One of the biggest barriers to our success in life, or with our Wellness Plan is our fears. What holds us back from making the changes in our lives we know we need to make? How do we coach with someone around their fears while staying within our Scope of Practice? (https://nbhwc.org/scope-of-practice/) Fears and Consequences A recent joke goes: “The only people who like change are babies with wet diapers!” Change can be scary stuff. “What will happen IF I do this?” Your client may have some very realistic concerns about the potential consequences of them changing their lifestyle behavior. How ..read more

The longer we do anything the more we fall into habits. Habits are time savers. They help us avoid making our lives more complex than they need to be. They often are shortcuts that help us to experience less stress and get things done, sometimes quite efficiently. Doing certain things by rote can serve us well. Health and wellness coaches are continuously helping their clients to establish healthy habits that work for their growth and wellness. There are also, of course those lifestyle habits that work against our wellness. Driving home we suddenly find ourselves in the line at the drive-thro ..read more

“We define mindsets as core assumptions that we have about domains or categories of things that orient us to a particular set of expectations, explanations, and goals. So to put that a little bit more simply, mindsets are ways of viewing reality, that shape, what we expect, what we understand, and what we want to do.” Alia J. Crum, PhD. (https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/mindset-matters-how-embrace-benefits-stress) As I grew up, I had the mindset that I was not mechanically inclined. Sure, I could do some things, and had served as a third hand for my high school best friend as he fixed up ..read more

How do we allow ourselves to enter the zone of compassion, and what holds us back from going there? How do we keep our “coherent sense of self” that Erik Erikson talked about intact when we connect with the ‘other’? (Allow me to use the term ‘other’ to refer to a person or persons, clients, or otherwise throughout this piece.). I took on the question of Compassionate Detachment in a previous blog “Compassionate Detachment” (https://realbalancewellness.wordpress.com/2022/01/10/compassionate-detachment/) where I shared a portion of Chapter Five from my book Masterful Health & Wellness Coach ..read more

Winter is a great time for coaches to rest up, reflect and recharge their energy. It’s a great time to also work on your ongoing professional development and what better way this time of year than to cozy up with a good book! Many of you are taking your professional development as a health & wellness coach seriously and are preparing to take the certification exam of the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching (https://nbhwc.org). It is definitely an exam to be taken seriously! Concerted preparation is needed to pass, even for seasoned health & wellness professionals. Many pe ..read more

A stimulating conversation with a colleague launched me on an exploration of how we can allow ourselves to be more creative in the coaching work we do. A mark of a more masterful coach that I’ve always observed is their ability to be creative in the moment in ways that enhanced the coaching process. Watching them work, I would see inventive experiments emerge that were not just tricks from an old reliable bag, but fresh adventures for the client to try out. What allows a coach to come up with something new that fits the moment and catalyzes the client’s growth? Creativity has relevance to heal ..read more

Coach training often talks about the importance of the ‘Coaching Conversation’. What is it exactly and how is it very different from a Social Conversation? Coach Patrick Williams (https://drpatwilliams.com) describes the Coaching Conversation as: Coaching is a conversation where the client gets to say what they have not said, think what they have not thought, and even dream out loud with a committed listener…That is when magic may occur. Facilitating versus Contributing As coaching students begin to practice coaching, they sometimes come to a place in the dialogue with their client where they ..read more

James and Janice Prochaska were kind enough to edit the section of my new book Masterful Health & Wellness Coaching: Deepening Your Craft https://wholeperson.com/store/masterful-health-and-wellness-coaching.html that conveys how coaches can make use of their model for behavioral change – The Transtheoretical Model. I am deeply grateful to them for this. While many coaches are familiar with their work on the “Stages of Change” model, there is still much to be learned about how to apply it, especially when we look at the first stage of change – Precontemplation. Here is a small section of th ..read more

Most coaching has always been done remotely, primarily via telephone. Nowadays coaches and clients hold many, if not most, of their sessions via some form of video conferencing platform. Zoom, GoTo Meeting and many other apps and services allow us to coach clients all around the globe. What fun it can be to have clients on several continents, and perhaps others just across town, yet see them “live”. Reviewing video session of coaches and their clients in action has led me to some interesting observations. There are definitely some ways in which coaches must be very conscious about how they ar ..read more

Health and wellness professionals are sometimes confused about the role each professional might play in helping individuals to live their best life possible. Our clients are seeking to be healthier by attaining such goals as losing weight, managing stress, stopping smoking, becoming less isolated, and often, managing a health challenge of some kind. To do so they need: • excellent wellness information • great treatment (if that is called for) • and a way to make the lifestyle changes that will ensure lasting success. So, who is responsible for what? Health educators, fitness trainers, rehabi ..read more