Wellness Coach
2010-2020 A Decade of Growth for Wellness Coaching
After years of building a foundation, health and wellness coaching has flourished in the last decade. At the beginning of this last decade the International Coach Federation was only fifteen years old and the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching hadn’t even been thought of yet. My book, Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change, had been on the…
A Thousand Pots of Brown Rice: A Mindful Way To Be Well
We all want to be as healthy as we can be, and are usually anxious to get there quickly, like it was a destination we could actually arrive at. Mastering a wellness lifestyle is rather like mastering any art, craft or skill. It’s more of a journey than a destination. Lifestyle means a way of living, and doing it well…
Astonishing Non-compliance – Understanding Grief and Readiness for Change in the Health Challenged Client
Medical noncompliance is a vast and complex issue that results in widespread human suffering and immense healthcare costs. Of the 3.8 billion pharmaceutical prescriptions written each year (USA) it is estimated that more than 50% of them are taken incorrectly or not at all. Medical noncompliance also includes failure to do medical self-care, self-testing and attend follow up appointments with…
Client-Centered Directiveness: An Oxymoron That Works – Part One
At its very foundation, coaching is client-centered. The work of Carl Rogers profoundly influenced the founders of the life coaching profession. Yet, among the thousands of health and wellness coaches we have trained at Real Balance (http://www.realbalance.com), the question of how directive or non-directive to be remains an area of unsureness and anxiety.
As time marches on…
Crafting Your Growth In The New Year : The Personal Growth of The Wellness Coach
December’s darkness arrives at about 4:30 pm here in Colorado as we approach the longest night of the year later this month. It’s a time of hunkering down by a fireplace in the Northern Hemisphere and a good time to reflect on the past year with a hot cup of your favorite brew. It’s also a time when we yearn…
Delivering The Behavioral Side Of Lifestyle Medicine Through Wellness Coaching
“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”
Hippocrates 420 B.C – 370 B.C.
Healthcare providers have been prescribing lifestyle improvement for thousands of years. The evidence has been built from the observations of Hippocrates all the way…
Getting Yourself Out Of The Way: The Self-Vigilant Coach – Part Two – Projection In Health & Wellness Coaching
Our previous blog post: Getting Yourself Out Of The Way: The Self-Vigilant Coach – Part One (https://wp.me/pUi2y-mu) explored the many ways in which the coach can interfere in the coaching process and “get in the way” of the client’s own coaching work. Our own agendas, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, projections and unfinished emotional business can all impede the coaching…
If It Only Was That Simple: The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth
When faced with overwhelming, frightening and ultimately complex problems we tend to search for simplistic answers. Perhaps this is an adaptive attempt originating in the deep part of our brain known as the amygdala, where fear triggers our survival instincts (and our flight/fight/freeze response). In our ancestral days near our cave, taking action to freeze, run or fight like…
LOVE and HEART HEALTH: Coaching for Connection
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.”
From the Song “Nature Boy” – lyrics by eden ahbez, recorded originally by Nat King Cole, sung by David Bowie in the movie Moulin Rouge
There is the biological heart that pumps our blood and keeps us alive. There is also what cardiologist Sandeep…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Social Distancing – Not Social Isolation: Coaching for Connectedness in the age of COVID-19
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…
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…
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…
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