Psychedelics are becoming a popular tool among some circles of coaches—from dedicated psychedelic integration coaches, to microdosing coaches, to coaches who use psychedelics in business and organizational training.
Here we cover the role of the psychedelic coach, various kinds of psychedelic coaches, and how to evaluate a coach before working with them.
The main role of a psychedelic coach is to guide and support their client throughout their transformational journey.
A coach is often involved in all stages of the psychedelic experience: preparation, the journey itself, and support during integration in the days, weeks, and months following the experience.
During integration, the goal is to direct the transformational momentum of the psychedelic experience into everyday changes. A coach’s role, therefore, is to help you harness this momentum and extend the transformational power of psychedelics into all areas of your life, well beyond the immediate experience.
For that reason, psychedelic coaches will typically take on many or all of the following roles:
A psychedelic coach’s role differs from that of a guide and therapist in several key ways.
While a coach plays a larger role in the planning and integration phases before and after a trip, a psychedelic guide is most directly involved with the immediate psychedelic experience itself, playing the role of the shaman and/or healer. The guide is responsible for the set and setting of the experience, aiming to create a safe and maximally beneficial trip for the psychedelic explorer.
A good guide will be able to help you in a variety of situations during the experience, whether by gently nudging you down a path of deeper exploration or helping you manage a “bad” trip while it’s happening.
Guides will often discuss your trip with you immediately after the experience, but unlike a coach, they’re not typically involved with the integration process in the days, weeks, and months that follow.
A psychedelic therapist differs from a coach in that they leverage the psychedelic experience to heal the wounds of trauma. They’re trained in more mainstream therapeutic methods and are often able to diagnose and treat specific mental disorders. But their added experience with psychedelics can provide more depth in all areas of treatment, including diagnoses, treatment planning, and maintenance following treatment.
One way to think of the difference between the two is that a therapist helps to heal your past while a coach helps to build your future. Of course, there’s a lot of overlap in these goals. Many therapists can and do help with personal and spiritual growth while many coaches help you overcome the chains of your past. The focus of the therapist, however, is on healing emotional and psychological distress, while the focus of the coach is to aid in personal and spiritual transformation.
Microdosing psychedelics can increase productivity, stoke creativity, improve your mood and focus, provide more mental clarity, and reduce anxiety among many other benefits.
A microdosing coach specializes in guiding you through a microdose regimen, typically lasting several weeks. Their goal is to help maximize your experience by:
You can learn more about our Microdosing Coaching program here!
The goal of integration, in a general sense, is to achieve wholeness in your life by aligning your everyday behavior with your values, goals, aspirations, and core beliefs.
Psychedelics can provide profound insight into our emotional states, thought patterns, mindsets, and relationships. But the scale of this insight is often much deeper and more abstract than we’re used to, making it difficult for us to make sense of how we might use it to affect positive changes in our lives.
Enter the psychedelics integration coach.
A psychedelic integration coach works with a client to achieve integration by first identifying the profound lessons from a psychedelic experience or experiences and then working with them to find actionable ways to integrate this insight into their everyday lives.
An integration coach often aims to remove mental blocks and toxic mindsets to allow the person to realize their full potential. To that end, the integration coach uses the psychedelic experience in a number of different ways, including:
Executive and leadership coaches, business coaches, personal development/life coaches, relationship coaches, and others, are also adding psychedelics to their list of tools in their client practices.
They typically use psychedelics to achieve domain-specific goals—business goals, for example—fitting the psychedelic experience into their larger framework and approach.
An executive coach, for instance, might work with a client to improve their role in leading a more effective business team. A psychedelic session could be used to provide insight into the executive’s interpersonal skills and identify any points of friction that might be causing conflict in their work lives. The coach then works with the client to create an action plan to improve their relationships with their team.
Psychedelics are powerful, flexible tools and so coaches can use them in a virtually infinite number of ways, tailoring them to your specific situation and needs.
Evaluating a psychedelic coach (or therapist or guide for that matter) is obviously complicated by the fact that nearly all psychedelic substances are illegal in most countries. Thus, as long as the substances themselves remain illegal, there can be no legal framework for training, licensure, and continuous improvement through education and re-certification programs.
That said, a vibrant community exists among psychedelic coaches, guides, therapists, and other facilitators.
Some qualities to look for in a psychedelic coach:
These are core qualities that will be critical throughout the entire coach-client relationship. Of course, some coaches will be stronger in certain areas than others. The most important thing is to find a coach that you feel safe and comfortable with.