A Research Paper By Jesse Moore, Health & Wellness Coach, UNITED STATES
Effects of Coaching on Health and Wellness
How can coaching improve health and wellness? The impact of this question is no less powerful than it is broad. We receive feedback on our health and wellness in how we feel, our frame of mind, lab results from healthcare providers, and even our bank accounts. In this research paper, we, the coaches, will learn ways we can partner with our clients to help them improve their health and wellness with the goals that they set. In this research paper, we will consider how to improve our health and wellness for our knowledge in order to better support our clients. This will include considering topics such as coachability, neuroscience, self-development, and positive psychology.
Coachability
Coaching requires behavior changes such as putting your phone away to get better quality of sleep outcomes at night, or to add exercise during the day for the first time to hopefully feel tired at night in order to fall asleep faster. Awareness of our brain’s capacity for change is important since thoughts, emotions, responses, and behaviors are initiated by our brains. The ability for people to receive coaching and create change is an important component for clients to understand to address new beliefs in their willingness, or not, to create change for themselves.1
To truly understand where we are going, in order to become healthier and improve our perceived wellness levels, I want to highlight a few examples where clients might be less coachable than their true capacity to receive coaching. For example, when I was in college, I majored in neuroscience and performed research with a neuroscience faculty member who received a grant to do tobacco research on stress responses in rats. Through our research we found that rats with nicotine addiction from tobacco had statistically significant and severely increased negative stress responses, which matched our hypothesis. 2 While a coach cannot treat someone with nicotine addiction, I simply draw the parallel that addiction could negatively impact one’s ability to receive and absorb coaching, thus having lower coachability.
In addition, others could be considered less coachable if they have a mentality that blames others, do not want to or appreciate receiving feedback, do not take time to self-reflect, want only quick results even when the problem is more complex and requires time, and they know it all and have nothing further to learn from others or about themselves.3However, the previous examples are coachable. Psychologist and author of Mindset, Carol Dweck, coined the term ‘fixed mindset’, which describes individuals with this frame of mind as believing they are born with a capacity for talents and skills, and it cannot be exceeded. These individuals could be operating from a place of fear when it comes to problem solving, or potentially not trying at all.4 This could lead to fruitless coaching if a client were to never flip their mindset. Now that we defined examples of having decreased coachability, moving forward we will look at how coaching can improve our health and wellness.
Neuroscience & Mindfulness Meditation
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to make pathway changes that allow for new learning in humans to create new pathways within neurons and synapses in our brains. Because of neuroplasticity, the human experience can be one of continued learning and growth. 1 Fixed mindsets can, in fact, change. An example in rats, referring to my previously mentioned lab experience, is fascinating. On a Sunday morning when I ran the laboratory, I was using a set of Skinner Boxes5, and after the trial, when I opened the cabinet door, one of my adult rats inside one of the boxes expanded its own neuroplasticity by laying on its back on the grid to insulate itself with its fur from the shock. This had nothing to do with the research conducted, but it does show fast adaptability in an adult rat demonstrating neuroplasticity.
According to Feiyi Wang from the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, mindfulness meditation has a direct, positive cognitive impact on the brain including improved neuroplasticity, memory, attention, and on executive function. There are also anatomical regions of the brain impacted positively including the cerebral cortex, grey and white matter of the brain, and the brain’s stem. Additionally, this study shows a decrease in the degradation of the brain. 6 Mindfulness meditation research shows positive correlations for physical and mental health including stress and pain reduction, reported improvements in cognitive function, and overall well-being to name a few. Additionally, this research also shows that coach-led training for mindfulness meditation initiatives provides greater learning than written or audio meditation options when practiced for twenty minutes per day for four weeks.7
Self-Development Through Assessments
As someone who uses assessments and has for years, I am a huge believer in self-development using assessments. These assessments include DISC, Emotional Quotient, and Workplace Motivators, which I am certified to administer and facilitate. The DISC Assessment is an observable behavior assessment, or how you behave. It is not a personality assessment, of who you are. A DISC profile provides the client with information on their approach to problem-solving, how they influence others, pace, and conscientiousness to rules. The DISC profile also provides information on how to motivate a client, how to communicate with them, and how they operate under stress.8 Communication insights, motivational information, and behavioral signs of stress can all be crucial information for a coach and client as they build trust over time and work toward improved health and wellness.
The Emotional Quotient assessment provides you with scores in the five categories of emotional intelligence. These include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, social awareness, and social regulation. While a perfect score is not the goal, improvement in these areas leads to a better understanding of ourselves and how to regulate our emotions. We can interrupt intense and stress-causing emotions by practicing recognition of emotions and using strategies to interrupt the emotional flood we experience. Development of social awareness, as another example, also increases your level of empathy. Development in this area will help you build and improve the bonds of friends, family, and coworkers, and can lead to improvements in relationships and reductions in stress to name a few.8 There can be huge benefits to our health and wellness through the development of emotional intelligence.
A third assessment to improve self-development is the Workplace Motivators assessment. There are six primary motivators accounted for in this assessment including Theoretical (knowledge), Utilitarian/Economic (money), Aesthetic (form and harmony), Social/Altruistic (helpfulness), Individualistic/Political (power), and Traditional/Regulatory (order). This assessment provides insights into the motivations behind the behaviors of the client.8 For example, if someone has a high utilitarian/economic score, acknowledging this and confirming if a client believes it to be true can be important in better understanding your client. Then work together to see how this could be used to improve the health and wellness of your client. For example, having poor health is expensive, and results in a 28% annual increase in out-of-pocket medical costs on top of a 37% increase in income loss.9 What’s important about using information with your client is not to manipulate them, but to propose information in a way that they believe is useful to consider. Perhaps their utilitarian/economic score is their highest and is a motivator as they work on their health and wellness journey.
Using assessments can be a valuable tool for our clients. And they are just that, a tool. Not a be-all, end-all, or 100% accurate tool that we should use all the time. However, these assessments provide a deeper understanding of our habits, triggers, strengths, and areas of possible oversight that can help us as we work through our health and wellness goals. Assessments can help you to understand your strengths and weaknesses so you can decide to leverage your strengths and build upon them to reach your potential and support your health and wellness journey. This will also increase your confidence because you will feel a greater understanding of yourself and be better equipped to powerfully handle challenges and goals ahead.10
Positive Psychology
According to the Positivity Ratio, you must feel three times more positive than negative to be in a flourishing state.11 While framing this ratio around athletics and exercise, regarding health and wellness, when I was coaching my team at the University of Minnesota, we regularly practiced gratitude. There was an exercise where we sat in circles in small groups before swim practice. During that time, we said something that we were grateful for the teammate to our left, the teammate to our right, and ourselves. The exercise brought smiles to the faces of my student-athletes as they happily stated joyful and funny things about their teammates, but when it came time to speak about themselves, long pauses filled the air. I wanted them to confidently state what they were grateful for about themselves, and they had difficulty completing the task. For me, it was time to help them build their confidence, so every week we had a practice with a fun activity before our main set. Perhaps it was hyping up a teammate before a tough pace set, or power posing before an anaerobic set. There was one practice we were doing lactate tolerance, and before the last repetition, we had a confidence competition. The team was behind the blocks dancing, laughing, and shouting which made them awesome. There was some sarcasm mixed in, but all in good fun. They were in physical pain from the lactic acid accumulating in their bodies and they had one repetition left. And then something changed. They got even louder, they were cheering like crazy, they were affirming each other, and they were affirming themselves. I decided to change what we were doing, and they raced a primary event that they swam because I wanted to explore what this looked like regarding performance. I was blown away by how fast they swam at the end of a lactate tolerance set. Some even got right on top of the best times without technical suits. While this is circumstantial and anecdotal at best, the results were fantastic. However, I could only create this in my training group with my twelve athletes. When the whole team was involved, at a meet for example, it felt awkward for my athletes, and they did not have the same environment to race in. They sometimes swam slower than they did in practice. I did not have buy-in from other coaches on staff who did not want to break from traditional on-deck behavior or feel capable or confident in doing this type of work with their groups. So, it stayed internal to my training group. After reflecting, I considered what we were achieving in practice, which included gratitude rehearsal, affirmations for others, self-affirmations, and connecting and having fun together. This was phrased by my group as ‘spreading the happy’.
As I consider health and wellness applications, I think of exercise groups such as CrossFit, spin or Soul Cycle classes, yoga classes, and others. These are all group exercise classes that, in my experience, have a community of people working out together, and investing in their health and wellness, with a group that supports them. I worked out in numerous CrossFit gyms, for example, and saw varying physical capabilities treated with nothing but respect, support, and affirmative behaviors. As a coach of high-level athletes, including Olympians, National Champions, and summer camp kids at all the universities I coached at, I also saw firsthand how positive environments support the health and wellness of athletes. I am also lucky to receive an annual evaluation from my athletes, and the environment and support are part of that discussion. Based on the evaluations and questions within them, fifteen years of athletes crave positive energy, positive environments, and positive experiences. When I consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs11, I can see a direct correlation between my athletes’ experience in swimming regarding both levels of love/belonging and esteem.
It is not all fluffy and feelings. There is science behind the use of positive affirmations. When looking at MRI results in conjunction with positive self-affirmations, there are differences noted in the brain that show an increase in activity in specific regions. We are seeing health and wellness benefits from the practice of daily affirmations including a decrease in stress, increases in exercise, and viewpoint changes of information that was perceived negatively is now met as an opportunity for growth.12
Powerful Results on Our Health and Wellness
From this research, one can surmise trends that client health and wellness can improve immensely through consistent practice in different areas including mindful meditation, self-development, and positive psychology. While the scope of some of this research is limited in the volume of trial participants or in formal research settings, there does not appear to be data where consistent practice in these areas is harming our health and wellness. It would be interesting to get permission from clients coached in a health and wellness coaching business to use their qualitative data to track and publish in a way that could help other coaches and clients learn and grow. One thing I personally take from this research is that small adjustments over time can have powerful results on our health and wellness.
References
- 1Riddell, Patricia. Neuroscience of Coaching. Theory, research, and practice. https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/104382/1/Chapter%2010%20-%20Patricia%20Riddell.pdf
- 2Barnet, Robert C. Curriculum Vitae. https://www.wm.edu/as/psych-sciences/documents/cvs/barnet_cv.pdf ***I didn’t have access to read the research articles to give Dr. Barnet credit and to not plagiarize, I included his CV which lists both research studies that derived the results.
- 3Ioli, Janet. https://www.janetioli.com/uncategorized/5-signs-you-are-not-coachable/
- 4Mind Tools Content Team. https://www.mindtools.com/asbakxx/dwecks-fixed-and-growth-mindsets
- 5Skinner Box. https://practicalpie.com/skinners-box-experiment/
- 6Wang, Feiyi. Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. https://neuro.wharton.upenn.edu/community/winss_scholar_blog2/
- 7Hudlicka E. Virtual training and coaching of health behavior: an example from mindfulness meditation training. Patient Educ Couns. 2013 Aug;92(2):160-6. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2013.05.007. Epub 2013 Jul 1. PMID: 23809167; PMCID: PMC3970714.
- 8DataDome Inc. https://www.datadome.com/assessments/leadership/ ***I am certified through Datadome to administer and facilitate sessions with these assessments. This reference takes you to their website so you can click on each and get an idea of each assessment, but I am treating this reference as an acknowledgment of their Trademarked information that I have access to for the simplicity of this reference section (textbooks, slides, presentation, etc)
- 9De Nardi, Pashchenko, Porapakkarm. The Lifetime Costs of Bad Health. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23963/w23963.pdf
- 10Mindfulness Women. 5 Ways Self Development Improves Your Health & Wellness. https://www.mindfulnesswomen.com/blog/5-ways-self-development-improves-your-health-amp-wellness
- 11ICA Positive Psychology Module. 2021.
- 12Moore, Catherine. Positive Daily Affirmations: Is There a Science Behind It? Positive Psychology.com. March 4, 2019. https://positivepsychology.com/daily-affirmations/