everyone's experience is different, all therapists and coaches are different etc, so it can be tough to navigate. I've not had any experience with "life coaches" and I worry about their lack of credentialing and the lack of research-based approaches brought up by previous posters.
I have found a therapy situation which appears to be working exceedingly well for me. This probably has to do with several factors, including how well-defined your personal goals are, the therapist's approach/style, and also how receptive you are to it.
In my situation:
- I have fairly well defined goals about what I want to do in my life
- I am/was already receptive to techniques similar to common therapeutic approaches like CBT, MBCT, etc that the therapist is trained in. (This means I am open to ideas like meditation, mindfulness etc but wasn't able to make it work for me in the past).
- My problem is that I have a lot of negative thinking (depression) and resultant reactive behaviors which were making it difficult to achieve my goals
- Was lucky to find a convenient therapist that I quickly "clicked" with
so basically I was very well primed to be receptive to new ways of thinking about my behavior and ready to make changes to try and fix it. the therapist has helped to be an objective 3rd party in helping me examine my behaviors, the motivations behind them, the patterns of thinking that lead me to those behaviors, where those ways of thinking came from (past experiences), and helping me learn tools so that I can notice when those thoughts arise and make more conscious decisions about whether to act on them or ignore them.
the therapist is NOT there to tell you what goals you "should" have. So if you are lacking definition or direction in your life you are not going to get any from a therapist. They are instead focused on helping you understand your own experience so you can come to your own conclusions more consciously and surely. My problems are not "no direction at all" but rather "too many possible directions and unable to choose" - he has helped with that. But if you are struggling with any negative self-talk, things like guilt or shame or feelings of depression etc, a therapist can absolutely help. They are there to help you think more objectively and clearly which can help cut through confusion (that perhaps you have created for yourself).
I imagine a life coach would help you more if you just have no idea what you want to do, but aren't really suffering from any unjustified negativity, self-harm/self-sabotage, or depressive type feelings. but given the lack of credentialing I think you are just picking a person to tell you what to do. That might work, and I'm sure there are good and effective ones out there, there's just not a science-based way of separating the effective ones from the non.