Health Coaching
Lessons From Albert Bandura For Wellness Coaches
“Self-efficacy or belief in one’s ability to perform determines whether behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and whether the effort will be sustained.”
"People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided." Albert Bandura
From ancient philosophers…
Make Contact With Nature Part of Your Wellness Plan
Here in Colorado we have one of the ultimate places for outdoor activity and opportunity. Yet, it is easy for many of us to stay so busy that we rarely take advantage of the healthful benefits of contact with the natural world.
We experientially know that our stress levels go down when we spend more time in nature. We…
Masterful Health & Wellness Coaching: Deepening Your Craft A New Book by Dr. Michael Arloski, coming in 2020
The profession of health and wellness coaching is fully engaged in a process of transformation. As we grow to be of service to wellness programs, lifestyle medicine practices, employee assistance programs, insurance carriers, disease management companies, and all manner of healthcare providers, around the globe, the demand for greater quality coaching only builds. We are moving from a need for…
Maybe The Last Heart Attack
Each year over one million Americans experience a heart attack, about one every thirty seconds. CNN produced a program recently about this that has everyone talking: “Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: The Last Heart Attack.” (http://sanjayguptamd.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/29/sanjay-gupta-reports-the-last-heart-attack/) (watch the entire program while it’s archived here)
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Following the odyssey of former President Bill Clinton and two…
Meaning And Purpose: A Key To Wellness
Those in the helping professions have long observed that people who have a sense of meaning and purpose appear to do better with their lives in general and their health in particular. Research over the last ten years is showing us that our observations were spot on. A clear, if even very simple, sense of one’s values, meaning and purpose…
Motivation Plus Mobilization: Coaching For Success At Lifestyle Improvement
“I just don’t seem to have the motivation to really make changes.” This is a lament frequent to the ears of health and wellness coaches. Our clients are often puzzled by a lack of success in their efforts to start living a healthy lifestyle, or keep such efforts going. They blame it on either a lack of motivation to get…
New 2nd Edition Of Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change
In 2007 Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change became the first comprehensive health and wellness coaching book published. Written expressly for the practitioner, it quickly became the foundational book of the field and has remained so to this day. Updated in 2009 it has served as the go-to book for independent coaches, health care and wellness professionals, and is often…
Positivity and Perspective Needed in These Times
It is easy to feel under bombardment today with news of COVID-19, economic chaos, and all of the fallout that reaches into our communities, our families and our lives. There can be a sense of negative overwhelm that can seem inescapable. This is true for us as well as for our wellness coaching clients. We all know that dwelling on…
Pre-diabetes – A Wellness Opportunity To Help
There is an opportunity for wellness and wellness coaching to impact the lives of millions of people in a life-saving way. 79 million Americans are estimated to have a condition called pre-diabetes. Usually symptom free, without intervention they will develop full-fledged Type II diabetes within ten years and possibly endure physical damage to their heart and circulatory system along the…
Process Coaching: Yes, Coaches “Do Emotions”
How can we walk with our clients through the landscape of emotion and stay on solid and fertile ground? How can we avoid the mud, or even the quicksand of faux-counseling/psychotherapy? We want our clients to harvest the insights and benefit from the emotional release that comes telling their story, while feeling heard, understood, and even affirmed. We want them…
Productive Exploration In Wellness Coaching
How can we tell if we have or have not done enough exploration with a wellness coaching client? Inadequate exploration usually results in poorly selected and set goals. In the rush to do “goal-setting” clients sometimes do so without considering all aspects of their life, health and wellbeing first. Many times I have seen a client insightfully discover that a…
Question Your To-Do List and Be Well: Coaching The Urgent/Important Matrix
Despite our best efforts to avoid “holiday stress” it always seems to arrive as reliably as Santa himself. The “to do list” seems impossible and we pay the price physically and emotionally when the stress is too much.
The way to tackle a “to-do list” is not to whittle away at it, it’s more like running it through a…
Real Balance GLOBAL – Taking Wellness Coaching To China
What The World Health Organization dubbed “Lifestyle Disease” is a global phenomenon. The increase of non-communicable disease is going up the fastest in what is sometimes called the developing countries of the world. “Twenty-five years ago, the number of people with diabetes in China was less than one percent. Today, China has more than 114 million people suffering from the…
Refining Coaching Linguistics: Verbal Tics, Placeholders and Fingerprint Words
In a recent New York Times article, writer Gregg Easterbrook shared this observation of modern day speech. "The verbal tic of saying “real quick” is surging ahead of “you know” in the American lexicon. “You know” is an empty expression, a verbal placeholder. By contrast, “real quick” has significance, reflecting the continuing acceleration of life. “Good morning, I would…
Self-Deception and Living Well
Enjoying abundant good health often means having a great wellness plan for our way of living and sticking to it. Sometimes we struggle and don’t know why. The problem may be that we don’t know what we don’t know. Self-deception happens at various levels of consciousness and when it’s at its insidious worst, we don’t even realize it.
The…
Self-Disclosure in Coaching – When Sharing Helps and Hinders.
We’re working with our coaching client and something they bring up reminds us of a relevant experience in our own lives. We feel empathy, we can relate. Do we share about our own experience with the client? Self-disclosure is a powerful part of human communication and a conscious technique that has been studied in therapy, counseling and coaching since the…
Seven Expressions Of Courageous Coaching
Courageous coaching! What would “courageous coaching” look like for you? There are many ways to approach the subject of courage in coaching. As a trainer of wellness & health coaches here are some of the ways I would like to see courage show up for the coaches we educate.
1. The Courage To Stand For NCRW- Naturally Creative, Resourceful…
Stress Coaching Part I: A False Sense Of Urgency
How often do you find yourself and others around you at work and at home operating on a false sense of urgency? How often do we take action before we have all the facts, or make a decision just to relieve our anxiety? See if this sounds familiar? On Thursday, a deadline is set for Friday for a report nobody…
Stress Coaching Part II – Recovery From Stress
What we refer to as “stress” is quite a mystery. Ill-defined by most everyone except psychological researchers, we ascribe devastating levels of power to it, and often feel helpless to cope with it. We know that stress is linked to worsening health, greater risk of illness and the exacerbation of most any condition we find ourselves with.
Wellness and…
Structure Is The Wellness Coach’s Friend: Seven Ways To Coach Better
Great coaching finds a balance between structure and spontaneity, customization, “dancing in the moment” and organization. While some large coaching organizations err on the side of too much structure, using scripts and ridged protocols, some coaches “wing it” way too much. Listening to hundreds of coaching recordings, done with real clients, I’m continually amazed at how loosely many coaches go…
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