLP — Neuro-Linguistic Programming — works at that deeper layer. It is a methodology for understanding and changing the structure of your internal experience: how you represent the world to yourself, the language patterns that reveal and reinforce your limiting beliefs, the unconscious programs that are running your behavior without your knowledge or consent.
The difference in practice is significant. A standard coaching approach might help you set a goal to start your business and build an action plan to get there. An NLP-informed coaching approach does that — and also helps you identify and dismantle the belief that says you don't deserve to succeed, the pattern that has you self-sabotaging every time you get close to something good, and the identity that is still running the program of the woman who failed, rather than the woman who is building something new. You cannot strategy your way out of an identity problem. NLP addresses the identity.
The Three Specific Advantages NLP Brings to Coaching
First: it works at the level of the unconscious, not just the conscious mind. Most of what drives our behavior is not accessible through conscious reflection. We can talk about our patterns for years in therapy and still find ourselves repeating them, because talking about a pattern and changing the neurological structure that runs it are two completely different things. NLP uses specific techniques — anchoring, reframing, timeline work, submodality shifts — to access and change patterns at the level where they actually operate. This is why clients often describe NLP work as feeling different from other modalities: not just intellectually interesting, but physically, viscerally different.
Second: it is extraordinarily efficient. Therapy is often a long-term relationship measured in years. That is appropriate for deep clinical work. But many women who come to coaching are not in crisis — they are in transition. They have done enough healing work to be functional, stable, and ready to move. What they need is not another two years of excavation. They need a focused, intensive process that helps them get clear, get moving, and build momentum. NLP-informed coaching can create significant shifts in weeks, not years — not because it is cutting corners, but because it is working directly on the structure of the problem rather than circling it.
Third: it puts you in the driver's seat of your own mind. One of the things I love most about NLP is that it is not a black box. The tools are teachable. When I work with a client, I am not just facilitating a shift in the session — I am teaching her how to use these tools herself, so that she can continue the work independently, so that she develops a relationship with her own mind that is active and intentional rather than passive and reactive. The goal of good coaching is to make itself unnecessary. NLP accelerates that process because it gives you the keys to your own internal operating system.
So Which One Do You Need?
Here is the honest answer: it depends on where you are.
If you are in active crisis, if you are dealing with unprocessed trauma that is destabilizing your daily functioning, if you have a clinical mental health condition that needs treatment — start with therapy. Get stable. Get safe. Do that work.
If you have done that work, or if your challenges are not clinical in nature but are about transition, identity, direction, and building a life that actually feels like yours — coaching, and specifically NLP-informed coaching, is likely the more powerful tool right now.
And if you're not sure? That's exactly what a discovery call is for. Not to sell you anything. Not to convince you of anything. Just to have an honest conversation about where you are and what kind of support would actually serve you best. Sometimes that conversation ends with me pointing you toward a therapist. Sometimes it ends with us starting to work together. Either way, you leave with more clarity than you came in with.
A Final Word on the Women I Work With
The women who come to The Up Collective are not women who need to be fixed. They are women who have already done hard things — survived things, rebuilt things, kept going when every reasonable person would have stopped. What they need is not more healing of the past. What they need is someone who will look them in the eye and say: You have everything you need. Now let's figure out what you're actually building, and let's build it.
That is what I do. That is what NLP makes possible. And if any part of this post resonated with you — if you read something here and felt a flicker of recognition, a sense of yes, that's exactly where I am — then the next step is a conversation.