northern trip

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

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social distancing

We all still need each other. Even in the age of COVID-19, our health continues to depend upon healthy supportive relationships. Real Balance https://realbalance.com has always stressed what we call Coaching for Connectedness.  We‘ve seen lifestyle improvement occur and last more often when people receive support for the changes they are making to live healthier lives.  When a…

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hourglass

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…

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flyfishing

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…

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wellness coaching graph

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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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…

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woman at desk with laptop

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…

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Irish Steps

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

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hopscotch

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…

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barbed wire

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…

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mountain

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…

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earth sunrise

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…

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Michael Arloski hiking in Conamara N.P., Ireland

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…

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morning men exercise

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

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sad girl beach

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…

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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…

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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

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Glass half full

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…

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Easier Said Then Done

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…

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distant couple

“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…

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Dr. Michael Arloski

Advancing the Craft of Health & Wellness Coaching

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