Conversation with Alice Greene
On April 9, 2012, Alice green of ahealthylifestyleworks.com was interviewed, (Personal phone conversation April 9, 2012). Alice Greene calls herself a Healthy Lifestyle Coach as opposed to a Health and Wellness coach. Alice is a certified coach and has her certification in personal training. As for her formal education, she has a Bachelor of Science degree in a field unrelated to nutrition much like myself. Alice was very personable and shared some interesting findings about her coaching. She said that one of the problems with traditional diets is that they are based on ‘being good”. Then when one deviates, they feel badly about themselves, give up and then go back to their old habits. However when one makes healthier choices that feel good, physically and emotionally, one will naturally want to do more of those things. She also said, “The more healthful things you do for yourself, no matter how small, the more likely you will keep doing them. The bottom line is that if you do what feels good rather than trying to be good, you will have more success in sticking with your healthy lifestyle and reaching your goal of being fit and healthy. The answer is not creating a diet program that feels good, but rather an active and healthy lifestyle that feels so good, you will want to stick with it, so that you will be fit and healthy for the long haul. What really matters is how you feel physically in your body and how you feel emotionally about yourself.”
Alice indicated that she felt that a two year coaching program was ultimately necessary for most people to permanently change their eating behaviors, because often when they get derailed shortly after losing weight, they forget what tools they initially used to overcome those challenges and often need to be reminded. What stood out about Alice’s philosophy was the notion of “feeling good” verses “being good”. Once a person changes their lifestyle for the better and feels better about themselves, they are more likely to do what feels good rather than get back into their old routine that did not feel very good at all. After speaking with her, this coach will be sure to focus more on the client feeling good about themselves through powerful questions and acknowledgments, rather than on their compliance to a particular way of eating.
Conversation with Claudette Pelletier-Hannah
The last person interviewed was Claudette Pelletier Hannah of weightandwellnesscoach.ca, (personal phone conversation April 10, 2012). She said that she had been a coach for about 10 years and a weight loss coach for about five years. She went on to say that although the entry point is now weight loss, it is still basically about “wellness,” meaning that physical and emotional health are her main criteria for success. Like the others interviewed before her, she does not tell her clients what to eat. She developed a program called “The Taste of Now,” which is a two-part program that brings consciousness to all aspects of food and eating. Her website says, “It’s about how, where, when and why you eat – designed to set you free from the struggle with food and excess weight.” She said that it was not about “what to eat”, but more about “how to eat”. It involves telling the truth about what you are eating, rather than telling stories about it or justifying it and then taking full responsibility for it verses pretending that there are no consequences. She also asked her clients to eat slowly, mindfully and when they were hungry, and then to stop eating when they felt satisfied. She found that when people had a lot of weight to lose, it was more helpful to have them start out that way, rather than telling them what to eat and what not to eat, and then eventually when they were ready, they became more interested in the nutritional aspect of their eating. She mainly supports making small changes, one after the other, depending on one’s readiness. An example of that philosophy might be adding one thing to one’s diet and then removing something else. This would involve small changes that one hardly even notices. Therefore, it is not a complete reversal of how they did things, but rather a gradual change in lifestyle. She normally works for 12 weeks with each client and has found that for many people that is enough.
Claudette feels that the most important thing for most clients is “readiness”. “Once they are ready,” she says, “they usually make some lasting changes in their lifestyle.” Sometimes their lives will improve in a whole lot of ways, because what she does treats the person as a whole, not just a person wanting to lose weight. Most importantly, many clients will say, “It’s not about the weight anymore.” In other words, the weight was just a symptom of unresolved life issues that they had now dealt with in one form or another. As a result, they were feeling much better about themselves, and losing weight was more of a side effect of their renewed sense of well-being rather than a means to an end. The most important question is, “What small change are you ready to start with that you think you can keep forever? Something that you feel ready for, something that feels easy.” In the end, she feels the ones who are ready and do the work will enjoy success!
What stood out about Claudette was the idea of “readiness”, because often a client will say that they are ready to adopt a healthy lifestyle, but through their actions, the coach can see that in reality, they were not yet ready to commit to any permanent changes. This would be a good time to focus on what’s going on underneath, and why perhaps the client is not ready to change, but might be ready to gain clarity around the issue and go easier on herself, which in itself is a great accomplishment for many people. It was also noteworthy that she advocated making small changes one at a time. This “baby step” approach is so important in making lifestyle changes, because it gives the person the necessary time it takes to incorporate these lifestyle changes permanently.
Conclusion
Coaching is an ongoing process that is based on what the client wants to accomplish rather than what the coach wants to accomplish. It is important to coach the client at the pace they feel comfortable and ask them to make small changes one at a time, ones that they can live with indefinitely without feeling overwhelmed. One of the most important things to come out of this research is the importance of treating the client as a whole person. Each coach either said this directly or alluded to the fact that when a client is coached around losing weight, they are in reality being life-coached, and the weight loss happens as a result of them making better choices and thus feeling better about themselves, not as a result of putting them on a diet.
Three factors are worth highlighting based on what the interviewed coaches said. The client must be emotionally ready to make changes, these changes must be in line with the client’s core values, and these changes have to feel good to the client. If any of these three criteria are not met, it is the opinion of this coach that the client will not be successful in making any sustainable lifestyle changes. In addition, it is very important that the client decide for themselves what is best and then determine what changes in their lifestyle they are willing to make, rather than be told what changes they need to make. Coaching is about supporting the client in feeling good, whether they lose weight or do not lose weight. Until now, it was always about the weight. In the end, it is actually about how the client feels on the inside. Because when a person feels good on the inside, the outside is bound to follow suit!
References
Bork, Chere, Telephone interview. 5, April 2012.
Greene, Alice, Telephone interview. 9 April 2012.
Pelletier-Hannah, Claudette, Telephone interview. 10, April 2012.