A License Is Not a Qualification for Competence

By Dr. Rosenna Bakari, PhD, PCC

A recent controversy erupted after an unlicensed well-being practitioner stated publicly that she has no interest in clinical licensure. The response from the licensed professional community was swift and, in many cases, overblown.

I know nothing about Dr. Bryant or her practice, and I’m not writing in defense of her. What I am defending is something larger: the right of help seekers to be legitimately served by competent practitioners, with or without a license — and the right of the public to understand the difference well enough to choose accordingly.

The Coaching Advantage

Coaching and empowerment work do not require licensure — legally, ethically, or practically. And if you listen past the poor framing, what Dr. Bryant was pointing toward is well-grounded. 

Flexibility

There is more flexibility in practice when you are not required to diagnose and label someone before you can help them — including the freedom to work with clients across state lines. More importantly, when you partner with someone without a diagnostic lens, you can stay fully present with what they bring rather than filtering it through a category you need to justify billing.

This matters more than it might seem. Diagnostic inflation is a documented concern in mental health — the percentage of the U.S. population carrying a mental health diagnosis increased from 32% to 47.4% over just 30 years, at a pace that cannot be explained by actual increases in mental illness. Many coaches operate from a fundamentally different paradigm: helping people without labeling them.

Financial Sustainability

As Dr. Bryant also noted, there is more financial sustainability when your business operates on private pay rather than insurance reimbursement rates that consistently undervalue the work. This is one of the reasons some licensed practitioners are voluntarily letting their licenses lapse to pursue coaching. The coaching space offers the financial viability that clinical practice increasingly cannot.

Lighter Load

The third point her framing missed is the genuine difference in the texture of the work itself. It's a lighter load, qualitatively. Coaching clients are high-functioning people seeking growth — navigating relationships, leadership challenges, life transitions, and career decisions. Relationships alone are among the most common reasons people seek any kind of professional support. These are not clinical presentations. They are human ones.

The Psycho-Culture War

Research supports these substantial advantages of working outside the licensed clinical model. The problem was not the substance of what Dr. Bryant was reaching for. The problem was suggesting that licensure carries no significance whatsoever. Dismissing licensure entirely is inaccurate. But so is using it as a proxy for competence it was never designed to measure. Two wrongs don't make a right. The goal should have been clarity, not a psycho-culture war.

 What We Should Help the Public Understand

Licensure in the mental health field exists for a specific and important purpose: to regulate the diagnosis and treatment of clinical mental health conditions. It is a legal authorization, not a quality certification. The distinction matters enormously. When coaching crosses into diagnosing or treating mental illness, it becomes the unlicensed practice of therapy — which is where legal and ethical lines are rightly drawn.

Coaching focuses on growth, empowerment, goal-setting, and accountability — a fundamentally different activity. Legally and professionally, the defining question is whether someone is assessing, diagnosing, or treating mental disorder. That is what licensure governs. Coaching assumes the client is resourceful. Therapy assumes something needs healing. These are not just different methods. They are different philosophical starting points with different scopes of practice.

When licensed practitioners claim superiority over coaches on the basis of their credential, they are importing a clinical regulatory standard into a non-clinical domain where it simply does not apply. The credential governs a different activity entirely.

So why the fight for territory?

Licensed practitioners have been migrating into coaching in significant numbers — not because the clinical model evolved to serve this population better, but because the coaching market pays better and operates outside insurance constraints. They moved into this space, then used their license to argue that the people who built and belong in it are underqualified. That is not consumer protection. That is market capture dressed in ethical language.

The Financial Stakes

The financial stakes clarify the motive. Licensure generates revenue for every state that issues it. Diagnosis generates revenue for every agency that bills insurance. And premium private-pay rates become more accessible to licensed clinicians when coaches aren’t competing for the same clients. There are no martyrs in this debate — only competing interests.

Most help seekers choose licensed practitioners because their insurance covers the cost — a financial decision, not a quality decision. Conflating insurance accessibility with practitioner quality is one of this debate’s most persistent and least examined assumptions.

Client Outcomes

The research does not support the credential-as-competence claim. Studies using client outcomes as the measure of skill have found that more advanced clinical training is not associated with better outcomes than minimal training. More striking still, experienced licensed psychologists have been found to perform worse than interns — suggesting that the supervised clinical hours licensure rewards may work against quality over time.

What does predict quality? Relational depth, honest self-assessment, and a commitment to knowing whether the person in front of you is improving. None of those things appear on a state board exam.

The licensed practitioners flooding social media with ethics-and-liability arguments are applying the wrong framework. A code of ethics governing the diagnosis of mental illness protects patients in clinical distress. It has no particular relevance to a high-achieving professional working through a career transition, a leader developing her team, or someone who simply wants to think more clearly about the next chapter of her life. These people are not patients. Treating them as if they might be is not protection. It is condescension.

My Own Credentials for This Space

I hold a PhD in Educational Psychology and an MS in Counseling — so I am speaking from knowledge of the clinical world, not outside it. I chose not to pursue licensure because I was never interested in diagnosing or treating mental illness. What I did instead was spend twenty years teaching undergraduate and graduate-level psychology, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and building a deep research-grounded understanding of how people learn, grow, lead, and change. In my last full-time teaching position at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, I supervised counseling practicum students.

Why I Chose Coaching

When I launched my empowerment practice, I pursued my Professional Certified Coach credential through the International Coaching Federation — a controlled process with its own ethics code, documented hours, and performance evaluation. I was intentional about my training, choosing to study under Dr. Lisa Leit, a PhD practitioner who both trains coaches and serves clients. Her expertise is evident in her objectivity, her professionally grounded questions, and her precision in helping clients clarify their goals.

My work is built on decades of scholarship and a credential designed for this space — not supervised clinical hours toward a license I never needed. That background does not make me less qualified than a newly licensed master’s-level counselor to do empowerment work. By any honest measure of relevant expertise, it makes me more qualified. The difference is that I cannot bill insurance — which was never the point.

No Absence of Standards

There is no argument for the absence of standards. When any practitioner — licensed or not — makes clinical claims, or blurs the line between coaching and therapy, clients can be harmed. 

The responsibility is scope clarity: know what you are doing, be transparent with the people you serve, and refer when something moves outside your expertise. Those obligations apply to everyone.

The public deserves to understand what they are choosing between. A license certifies that someone is authorized to diagnose and treat mental illness. It says nothing about whether they can build genuine connection, ask powerful questions, or help a capable person grow. 

A coach with deep domain expertise, a controlled professional credential, and twenty years of scholarly work behind them may serve that capable person far better than a licensed master’s-level clinician who moved into coaching last year because the money was better.

Choose based on what you need — not based on which credential sounds most authoritative in a social media argument.

Dr. Rosenna Bakari holds a PhD in Educational Psychology and an MS in Counseling. She taught psychology in higher education for twenty years and has published in multiple peer-reviewed journals. A Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coaching Federation, she is the founder of the Seven Exits Framework for leadership development and personal growth.