March 22, 2018

A Coaching and Environment Approach to Mastering Wellness

The Coaching Environment

The environment where I will be coaching my client offers an integrative and holistic approach
to promote wellness. Clients who come to the center are proactive in identifying and assessing
their health risks formally through wellness evaluations and informally, how they would like to
feel and look. This includes, but is not limited to, assessing their diet and exercise, disease risk
factors, strength and flexibility, life balance and stress levels.

The wellness evaluations can assess a client’s risk factors for certain diseases such as diabetes
or obesity, metabolic functioning, food and environmental allergies or intolerances to certain
foods or beverages. Through strength and flexibility assessments, clients who have been
leading sedentary lives may want to know if their inactivity could be the cause of their aches
and pains, physical limitations, or contributing to their high levels of stress. As each client
learns more about their health, they will be better informed about the life style changes they
may need, or want to make, to function at their best.

For clients who wish to make health related lifestyle changes in the areas mentioned above, the
center offers a motivating environment that is very elegant and serene. Clinicians are available
to provide medical massage and body balancing. Yoga and Pilates equipment, and instruction,
are available to clients who want to address their issues with strength, flexibility, and mobility.
There are medical professionals who are equipped to address vitamin deficiencies and low
energy as well as provide aesthetically based treatments so clients can feel and look their best.
Finally, to help people manage their time better so they can take better care of themselves,
meet their health goals, and reduce stress levels, I provide coaching.

The Coaching Client

The coaching client I’ll be working with here is female, in her mid-forties, who would like to lose
a significant amount of weight. She also complains of brain fog, bloating and gastrointestinal
discomfort. Further, she would like to be able to increase her stamina and flexibility. She has
completed her wellness evaluation and would like to work with a coach to help her make her
desired life style changes. This is where the coaching journey begins.

I use the word journey because achieving health related lifestyle goals may at times get very
challenging that it can be difficult for clients to stay on track. Heidi Grant Halverson in her best-
selling book, succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, provides data from the government
website that reinforces the difficulty of setting a life style change goal and achieving it. The
government keeps track on its website www.USA.gov of the most popular New Year’s
Resolutions American’s make. Weight loss and lifestyle changes top the list. Yet relatively few
people who try to lose weight actually do, and an even less number keep it off. Moreover,
Market Data Enterprises a firm that tracks niche industries reported that Americans spend in
excess of 60 billion annually on trying to lose weight.

Working with a coach can improve my client’s chances of being successful and beating the
bleak New Year’s resolutions odds of goal attainment, listed on the government’s website.
Studies have shown that clients who have worked with a coach were very satisfied in terms of
their return on investment and achieving their goals. The International Coach Federation
maintains a portal (researchportal.coachfederation.org) where evidenced based research
publications, including the outcome data I have referenced here, can be found. This is a good
resource to find scholarly articles about coaching for interested clients and coaches.

WOOP – The Coaching Approach

The evidenced based coaching approach I’ll be using with my client is called WOOP (Wish,
Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan). This approach integrates a visualization technique called mental
contrasting from the work of psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and implementation intentions by
Peter M. Gollwitzer Ph.D. I find this technique to be straightforward and uncomplicated and
will describe here how WOOP will be the used with my client. Halverson’s book Succeed,
highlights and endorses the benefits of mental contrasting and implementation intentions.
These concepts are a key part of WOOP.

I will illustrate here how my client and I will work within the WOOP framework. My client will
first spend some time talking about her health related life style goals and what she would wish
for. Together we would look at her desired outcome and then explore, in a very realistic way
what she would need to do to achieve her goal or wish. She must take a mindful look at her
life. Mindfulness is an important coaching consideration and will be discussed later. Mindfully
looking at her life and being able to identify and recognize potential obstacles will help her to
determine if she is setting an achievable goal. This exercise will help my client to discriminate
between what is a feasible goal in her life right now and what is not. This process is called
mental contrasting. Together we will take the time needed to realistically look at the steps
involved in achieving her goal. As a coach, it will be my job to actively listen to how she
describes her life and ask her not only relevant, but sometimes hard, questions to help her
determine if her goal is feasible and attainable.

This process will help to strengthen her expectations of achieving her goal and in turn increase
her chances of being successful. The implementation intention addresses the steps that will get
her to meet her goal and plan for the unexpected. This is called if-then planning. We will take
some time to address an alternative action plan if something unforeseen comes up. Mental
contrasting requires focused attention. This step is not taken lightly as I’ve experienced it to be
a critical success factor when working with clients.

My role as a coach is to also is keep my client accountable and in action towards her goal.
Trying to achieve too many goals at once can be mentally taxing. She may not have enough
resources to take on too many life style changes at the same time. Halverson discusses the
importance of building up that self-control muscle in her book, Succeed, and not making too
many demands on ourselves all at once. By taking on too much she may set herself up for
failure. Therefore, I’ll ask her to prioritize which goal she would like to focus on first. Losing
weight is her first priority.

We discuss the importance of being specific when choosing goals since specificity can increase
your chances of success. As we cycle through the WOOP process she decides that 30 pounds in
8 months is realistic and specific. My client has been successful with the weight watchers
program in the past and she decides she will follow that program again. My client enjoys being
stylish and likes keeping up with the styles in the world of fashion. She enjoys the wish phase of
WOOP as she dreams about the fun she will have going shopping with her daughter and trying
on the different styles of clothing. Shopping with her daughter was in the past a form of
enjoyment and a way she would bond with her daughter.

Once her goal/wish has been identified, as well as her desired outcome, we take a look at the
realities of her day to day schedule. We discuss time management issues and get specific about
when she will be able to go to meetings, to the grocery store, and what kinds of food she will
prepare and more. We put together if-then plans for when she may need to travel or entertain
for work and must deviate from her current food plan – from this step she will have a back-up
plan. We also plan for negative emotions that may come up and how to deal with them. We
talk about integrating Cognitive Behavioral Coaching techniques to recognize self-defeating
thoughts that may lead her astray. This can happen in times of stress when thoughts become
exaggerated or unbalanced. Some examples of these thoughts are all or nothing thinking,
magnifying, fortune telling and more.

Coaching Considerations

I used the term mindfulness as an important consideration when trying to make lifestyle
changes. Halverson’s book, Succeed, discusses how the majority of us spend our day on
autopilot. This is because the unconscious part of our brains store most of what we have
learned and experienced throughout our lives. She provides an analogy that what we are able
to store in the conscious part of our brain contains the information of a postage stamp, while
the unconscious part of our brain is like that of the super computer’s running NASA.

This makes sense when you think about how difficult doing everyday activities like driving,
talking, walking, typing and eating would be if the already learned instructions were not stored
in a designated place in our brain (the unconscious). This part of our brain enables us to do
many things without having to give it much thought. This can be a good thing when it comes to
typing or walking, but not so good when hunger and lack of time steers us into the drive
through. These are the times when we really must be mindful of the decisions we are making
in an effort to reduce self-defeating automatic behaviors.
Carol Dweck, one of the world’s leader in the field of motivation has written a book about the
importance of increasing your awareness when it comes to your mindset. Our mindset is so
powerful that when it comes to aspirations, our mindset can greatly impact whether we
experience success or failure. A growth mindset promotes success. Understanding your
mindset is key when it comes to accomplishing goals. The good news is that you can develop
that mindset with mindfulness based practices.

There are a number of ways to learn how to become mindful. By doing simple exercises with
my client she can begin to learn how to live mindfully. There are resources like as phone
applications, books, exercises, classes and more that I can share with her. Dutton, Gareth Ph.D.
an award winning behavioral change professor and researcher cites how to implement mindful
exercises specific to eating and weight loss that can have a positive impact. Integrating ways to
increase mindfulness is part of my coaching approach.

Other consideration when working with a client trying to make a lifestyle change is
understanding where they may be in their readiness to do so. Prochaska’s transtheoretical
model of behavior change can be used to assess where they are in their readiness. This model
has five stages and knowing what stage your client is in is important because there are different
processes and principals that are used to reduce resistance and facilitate movement at each
stage. Since my client is taking proactive steps to assess her health and hired a coach she most
likely is in the stage called preparation. There are five stages of readiness.

Finally, my clients are unique and all have strengths. These are qualities that we all possess
that are stable over time. When we know our strengths, we can think about different ways to
put them to work to help with problem solving and meting difficult challenges. On the flip side,
we may overuse a strength and it may be getting in the way. Either way I have my client take a
30-minute evidenced based assessment to learn about their top strengths.

As a Licensed Professional Counselor and ICF Certified coach I have learned many fascinating
evidenced based ways to help my client achieve their goals with the added benefit of applying
this information to my own life. I can say from experience that I have learned to become more
mindful, helping me both personally and professionally to become a better coach and
counselor. Coaching is not a one-size-fits all approach -- just like a mechanic may need to use
a different tool set when working with a Honda then he or she would when working with a
Volvo. The field of coaching is an emerging field with many evidenced based tools to use that
can help people lead healthier lifestyles and live well.
 References

Dutton, Gareth, R. (2008). The role of mindfulness in health behavior change. ACSM’s Health &
Fitness Journal. 12, 4-12.

Dweck, S. Carol. Mindset the new technology of success. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

Halverson, Heidi Grant. Succeed how we can reach our goals. Penguin Group, 2011.