The 4 C’s of Health and Wellness Coaching

All Brad Cooper

Welcome to the catalyst coaching. This is an episode. My name is Brad Cooper. I’ll be your host and the CEO for us corporate wellness co, founder of the Catalyst Coaching Institute. Let’s start off by talking about this word catalyst a lot behind that. The biggest thing for now is the concept that goes back to your high school or College Chemistry class where you’ve got two elements and they won’t mix or they won’t mix fast enough, and so what do you do? You throw in a catalyst and then things happen. We want to be that catalyst for you. There are a lot of podcasts out there on wellness, fitness, nutrition, weightlifting, different diets, but there’s nothing out there to help wellness coaches be better wellness coaches, so if you’re a future wealth and health and wellness coach, if you’re a current health and wellness coach, if you’re looking for ideas, if you’re looking to become better at what you do or where you’re heading with your career, that’s our goal. We want to be that catalyst. Now. We’re always looking for resources for our own team and we want to build on that by making these resources available to you as well.

Way this is going to be structured. It’s really going to be focused on the subtitle. You saw the art, science and business, a wellness coaching. It’s going to help you become a better coach. It’s going to help you develop your career. If you’re just thinking about wellness, coaching is going to help you make the right choices out of the gate instead of learning the hard way about which way to go, so that’s what we want to be for you and we’d love your help in making that happen, so if you’ve got questions, if you’ve got ideas, if you get things that you think would be helpful for us to share on this podcast, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Our contact information email is probably your best route. The email, his Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.Com. Again, that’s results at CatalystCoachingInstitute.Com.

Any ideas you’ve got, and of course anytime you have questions, we’re there for you as well. We’re going to focus on something called the three c’s and we’re gonna actually make it a fourth seat today, but the format for this podcast will be a mix. We want to throw a lot of stuff out there and and help you glean the things that that matters the most to you. The format for this podcast is going to include a variety of aspects. We’re going to invite experts in the field to come on and answer the questions that you’ve asked us. We’re going to look at research articles. One of the dangers for wellness coaches is to get pulled into many of the fads that are out there. You don’t want that to happen, so we’re gonna help you with that. We’re going to walk you through how to read an actual scientific research study and then how you can apply it.

We’re going to take some of the applied research and we’re gonna. Go through it in our podcasts and talk through. Now what can you do with now that the information is out there in the literature, what do we do with that? We’re going to interview coaches to share with you what they’ve learned about things like the National Board Exam, how coaching is fit into their life, the things that they’ve learned, being coaches for five, 10 or more years. The main aspect, we’ll focus on those three c’s and again today we’re going to make it a fourth c, and those three c’s are competence, credibility, and clientele, and the fourth c, while come back to that, that’s the structure of this. The emphasis will be placed on application. At the end of each podcast, I’ll provide a summary of the key items from either the interview or the overview or the research or whatever it is that we went through that time I’ll pull in the application piece the best I can to give you some sort of a take home or a next step as you move forward. We’re going to emphasize application that that is key to wellness coaching, and it’s key to this one.

With that, let’s go ahead and jump into this session’s overview. I’m going to take you through, and again, this is just an introductory podcast today. I just want to give you a flavor for the types of things you’re going to hear about, but we also didn’t want to just make it an introduction, so as part of this I’m going to go through the three c’s and we’re going to talk about how you can apply the initial pieces of that and then we’ll come back with each podcast and we’ll address each one of these at a deeper level over and over through a number of different tools and resources like we talked about earlier, the three c’s, competence, credibility and clientele. Our audience is quite varied. We have people listening to this who have never coached a single person has a health and wellness coach. Maybe you’ve been an athletic coach or triathlon coach or or you’ve coached your, your son or daughter’s athletic team, but in terms of health and wellness coaching, this is brand new to.

You’ve heard about it. You like the idea kind of seems to be a natural thing for you in terms of your life and what you love, but you’ve never actually done it. I get it. You’re out there. In fact, that’s a big part of audience. You’re thinking about it. We also have people who are experienced health and wellness coaches. You’ve been doing this for awhile. You want to be better. You want to grow your business. You want to increase your engagement in your workplace. You want to have more clients. We also have people that are integrating health and wellness coaching in with something else they’re doing. You’re a physical therapist. You’re a personal trainer, you’re a physician, a counselor, and you want to take these techniques that are tied to health and wellness and use those to be better at what you’re currently doing. I’ll try to address all three of those aspects as I talk about these three Cs of competence, credibility in clientele.

First of all, you’ve got competence. It doesn’t matter what profession you’re in. Competence has to play a leading role. Credibility clientele, those are great. They’re gonna be very short lived. If competence isn’t your focus, it’s got to be an ongoing pursuit and certainly has to be an ongoing pursuit as a professional health and wellness coach when it comes to health and wellness coaching. This area of competence is changed pretty recently in 2017. One of the most important aspects is selecting your training, your certification, expanded. There are a lot of options out there in terms of where to go to become a certified wellness coach. If you haven’t already gone through that, and I understand some of you have, but if you’re in the process of going through that, make absolutely certain that you look into something called the ice hwc. That’s the International Consortium for Health and Wellness coaching. You can.

You can look it up at ICHWC.org. That is the national board, if you will, to nonprofit organization. They do not provide a certification themselves. They are the oversight organization, so they’re approving programs that allow you to become board certified and you don’t want to go through a full program, spend the money on tuition, do all the studying and then find out that one wasn’t approved. Check out that website when you’re looking at your different certification options and make sure to pick something from from that list and then your second piece. Obviously, once you’ve found a couple of organizations from that list that makes sense to you in terms of the the Ich wc piece, then you want to make sure that you’ve got something that fits you personally. What’s the class size? Are you able to spend time with the instructors and what’s their background?

What kind of practical application we you get from that, so ask all those questions, but begin with the Ich wc just so you don’t have to start over. Once you’ve earned that certification from an accredited organization, then you’re ready to get started. However, like any professional, you’re going to want to make sure that the continuing education is part of your plan as well, and we’ll talk about some of those. Like I said, we’re going to go through some of the applied research training that you’ll get. Listening to this podcast will help build some of that that continued education in terms of the things you’ll learn regularly, reading big part of becoming a professional health and wellness coach and understanding how to look at the literature and review that and like I said, we’ll go through that. Will walk you through that. Some of you already know how to do it.

If you don’t, we’ll make sure that’s a topic in the future, so the first C is competence and the application is considered. Where are you in terms of your current level of competence and what your best next step you can take to enhancing that level. Get your calendar and figure out the start date of that next step. If you’re already certified, then what’s that conference you’re going to attend or what is that hour you’re going to set aside each week to do a literature review on some of the topics your clients are asking you about or what is that continued education course that you’re going to take? If you’re not yet certified, then your first step is going to be find a program that’s Ich, WC accredited, and get that process started. That is step one to this idea of competence. The second C is credibility.

Competence is a combination of your skills, your knowledge, your abilities, your gifts, credibility. It’s the awareness others have of your competence and increasing your in the eyes of your clients. Potential clients is a big part of how you’re going to grow your business as a wellness coach. Now, keep in mind when I say grow your business and I’ll use that phrase over and over as we go on through this podcast. If you don’t have your own coaching business, that still applies to you, so when you hear me say, Grow Your Business, I’m talking about growing your engagement. If you’re in a company, if you work at a hospital, if you’re working for a wellness company, growing your business means enhancing the engagement that your clients have. It’s enhancing the followup, the involvement, the number of people who are seeking out your coaching. Don’t write that phrase off just because you say, oh, I don’t have my own business.

You do. We all do, and it’s critical to understand that going in, so the application for the second c credibility is a don’t rush into establishing your credibility until the competence pieces in place, but at the same time, once you’ve earned your certification, don’t stall either. If you’re already a certified wellness coach, then what would be two things you could do or at least begin looking into over the next week that would allow others to tune into your credibility and again, we’ll get into some examples of those over time. We’re going to take a deep dive in each one of these. One of the things I didn’t mention when I was talking about the format is in addition to the interviews, the literature reviews and some of the coaching interviews that will go through all occasionally just take a podcast, just just you and me and I’ll take you through some business concepts or some of those things on how to build into these further that second seat credibility.

The third C, again, it’s competence, credibility, and the third C is clientele. Once you’ve established your competence and your credibility than it’s actually time to build your business or your clientele. This will involve a wide variety of marketing strategies, pricing formats, organizational elements, and again, repeating what I talked about and credibility. Building Your Business in quotes is not just something that applies to independent wellness coaches running your own external business. It applies to all of us. If you’re working for a wellness company or you’re working within an employer that provides wellness coaching to their employees or to outside resources, and maybe you’re not technically in the marketing department, you’re still growing your business. That engagement, that follow through, that desire for folks to connect with you as their coach that is growing your business. Clientele will take a deep dive into what that looks like in terms of pricing and marketing and sales and getting your name out there, but for now I want you to think about how many clients do you currently serve?

How could you build on the first two C’s, competence and credibility to measurably increase that figure over the next 30 days? Is there some special offers you could provide? Maybe you’ve got some people on the fence, they’ve been talking about hiring you as a wellness coach. Is there something you could do to get them off that fence? You’re talking about you within an organization. Is there something you could do to promote, maybe it’s a challenge you set up, but something you utilize to enhance people engaging with you, whether it’s internal or external business. More to come on all three of these, but I do want to mention one other one. You’ve got the three C’s, competence, credibility, clientele. There’s one other C, and we may not change the name to the four cs, but it’s critical and I was reminded of it this morning and it’s your calling is so important.

If you’re going to be, uh, an effective health and wellness coach regardless of your setting to remember. It’s your calling. I was out at the track this morning doing some intervals and I was frankly kind of grumpy. I wasn’t really in the mood to be doing it. I wasn’t feeling that good and just kind of going through the motions. As I was wrapping up, one of the last intervals of soccer coach and a few of the kids came over to the track. I was changing out of my spikes and put my running shoes on just to do a little warm down and they wind up at the starting line on the track and they started running and I just turned the coach and said, hey, what, what’s going on? And he said, well, they’ve got to run two miles in under 15 minutes, you know, to be part of the team.

He said, yeah, it’s going to be tough for some of them. And I looked at him and then about halfway into it, remember the two mile run about halfway into it, one of the kids was dropping off the back. So I just tucked in next to him and just starting talking to him and encouraging him and he talking about, you know, little tips here and there, back get your head up and using the arms and we can do this. Come on buddy, you got this, you can do this. And it was, it was so fun. And we got to the finish and he came in well under the required time. He really picked it up that last half and he just had this big smile on his face and I did a few more laps just forming down and he, he kind of wanted up to me as I was coming by and he goes, man, thanks so much, and I tell you what, my whole effect changed from when I got to that track and remember I love to run, so usually going to attract as fun for me.

It’s exciting, it’s energizing, it, it, it builds something that starts my day off, right? For some reason I didn’t have that this morning, but when I get to experience his pleasure, his enjoyment, his excitement about accomplishing this thing and that was fine and that just changed the morning and you get that, you understand that I wasn’t coaching. That’s not health and wellness coaching per se. I was just a guy out there encouraging somebody to be their best. Trying to be that catalyst, if you will, and I realized in that moment, wow, that’s what the calling is all about. We get to do this thing that changes lives. How exciting is that? So that’s the fourth C is remember your calling, you’re doing this for a reason. You got into wellness coaching because it mattered to you. You got into wellness coaching because you love influencing lives. You love being that catalyst to help people become their best selves. So don’t ever forget that in the midst of talking about competence and credibility and clientele, don’t forget that piece around calling because man, that’s where it’s exciting. That’s why we’re doing.

Let’s talk about where we’re going with this. I’ve shared with you the format. I wanted to give you a little flavor of what some of the podcasts will look like, but let’s talk about what’s coming. Some of the topics we’ve actually gone through in preparation for this and put together Alyssa 21 different topics. Let me just throw out a few of these. We’re going to have a couple of interviews with teams of coaches, a pair of coaches coming in next week that are not only board certified through the Ich WC, they were actually invited by the ICHWC to help develop future questions for the exam. Now, obviously they’re under confidentiality restrictions. They can’t tell you what the questions are going to be, but they can talk through the concept, they can talk through some of the things that you need to focus on as you prepare for that exam.

We’re going to have them in an upcoming podcast. We have another team of coaches coming in. It’ll give you a completely different perspective. They’re going to share with you their backgrounds, why they got into coaching in the first place, their favorite types of clients, what they do when they hit a struggle point with a client for some reason, what do they do? Then more the coach’s Perspective on health and wellness coaching and if you’re thinking about going into coaching or maybe you’ve lost that feeling of a calling for, that’s when you’re not going to want to miss other topics. I mentioned to you all cover some things around the business of coaching, things around marketing, pricing, growing your business, that type of thing. Applied Science. I’ll occasionally pick a research article ran across one this morning that you’ll find very, very interesting. We’ll just walk through that.

We’re not going to bore you by reading all the details of it, but I’ll just hit the highlights and then we’ll talk through, so what does that mean for your clients? We’ll talk a little bit about personal wellness as a wellness coach. It’s a little different. We’re living this. We’re not just talking about it and if we are just talking about it, we’re missing out, so we’ll talk a little bit about personal wellness and how that can be applied in your career and your life will do a little bit on social media. We’re going to talk about evidence based practices for you as a coach, avoiding the fads and focusing on where’s the evidence? Is that what we’re sharing with our clients? We’re going to hit things around temperament, motivational interviewing, intrinsic motivation. Again, your questions are always welcome. You can contact us through Linkedin, facebook, twitter, number of different resources.

If you’ve got certain things you’d like us to cover, please send them our way. We’re going to talk about time management. We’re going to talk about lessons learned. I think some of you who are currently in the field running your own business or running a wellness program within your organization. I’ve been doing this for 12 years as a ceo for us corporate wellness. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. We’ve learned from those, and I’ll share many of those with you. We’ll even talk about family wellness. We’re going to interview some some folks about how that’s integrated into their family and not just on a personal level, you know, mental health is a big area right now. We’re going to bring somebody in that can talk through how those are connected as well. Lot of different topics coming up. Thank you so much for joining us.

I’m. If you can’t tell, I’m excited about this podcast and the influence, the catalyst that potentially it can be in your life in those that you’re serving. One of the phrases we use in our organization over and over is the phrase #better than yesterday. Think about that better than yesterday. To me, that’s what wellness is all about. It’s not about me comparing myself to you. It’s not about you trying to become somebody else. It’s not about trying to help all the employees become like the wellness committee. It’s about helping each and every individual become better than yesterday, helping make their tomorrows just a little bit better than our today’s. So as we sign off, I’m going to sign off with that. This is our opportunity to be better, to choose better and Doug on it to live a life that’s #better than yesterday. Thanks for joining us. I’ll see you next time.