Michael Arloski
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…
Making and Maintaining The Shift To The Coaching Mindset
We meet our coaching client with the very best of intentions. We want to help. And help sometimes means throwing ourselves into doing what the client seems to be unable to do themselves up to this point – figure out solutions. Instead of empowering our clients to come to their own solutions, we seek to fix it for them. 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 and the Motivation to Be Well
“Wellness is the experience of living life with high levels of awareness, conscious choice, self-acceptance, interconnectedness, love, meaning and purpose.” Michael Arloski (Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change, 2007).
Meaning and purpose are included in most definitions and models of wellness, yet how does this philosophical concept translate into behavioral change, or does it? The primary value of meaning…
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…
Nine Keys To Readiness For Change And Improving Your Lifestyle
“People don’t change until they are ready to.”
James Prochaska
Lifestyle improvement is all about change, as we explored in our last post. When it comes to changing our thoughts, beliefs, and our behavior, the big question immediately becomes “How ready are you to change?”. The answer is not a simple yes or no, and extensive theories have arisen…
Plan Now To Be Well In The Middle of Summer
Spring is in the air, if not on the ground quite yet. Spring Training for baseball is in full swing, our aspen trees are budding out and folks in the Northern Hemisphere are planning their vacation and summer travel time. For the last thirty two years most of my summers have had to plan for including one event right in…
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…
Really Full Engagement in Life, Work, and Coaching
In 1971 Ram Dass (psychiatrist turned meditation teacher/guru) admonished us all to BE HERE NOW! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book), and the battle with the distraction capacity of our big brains has never let up. How many wonderful books, mindfulness practices, institutes, and even religions have arisen in our quest to focus on this very moment in front of us. Today a…
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…
Retreat, Review, Renew and Rewrite The New Year Now
The ancient Celtic Calendar rings in the New Year at the very end of October with the holiday of Samhain. Looking at a Northern European year’s climate through largely agricultural eyes this makes perfect sense. The last of the harvest is done and it’s time to prepare for winter and a long rest for the land.
For the self-reflective…
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…
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