Health Coaching
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…
Structuring Great Wellness Coaching Sessions – Part 2 Process and Progress
Though every coaching session is unique, coaching sessions that follow a general structure are usually more productive. In our last blog post we showed how a coach can use structure by Co-Creating The Agenda for the session to get off to a great start.
In that beginning structure we followed this basic sequence:
• Greet and Connect. Small…
Structuring Great Wellness Coaching Sessions – Part 3 Accountability and Support
This is the third of a three-part series on Coaching Structure. In our first blog we showed how a coach can use structure by Co-Creating The Agenda for the session to get off to a great start. In our second blog – Structuring Great Wellness Coaching Sessions – Part 2 Process and Progress we explored how effective processing leads to…
Ten Steps To Forward The Action In Your Life
In the coaching process we listen, clarify and help our clients explore their lives, taking stock of their current life situation and health status. Eventually we have to go beyond our basic listening skills, summarizing and helping our client get very clear about where they currently are. At that point we help them get clear about what they are ready…
Ten Steps To Structuring Great Wellness Coaching Sessions
Wellness coaching clients show up for appointments desiring to make progress in improving their lifestyles and thereby improving their lives. For as much as they want the session to be productive, it is easy for the client and the coach to drift together from topic to topic and finish up realizing that little has been accomplished. Sometimes a client comes…
Ten Ways To Coach Through Barriers To Change – Part One – Outer Barriers To Lifestyle Improvement by Dr. Michael Arloski.
A key part of effective coaching is helping our clients to find a way over, under, around and through the barriers that get between them and their goals. The best-laid wellness plans are inevitably challenged by some combination of “life getting in the way”, lack of environmental support, or sometimes even the “push-back” resistance from peers.
The other side…
Ten Ways To Coach Through Barriers To Change – Part Two – Inner Barriers To Lifestyle Improvement – II by Dr. Michael Arloski.
6. Practice Extreme Self-Care
Many times coaches and clients co-create a wonderful set of self-care action steps that the client knows will help them to be healthier and well. Then, on the next coaching appointment, the client confesses that they held back from doing almost all of the actions agreed upon. The coaching conversation then reveals that the client…
The Best Coaching Question
The Best Coaching Question
As a guest on Mike Vera’s Podcast Healthy & Awake (https://mikevera.com/healthy-%26-awake-podcast) I was surprised to be asked “What’s your favorite question to use in coaching?” For a brief moment I was puzzled by the question, then I immediately said
“What are you aware of right now?”
…
The Bigger Mindset Shift: Waking Up To Lasting Lifestyle Improvement
Just back from a whirlwind of professional travel, I’m struck by a pervasive awakening that our health is largely behavioral, and if we truly want to improve health worldwide, we must seek methods that support success at lasting lifestyle improvement. At the Lifestyle Medicine 2015 Conference http://lifestylemedicine2015.org, where I presented, we saw that the medical profession is embracing wellness…
The Bonus Benefits Of Exercise
Harvard’s School of Public Health (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/staying-active-full-story/) is quick to tell of all the prevention advantages of exercise. We know that getting more movement and exercise into our lives can help prevent the onset of heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome and osteoporosis. Exercise can be vital to positively affect the course of these illnesses…
The Challenge of Being Well And Being Male
Living a healthy lifestyle presents challenges for everyone, but what are men, in particular, up against when it comes to being well? Stereotypes aside, let’s look at what we know about men’s health during Men's Health Week 2020.
In January 2012 a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, published in the Journal of the American Medical…
The Great Utility of Coaching In The Emotional Realm
According to Plato: Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
Coaches often cautiously retreat from the affective level with their clients for fear of crossing the line into therapy. Other coaches with a professional mental health background are comfortable going in this direction, but don’t often know how to shift from a therapeutic approach to…
The Health And Wellness Coach’s Value Proposition
Every potential coaching client is looking to have the question ‘What’s in it for me?’ answered. Every coach needs to be able to succinctly answer that question by conveying what they will provide for their client.
Potential coaching clients are rarely familiar with what a coach, especially a health & wellness coach, can do for them. They are used…
The Language of Effective Coaching Accountability
While mentoring a coach along the path towards her ACC (Associate Certified Coach through the ICF – International Coaching Federation - http://coachfederation.org) I observed her repeated hesitancy in using accountability in her coaching. As we explored this I found that in her coach training she had been exposed to a style of enforcing accountability instead of co-creating accountability…
The Mindful Embrace: Awareness of The Other
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
-Thich Nhat Hahn
When we work as any kind of human helper we are living on two levels at once. There is the role and function of being the ally for our client, and yet there is…
The Optimistic Advantage in Being Well
Considering how happy most folks are to see 2011 fading in the rear-view mirror, it’s amazing what a collective sense of optimism there is about 2012. An Associated Press-GfK survey found that 62 percent of those surveyed are optimistic about what 2012 will bring America, and 78 percent were personally optimistic about the new year. (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70925.html) This validated…
The Psychophysiology of Stress – What The Wellness Coach Needs To Know
Stress gets blamed for most everything, and much of time deserves the accusation (60 percent to 90 percent of health-care professional visits are stress-related - https://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/10/relaxation.aspx ). Wellness and health coaching clients inevitably recognize that excess stress in their lives is affecting their quality of life, performance at work, and their very health in negative ways. Finding a way to…
The Quandary of Closeness And Compassion in Coaching
“Don’t get too close to your clients.” It may have been my junior year of being an undergraduate psychology major when a professor offhandedly gave this warning to me and a couple of other students. There is always this question about ‘therapeutic distance’. Clearly when a therapist allows their own feelings of attraction or repulsion, insensitivity or caring to interfere…
The Road Ahead for Wellness Coaching: Trends To Look For
Returning from the 2013 National Wellness Conference this month, I continue to be amazed at how wellness coaching has become such a vital part of the wellness field. The tiny trickle of interest in wellness coaching that began in the late 1990’s is now practically a tsunami of both excitement and action washing the field forward with surprising speed.
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