Support Systems: Mentoring, Coaching, and Therapy, What Sets Them Apart

There was a time I didn’t even know coaching existed. About five years ago, after I’d recovered from burnout; preparing for job interviews felt much harder than usual. I’d forgotten what I was good at, lost touch with what used to make me feel alive at work. That’s when I would’ve loved to have a coach —not a therapist. Someone who understood my work, my background, my context, and could help me move toward what I wanted next.

Recently, I was chatting with an ex-colleague about how coaching is different from therapy or mentoring. It’s a question I hear often, and he suggested I write it down, so here we are.

In this post, I will explore their differences through my own experience and share about my approach to coaching in the tech space.

Therapy vs Coaching vs Mentoring

Therapy helps you heal from the past. It focuses on understanding and resolving emotional experiences, often from childhood or significant life events that affect you today. At its best, therapy/counseling regulates your nervous system and restores your sense of safety. Something many people never fully experienced growing up or recently got shaken by a difficult experience such as loss or incident.

As you recover in a space created with your therapist, you grow to be your own caregiver. You create inner peace, and restore emotional freedom. You get better at handling emotional stress in any part of your life. Taking myself to therapy early in my adulthood was one of the best things I’ve done for myself.

Coaching, on the other hand, is forward-looking and goal oriented. You want something new, different in your near future. A new job, writing a book, growing a business, becoming a solid leader or sustaining the work-life balance. And, you don’t want to figure it out alone.

The direction is yours; the role of a coach is to stretch your thinking, challenge your assumptions, and help you focus on the actions that matter. In that space, you see possibilities you couldn’t see alone, test them in small, practical ways, and turn them into progress. Over time, those steps compound and shape the future you want, not the one you drift into. 

Mentoring, which is the most common form of support in our field, is learning from someone else’s lived experience. A mentor offers advice, guidance, and insights based on their journey and experience —usually in a role or field you’re curious about or want to grow into.

Good mentoring often includes elements of coaching such as asking questions instead of giving easy answers, but the focus is still the mentor’s experience and the mentee’s specific situation or project. I have had mentors all my career, and been a mentor myself a long time. I find this especially crucial for early career engineers to have.

They are all wonderful and effective ways to get support, but the context and the outcomes are a little different for each.

The shape of coaching & mentoring in tech

I am the coach and mentor behind Humans in Systems, blending both of those approaches in my work. People trust me because I’ve been in tech all my career. I understand the experience, the context, and the challenges. I have the ability to create a psychologically safe space where we can explore together and turn ideas into practical steps forward.

It’s a bit like having a sports coach whose only focus is helping you succeed at what you’re aiming for without the pull of business priorities or the constraints of a hierarchy.

Sometimes we talk about imposter syndrome, confidence in conflict, or growing without burning out. Sometimes more practical things like writing better RFCs, or delegating technical work effectively.

Sessions usually center around you discovering your own thoughts and insights that make you excited to take action. And sometimes, you might “interview” me to spark an idea. So, I can share my experience as a mentor to help you get new input to think further and create your unique solutions. 

Over time, people often share their experience as:

• “This was surprisingly intense, in a good way. I feel stretched in my thinking from all the reflection and idea generation.”

• “Ah, I have finally sorted my thoughts to move forward.”

• “I think I already knew the answer but I guess I just needed someone to talk to so I could distill it.”

That last one reminds me of the neuroscience behind why we can’t tickle ourselves because our brains filter out self-generated input. Creative thinking can work the same way: sometimes it takes another person’s presence to unlock ideas you didn’t know you had.

It’s like when you’re explaining a tricky debugging to someone, and halfway through, you suddenly spot the issue yourself. It feels like magic, and you realize you’ve been more resourceful than you thought all along.

Important to note that coaching works best when you’re fully committed to it for yourself. It’s the kind of investment you choose. Like attending an important conference, joining a week-long retreat, or buying a big equipment that opens up a new skill or a life style.

But just like those investments, the real return comes from how you use them. So the progress often happens between sessions; when you test an idea we discussed, have a new conversation, or try a different approach and see how it changes the outcome.

The people who get the most out of our work together are the ones who:

• Reflect, think deeply, and explore new possibilities

• Take small, consistent experiments to move forward

Both are equally important. I know this because I do it myself. When I started my own company, I finally hired a coach. I didn’t want to figure everything out alone and wanted someone to challenge my thinking, expand my perspective, and keep me moving. It’s been the best investment I’ve made for my goals.

Closing thoughts

I don’t believe people get anywhere alone. We’re wired for connection, as it’s one of the most important survival skills of humankind. So building your support structure is a form of wisdom, not a weakness.

Back when I was burned out, I remember wishing there were “work therapists” like people who could hold space for what was hard and help me find a way forward. I realized later that what I needed was a coach. I know this now because of the different type of supports I have gotten.

I genuinely hope this has given you a clearer picture of the kinds of support out there, and how the right one can make it easier to move through challenges.

And I hope you have access to it, when needed.