In this episode, we are talking about how you can use stages of change to meet your clients, where they are at, and what to do so you don’t inadvertently push clients further away from change.

Health professionals can assume clients are ready to change simply because they booked a consultation, or they are discussing changing. The reality is people can be at varying degrees of readiness for health behaviours, and they may need support with tapping into their motivation or overcoming barriers before they are ready to take action.

If we don’t take the time to assess a client’s readiness to change, and mismatch our communication and approach we can risk pushing clients further away from change.

How can we tell where someone is at? What language gives clues? How do we tailor our approach? In this episode, we provide strategies, tips and tools you can implement in your practice to ensure an effective client-centred consultation where change is way more likely to happen!

In this episode, Sharon Curtain talks to Dr Shami, an integrative GP who is the Director and co-founder of the MINT clinic, about health coaching and how it changed her practice.

Dr Shami has been a GP for 23 years and has been an integrative GP for 10 years. She has seen first hand how burnout can happen in a system that creates co-dependency when the GP is supposed to provide the answers/fix the medical problems while patients are passive and not encouraged to take responsibility.

Her approach changed completely when she started with ACNEM to have an emphasis on empowering patients to take responsibility for their lifestyle behaviours. She noticed how her patients flourished when they were encouraged to create a plan based on what they think would work for them.

Studying health coaching was life changing and has transformed all her consults. Clients leave feeling empowered and happy as they come up with their own solutions, matched to where they are ready to start.

Dr Shami looks forward to her consults, and is always curious about her clients and what might work for them. She discusses the simples changes she's made and the difference they make. She also discusses how the enviroment set up also leads to collaboration.

Dr Shami is the Director and Lead General Practitioner at MINT Clinic https://www.mintclinic.com.au

Follow Dr Shami's Podcast SIX HATS PODCAST

In this episode of The Health Coach Show, we discuss the importance of silence in consultations and why clients should be doing most of the talking in conversations and not the health professional and/or coach.

We discuss the concept of "holding the space", allowing clients time to process their thoughts and emotions without us feeling the need to jump in and provide solutions or advice.

We may fear silence and assume a need to fill it with ideas and answers. However, coaching is not about fixing or rescuing clients, but rather about facilitating their growth and learning.

We also discuss how the provision of information or opinion which may have the intention of being inspiring or empowering can in fact create discord, as the coach grabs the talking stick and takes the focus away from the client.

Coaches need to stay present, curious, and allow our clients to do the work. Holding the space is where the magic happens: clients begin to understand themselves and their behaviours, and what it takes to create sustainable change.

In this episode of The Health Coach Show, Sharon Curtain and Caitlin Cotter talk about the coaching competency of being calm, present and emotionally available. 

Caitlin is a health coach and graduate of Accredited Health Coaching Australia, a mental fitness coach, and a weight management practitioner.

When we start our coaching consultations, it’s important that we’ve put our own thoughts and concerns to the side, and have created a calm environment, free of distractions for our clients, allowing them to be present and providing space for insight, reflection and growth.

In this episode, we discuss why being present is so important and also give you some tips and techniques for how you can be more calm and present and emotionally available in your consultations.

These techniques help us drop into level 3 listening and also create a space for our clients to look deeper. 

These techniques are useful before and during a coaching session, and can be used to help centre/ground/calm clients who might be feeling, overwhelmed, distracted, or frazzled when they arrive at a coaching session. 

It’s great to develop a practice of mindfulness to reset your focus between clients and ensure you are fully calm present and emotionally available. We take you through a short mindfulness breathing exercise that can help ground you and bring you into the present, and can be used to recentre at any time. 

Caitlin can be found on Instagram as Zesthealthcoaching.au

To find out more about Positive Intelligence: https://www.positiveintelligence.com/

In today’s podcast, we’re talking about rapport. Are we doing this well as practitioners or are we just making small talk?

Rapport is the foundation of all therapeutic relationships. It’s the way that we communicate we are listening, connected and interested in our clients and provide a space that is safe for them to open up. 

Rapport is defined as a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well.

Health practitioners can attempt to build rapport by using 'strategies' - for example ensuring they have an open body posture, maintaining eye contact and asking the client questions about themselves, their family and interests.

Client consultations often start with small talk to ‘establish rapport’ and in this episode, we challenge whether this is the most effective use of our time.

We explore and what rapport is and why we need it, the ways that we might try to establish rapport with clients and why these things may/may not be helpful. We also discuss effective ways we can establish rapport, allowing our clients to feel heard, understood and connected.

CONTACT:

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @accredited_healthcoaching_au

Facebook: Accredited Health Coaching Au

Web: accreditedhealthcoaching.com.au

Courses: Creating change in 15 minutes. Health Coach Specialist, Health Coach Mastery, mentoring and Gap training.

In today’s podcast, we talk about precontemplation, and how to manage our clients and ourselves when they are not ready to change.

Clients in precontemplation may not be thinking about changing their behaviour because they don’t think they need to, or may not be considering change because it feels impossible. 

Our current approaches may lead to frustration, conflict and the client feeling judged, pressured and misunderstood.

We explore what we often do as health professionals when we are faced with a client who is pre-contemplative, and why these approaches may not be helpful. We also provide some suggestions for what we can do instead.

CONTACT:

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @accredited_healthcoaching_au

Facebook: Accredited Health Coaching Au

Web: accreditedhealthcoaching.com.au

Courses: Creating change in 15 minutes. Health Coach Specialist, Health Coach Mastery, mentoring and Gap training.

In this episode, Shivaun and Sharon discuss ways we can assess and build confidence.

The confidence ruler is a great way of assessing your client's confidence in changing their behaviour. Asking rating questions helps your client to explore what is helping them feel confident (eg previous success) and what is holding them back. By exploring external and internal barriers, we help clients get clear about what is holding them back. Once all the barriers have been identified, we can support clients to create a plan to deal with barriers to change and to enhance/strengthen facilitators for change. Knowing the way forward and anticipating obstacles builds confidence. Underpinning it all is a mindset of curiosity and compassion. We encourage trial and correction and support clients to see how small steps lead to big changes.

CONTACT:

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @accredited_healthcoaching_au

Facebook: Accredited Health Coaching Au

Web: accreditedhealthcoaching.com.au

Courses: Creating change in 15 minutes. Health Coach Specialist, Health Coach Mastery, mentoring and Gap training.

In today’s podcast, we talk about how to blend expertise and coaching.
We explore the concept of switching hats versus integrating approaches and how being client centred means we are always coaching.
We assume people are coming to see us for our expertise and feel that giving value means delivering an in-depth education and an action plan.
In fact, we are more efficient and effective and provide more value when we use coaching to explore what a client wants from us, what information they know and what they want to know, and help them create a plan matched to their state of change.
We do use our expertise, of course, however we provide information, with permission, when our clients have a skills or a knowledge gap. It’s about delivering what they need, when they need it, and checking in, is that enough or would they like more detail or additional information.

In this episode Sharon and Shivaun, dietitians and HCANZA accredited health coaches, explore common excuses, what we may feel or do when we hear our clients give us 'excuses' for why they haven't made a change. 

Excuses are in fact valuable, as they are the client telling us exactly why they are stuck, or feel unable to take action.

What can we do when we do hear excuses? Get curious, acknowledge and validate the client's experience, support them to discover all the barriers so they can evaluate and sort them, and then explore what can they do to overcome these obstacles.

The final step is to support clients to come up with a plan.

At Accredited Health Coaching Australia, we've developed health coach training courses, incorporating evidence based health behaviour change interventions and techniques that promote self-efficacy, self-determination and self-responsibility. You'll be introduced to a toolbox of motivational interviewing, positive psychology, the transtheoretical model and health and coaching psychology to assist you in supporting clients to achieve sustainable health behaviours and outcomes.​​

HCANZA approved program provider.

You can learn more at https://www.accreditedhealthcoaching.com.au

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/accredited_healthcoaching_au/

In this episode Sharon and Shivaun dig into what motivation is and how we can harness it to achive our goals.

We discuss the role that external and internal (intrinsic) motivators can play on behaviour change,and how we can move along the spectrum from external motivation, to the place where our identity shifts and we become intrinsically motivated.

Sometimes we wait for motivation to hit before we take action, although we can find motivation comes from the actions we take! We can support people to explore how values can drive our behaviour and find their deep 'why' for changing a behaviour.

Helping people imagine their future self and linking to values and identity creates an energy around what is possible that can drive changes in behaviour.

CONTACT:

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @accredited_healthcoaching_au

Facebook: Accredited Health Coaching Au

Web: accreditedhealthcoaching.com.au

Courses: Creating change in 15 minutes. Health Coach Specialist, Health Coach Mastery, mentoring and Gap training.