Wellness Coach Training
“Coaching for a Lifetime of Wellness: Five Keys to Sustainable Behavioral Change”
The theme of the 41st Annual National Wellness Conference was “Spotlight On Sustainability”. While we often think about sustainability and our environmental practices, as a wellness coach and psychologist I immediately thought of sustainable behavioral change. As I prepared for my presentation on this topic my research revealed that we actually know very little about how effective our…
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…
China Embraces Real Balance Wellness Coaching
Faced with the same lifestyle-based health crisis many other countries are experiencing, China has been searching for a way to help people truly succeed at lasting lifestyle change. Over half of the men in China smoke. The diabetes rate is now higher than the United States, with heart disease, COPD and other “lifestyle diseases” on the rise. Health information…
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…
Coaching Emotions for Better Lifestyle Choices
Check out the best in Health Coach Training: www.realblance.com
Lifestyle behavioral change is not simply a rational process. Emotions influence or sometimes completely determine the outcome of decisions we are confronted with every day.
When dealing with people remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
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…
Keys to Coaching Clients Who Overidentify With Their Illness
We like to say that a coach listens to a person’s story and helps them to realize that they are not their story.
For the health-challenged client, their illness, conditions, or health experience is a huge part of their story. “I am a diabetic.” While this is true, how strongly does the person now see themselves through this lens? What…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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 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 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 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.
…
The Tao of Wellness Coaching – Part One – What Centers Us?
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
Lao Tzu
History and Context
It is said that the legendary Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, rode off on the back of an ox when leaving the Middle Kingdom. Before a sentry guard would let him pass out of the city gates, he asked the…
Page 1 of 2