Understanding the Differences Between Mindset, Mentorship, and Transformational Coaching
- Mar 24
- 5 min read
Once a record-breaking sales leader, now a case study in self-healing and self-trust, Alyssa Van Alstyne is a transformational coach who helps ambitious women dismantle money and worth blocks to rise with embodied power and unapologetic voice.
Are you feeling that something in your life or business is ready to shift, but unsure what kind of guidance you truly need? In this article, we explore the distinctions between various types of coaching, mindset, mentorship, transformational coaching, and more, so you can find the right support that aligns with the change you're seeking.
The search for the right support
In today’s world, coaching is more accessible but also more saturated. With so many voices and offers, it’s hard to know what kind of support will lead to the results you desire. Do you need help reframing your thoughts, a mentor who’s walked a similar path, or someone who can help you meet deeper parts of yourself, those quietly shaping your choices, relationships, and results?
This article brings clarity, exploring the distinctions between various types of coaching, mentorship, mindset, consulting, therapy, and transformational coaching, so you can find the support that aligns with your desired change. We’ll dive into a deeper path of work that doesn’t just shift what you do, but transforms how you live, lead, and love.
A quick guide to the coaching landscape
Coaching isn’t one-size-fits-all. The industry offers a wide range of specialties, each serving different needs at different moments in your journey. Understanding these distinctions can help:
Mentorship: A mentor shares wisdom from their own experiences, guiding you with insight gained from their path. This can be helpful if you want to learn from someone who’s "been there."
Mindset coaching: Mindset coaches help you shift limiting beliefs and reframe old stories. They’re great for gaining clarity, motivation, and strengthening mental patterns when you’re feeling stuck.
Consulting: Consultants offer strategies, systems, and external solutions, focusing on the practical “how” when you know what you want, like launching a program or scaling a business.
Therapy: While not coaching, therapy focuses on mental health, trauma healing, and emotional well-being. It’s important for addressing past wounds, while coaching often focuses more on future action.
Transformational coaching: Transformational coaching delves into your deeper layers, such as emotions and unconscious patterns. It doesn’t just change what you do, it transforms how you live, lead, and love.
The transformational path: My style of coaching
Understanding the different approaches is one thing, but choosing the right path for lasting change is another. My coaching is rooted in transformational work, not as a quick fix, but as an embodied experience of deep change. This is for the woman who has done mindset work but still finds herself repeating the same patterns, or the entrepreneur whose nervous system braces despite clarity.
My approach follows a three-phase arc, Awareness, Compassion, and Aligned Action, to facilitate true transformation. These phases are a living cycle, not linear steps, continuing to deepen over time.
The three core components: Awareness, compassion, and aligned action
Awareness: Transformation begins with recognizing subconscious beliefs and emotional imprints that shape your behavior. It reveals hidden patterns, often transforming what seemed like small issues into deeper insights.
Compassion: Compassion shifts the narrative from judgment to understanding. It helps you meet your past actions with kindness, allowing healing to take place.
Aligned action: Transformation becomes real in action. From awareness and compassion, aligned actions naturally emerge, choices that feel true and congruent with your values.
The living cycle of change
These three stages, such as Awareness, Compassion, and Aligned Action, form a continuous cycle that deepens over time, allowing for sustainable transformation. Awareness without compassion can create shame, compassion without action can lead to stagnation, and action without awareness can lead to burnout. Together, they create lasting change.
Beyond mindset: The multidimensional layers of change
Mindset work alone doesn’t lead to lasting transformation. True change requires a multidimensional approach, encompassing the mind, emotions, body, subconscious, and behavior.
Mindset: The first step is inquiry, asking why you keep repeating old patterns. It’s about understanding what those beliefs are protecting you from.
Emotional intelligence: Feeling to heal. Emotional intelligence involves recognizing and processing emotions stored in the body, allowing them to move and release.[1]
Somatic work: The body stores your experiences. By bringing awareness to the body through movement and breath, we access and release these stored emotions and patterns.[2]
Subconscious reprogramming: Early subconscious beliefs shape your choices. Rewriting these stories helps create space for new, empowering truths.[3]
Behavioral integration: True transformation shows in your actions, setting boundaries, speaking truth, and acting in alignment with your new beliefs.
The ripple effects: Why this work changes everything
Transformational coaching isn’t just about achieving one goal, it’s about becoming the kind of person who lives, leads, and loves from truth. Clients often report setting boundaries with grace, speaking confidently in rooms they once shrank from, and feeling renewed vitality in their bodies. These changes ripple outward, transforming every area of life.
Beyond the goal: Lifewide impact
This kind of coaching goes beyond just one area of life. It touches relationships, health, leadership, and the way you experience yourself in the world. As you align with your truth, your entire system recalibrates, leading to more harmonious and fulfilling experiences.
The body responds
The most profound changes often occur physically. Chronic pain, fatigue, and symptoms of stress are often a result of unresolved emotional and survival patterns. By listening to the body and honoring its wisdom, many clients experience healing from what was once deemed “chronic.”[4]
Pain as wisdom & the body’s capacity to heal
Pain need not be feared or dismissed; it is the body’s way of communicating when the mind cannot. When we listen without judgment, pain transforms from punishment into guidance, showing where things are out of alignment and where truth waits to be reclaimed. Healing comes not through striving, but through recognition, release, and compassion. Over time, vitality returns, the body relaxes, and life flows in alignment with your true self. Showing up as your honest, embodied self recalibrates the mind, steadies the nervous system, and heals the body, reflecting wholeness in everything around you.[5]
A final reflection
Transformational coaching is not about fixing what’s broken but returning to wholeness. It’s a reclamation of your true self, listening deeply, and leading from a place of inner truth. When you connect with your deepest truth, everything changes.
Read more from Alyssa Van Alstyne
Alyssa Van Alstyne, Transformational Life & Business Coach
Alyssa Van Alstyne is a transformational coach, certified Gold Practitioner, and former top-performing international sales leader based in Canada. After healing from a near-paralyzing spinal infection, chronic illness, and autoimmune diagnosis, while raising three children, she became a living example of what's possible when women learn to trust themselves again. Alyssa blends somatic coaching, nervous system healing, and subconscious work to help women release blocks around money, visibility, and voice. Her approach draws from two years of intensive training with the Institute of Coaching Mastery, paired with deep lived experience. Her mission is to guide women back to radical self-trust and live lives that fully reflect who they are.
References:
[1] Gabor Maté: The Healing Force Within
[2] Body Keeps The Score Summary by Bessel van der Kolk
[3] Bing videos: Dr. Joseph Murphy, Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind Lecture
