The Growth Mindset vs. The Fixit Mindset in Coaching

“We define mindsets as core assumptions that we have about domains or categories of things that orient us to a particular set of expectations, explanations, and goals. So to put that a little bit more simply, mindsets are ways of viewing reality, that shape, what we expect, what we understand, and what we want to do.” Alia J. Crum, PhD. (https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/mindset-matters-how-embrace-benefits-stress)

As I grew up, I had the mindset that I was not mechanically inclined. Sure, I could do some things, and had served as a third hand for my high school best friend as he fixed up his old Ford with the Thunderbird engine. I, however, thought that my talents lay elsewhere. After college I bought my first ten-speed bicycle and enjoyed riding it immensely. I could change a flat and tighten up my brakes, but still held the belief that I was just not mechanically gifted. Then, in my doctoral program I started riding with a fellow student who had just left his job as a full-time bicycle mechanic. Under his tutelage I slowly opened up to doing more of my own repairs. My mindset started to give way to changing. When I had accomplished the feat of repacking my own wheel bearings, I realized that doing mechanical work was not a “gift” one was blessed with or not, it was a learning process, and the important thing was – I could do it!

The point in telling this story is that our mindsets shape who we are, or rather, who we think we are. And they shape how we coach.

Stanford University Professor and research psychologist, Alia Crum’s work on mindset helps us understand its importance and relevance to our field of wellness coaching.

“Mindsets are core assumptions we make about the things and processes in the world that orient us to a particular set of expectations, explanations, and goals, for example: “aging is an inevitable decline”, “cancer is a catastrophe”, “healthy foods are disgusting and depriving.” The world is complex and uncertain and yet we need to predict what will happen in order to act. Mindsets are our human way of simplifying and understanding a complex reality. The mindsets we adopt are not right/wrong, true/false, but they do have an impact. Mindsets can change our reality by shaping what we pay attention to, how we feel, what we do, and what our bodies prioritize and prepare to do.” (https://www.parulsomani.com/post/mindsets-q-a-with-dr-alia-crum-stanford-psychology)

Check out Dr. Crum’s work on how our mindsets create our own reality and affect our responses to exercise, food and stress. (https://psychology.stanford.edu/people/alia-crum)

The concept of the Growth Mindset vs. the Fixed Mindset was pioneered by a Stanford Colleague of Crum’s: Dr. Carol Dweck. Her work showed us the tremendous effects of the mindset we hold about intelligence. Is your intelligence fixed, or malleable? Here are some thoughts from an excellent blog about Dweck’s work. “Your view of yourself can determine everything. If you believe that your qualities are unchangeable — the fixed mindset — you will want to prove yourself correct over and over rather than learning from your mistakes.” “…as you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another— how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.” “In fact Dweck takes this stoic approach, writing: “in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from.” “We can still learn from our mistakes. The legendary basketball coach John Wooden says that you’re not a failure until you start to assign blame. That’s when you stop learning from your mistakes – you deny them.”
(https://fs.blog/carol-dweck-mindset/)

Growth Mindset vs. Fixit Mindset in Coaching

Allow me to extrapolate on Dwek’s work and think of the mindset we hold in coaching both towards ourselves and our client. The wellness field is founded on the principles and concepts of people like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others who saw people being drawn towards actualizing their potential. This emphasis on personal growth is also foundational to the coaching field. When we work with a client do we see their personal growth as the ultimate goal of coaching, or do we view coaching primarily as problem solving? Growth mindset or ‘fixit’ mindset?

The Growth Mindset in coaching is about possibilities. In coaching we do strategic problems solving, but so much more. We ask “What’s possible? What could be?” We operate on a growth mindset instead of asking “What’s wrong and how can we fix it?”

Remember Alia Crum’s words “mindsets are ways of viewing reality, that shape, what we expect, what we understand, and what we want to do.” When we approach a coaching session as a time when we help our client to work on their ‘issues’, we may be still operating from a clinical mindset, or at least from a consultant mindset, instead of a coaching mindset. Are we always looking for a problem to solve? Many consultants name their business XXXX Solutions, Inc. Are we framing coaching as mostly a solution-finding process? I see books on coaching that hold out the promise of teaching you a method to get to the heart of the problem/issue quickly and effectively. Is that what coaching is all about?

Perhaps our client comes to us to work on managing their stress better. If we take a problem-solving approach to stress management, we are flirting with futility (as well as infinity). With the Fixit Mindset, there will always be a problem to work on, one arising as another is resolved, keeping the client in a continual game of “whack a mole.”

Evoke Transformation

The authors of Co-Active Coaching (a truly foundational book of the field of life coaching) set out four Cornerstones of Coaching to give us a foundation to build on. (https://coactive.com/resources/books/coactive-coaching-4th-edition)
The fourth Cornerstone is EVOKE TRANSFORMATION. We are urged to approach coaching as a growth process, one that results in the person transforming into their best self, living their best life possible. When we coach from a Growth Mindset, we are framing the whole process through that lens. We are coaching for what’s possible, for the actualization of that person’s potential, for what could be.

While we may have a client who simply wants to get more sleep or prevent the onset of a chronic illness. Perhaps a fairly straightforward behavioral process based on sound coaching structure enables them to succeed with just that. Yet, we are serving our client best when we interact with them in such a way that we are honoring their autonomy, holding them to be “naturally creative, resourceful and whole.” (The first of the Cornerstones of Coaching.). Who knows what our client may discover on their coaching journey if we are approaching the coaching process with a whole-person approach and a Growth Mindset.

Part of our challenge is that most of our clients come to us with a Fixit Mindset of their own. They are used to working with consultants that analyze their problem and make recommendations. While that works fine for treatment, it doesn’t really fit what we do in coaching.

Some clients also show up with no discernable ‘problems’. Their health may be just fine, for now. The wise coach will praise the person for their good health and inquire if they have a conscious plan for how to stay that way. So, in effect, prevention itself fits the Growth Mindset better than a Fixit Mindset. As we explain how coaching works and build the coaching alliance, we help our clients to make a mindset shift of their own.

Default to Growth

Mindsets are like default settings. When we have made the shift from a Fixit Mindset to a Growth Mindset it is what we default to, over and over again. Of course, we help our clients to solve problems, to identify and overcome barriers, to do strategic thinking, brainstorming and more. With a Growth Mindset the problems are solved in order for the person to grow, not just as an end unto themselves.

Maslow’s theory of Self-Actualization always maintained that we human beings have a natural, innate drive towards actualizing our potentials. Barriers arise that hold us back and prevent us from moving forward in that actualization process. But when we are able to remove those barriers the growth process takes over and we grow and thrive. Coach with the lofty goal of transformation.

Michael Arloski, Ph.D., PCC, NBC-HWC is CEO and Founder of Real Balance Global Wellness – a world leader in health and wellness coach training (https://realbalance.com/). Doctor Arloski is a pioneering architect of the field of health and wellness coaching. He and his company have trained thousands of coaches around the world.

Structuring Great Wellness Coaching Sessions – Part 3 Accountability and Support

This is the third of a three-part series on Coaching Structure. In our first blog (https://realbalancewellness.wordpress.com/2021/08/26/structuring-great-wellness-coaching-sessions-part-one-how-to-get-started/) we showed how a coach can use structure by Co-Creating The Agenda for the session to get off to a great start. In our second blog – Structuring Great Wellness Coaching Sessions – Part 2 Process and Progress (https://realbalancewellness.wordpress.com/2021/10/18/structuring-great-wellness-coaching-sessions-part-2-process-and-progress/} we explored how effective processing leads to insight, understanding and paves the way to co-creating the Next Steps the client needs to create progress.

The Accountability Agreement

As we finish up our Next Steps part of the coaching structure in our session, we still need to arrive at clarity with our client about how they will be holding themselves accountable to follow through on their Next Steps and how we, the coach, can help.

You might say that if there was a singular contribution of coaching, in general, that put it on the map, it was accountability. In the early development of life coaching/business coaching, etc., clients sought out a way to be more accountable to themselves to accomplish the goals they were striving for. Sometimes the client was in a business structure where they were at the top of the reporting chain, so who was helping them be accountable? The value coaches provided with accountability quickly demonstrated that coaching was worth investing in.

The Key to Effective Accountability

Ultimately a client is accountable to themselves. Their coach is not their supervisor, manager, teacher or parent. The key is to set up and continuously convey through carefully chosen language that the client is accountable to themselves, not the coach. Accountability needs to be felt internally not as an external force applied by someone else. Yet, the coach needs to do something to help the client with accountability. How do they do it?

The coach supplies two things:
• A rationale for the importance of accountability and tracking behavior.
• The structure which the client uses to make accountability work and continue to create progress.

Tracking Behavior

Clients have often attempted to make lifestyle improvements without the aid of a true Wellness Plan. They sometimes have not even kept track of their progress in a measurable way. A target is set ( X number of pounds, a certain distance covered in a race, for example) but the day-to-day grind of getting to that target can fade away without consistent persistence and feedback. Not having a clear picture of how consistent the client is being allows for self-deception to leak in. The person “thinks” that they are exercising regularly, but are they?

Research shows us that the people who self-monitor their wellness efforts succeed the most. (https://www.obesityaction.org/resources/self-monitoring-the-way-to-successful-weight-management/) While it may be laborious to keep a food log, or even to use a phone app, the results support the effort. When self-monitoring is combined with live coaching (as opposed to simply the use of a digital app alone) it would seem we have the best of both worlds.

One of the best questions in coaching is: “How will you know when you are being successful?”

When the coach asks this question, even the most reluctant client will admit that they have to figure out some way to keep track of their efforts. It’s not always easy. I remember one client who said, “I like to track things…when I’m being successful!” However, facing the lack of progress can spur the coach and client on to examining strategies and making adjustments.

Co-creating Accountability Agreements

Maintaining the Coaching Mindset is crucial to setting up effective accountability agreements. This is where a Client-Centered Co-Creative Approach works best. When a coach slips into the prescriptive, consultative mindset we hear words like this:
• “I want you to…”
• “I need you to…”
• “You ought to…”
• “You should…”

“I want you to walk four days for twenty minutes each time next week.” “You ought to be drinking at least X number of ounces of water each day.” It’s easy to take charge and state what you, the coach, thought was obvious from your conversation around Next Steps. When the coach does this, they take power and autonomy away from their client.

How much different it sounds when the Coaching Mindset comes through. “So, you’ve decided on walking between now and our next appointment. Tell me about how often and how long to walk would be right for you to have a successful week.”

Accountability Methods

The most common form that accountability takes is when the client agrees to a commitment to simply report on their progress at the next coaching session. This usually works very well for most Action Steps. Coach and client write down this commitment and the coach makes sure to ask about it at the Check-In portion of the next coaching appointment.

At times, however, a lapse of seven to fourteen days between appointments may not be optimal for practicing a new behavior or seeking to make progress on an action steps that requires greater frequency. For example, beginning practicing relaxation training needs to be done fairly often during a week. Especially because it is a very new behavior to remember to perform, a system of more frequent accountability may work better. Let’s say that our client recognizes this (perhaps because the coach challenged them around it) and knows they need to connect with their accountability resource (the coach) more often. Coach and client agree that the client will email or text the coach every second or third day and report on their progress.

Don’t be a reminder service. As we say, “There are apps for that.” When a client asks for a reminder to perform their Action Step you and your client are best off if your gently refuse. Offer instead to have the client contact you (email, text, etc.) when they have actually completed the behavior. This encourages greater self-monitoring by the client and more independence which will pay off in the long run.

When wrapping up the session, here’s another important tip:

Ask your client to recall and restate to you what they have made commitments to doing as Action Steps, and how Accountability will work. This has much more power than when you tell them what has been agreed to.

The Importance of Support

Coaching for Connectedness is a vital part of Health & Wellness Coaching. We know that people who lack social support have much higher rates of all the major chronic health challenges. Exploring what sources of support a client has is an essential part of any initial Discovery or Foundation Session. When clients lack support we may see if our client wants to make that an Area of Focus for their Wellness Plan and consciously work on expanding it.

Unfortunately, coaches don’t always include checking out support as part of the Coaching Structure. When we have co-created an Action Step with our client it is important to ask:

“So, who or what else in your life can support you in doing this?”

Make this question part of how you conclude working on each and every Action Step. You, the coach will be providing support but how else can our client find support for their wellness efforts?

The Wind Beneath Your Wings

Help your client to seek out and distinguish who or what in their life will be a positive and encouraging source of support. Critical, negative, cynical and sarcastic people need not apply! Support from positive people can be the “Verbal Persuasion” or cheering on that Albert Bandura talks about as a way to build Self-Efficacy. (See my blog “Lessons From Albert Bandura For Wellness Coaches” https://realbalancewellness.wordpress.com/wpadmin/post.php?post=843&action=edit } Perhaps even more powerful is the type of support where others actually do the same activity as the client’s action step, and do it with them. This may take the form of an individual such as a walking buddy, or a group, such as a hiking club. Also, don’t forget about sources of support like a pet dog – the four-legged fitness trainer!

Internal Barriers and How to Ask for Support

Involving others in one’s Wellness Plan seems like a no-brainer, but such is not always the case. Your client may be inhibited to do so for various reasons. Explore their reluctance with them. You may discover that your client sees it as a sign of weakness to ask others for help. They may have had severe lessons about this earlier in their lives. They may also be embarrassed to involve others until they have had a measure of success on their own. Imagine the overweight client who doesn’t want to share yet another weight-loss effort with their friends until they feel better about their own progress.

A frequent source of support that is called upon by many clients is their partner, spouse, etc. Here the vital step may be having a crucial conversation with that person about exactly how they can be supportive, and to identify exactly what is not helpful. The coach can help with rehearsal conversations and by offering to set up accountability around just setting a time for the client to have their important conversation with their partner.

Wrapping Up

In the last couple of minutes, it’s time to wrap up the coaching session. Coaches can do this in a number of ways.

• Summarize the highlights of the sessions ¬– what was covered.
• Ask the client to share what their “take-aways”, their essential learnings from the session were.
• Ask the client to repeat what their Action Steps will be between now and the next appointment and what Accountability will be for each.
• Confirm the next appointment.
• The coach may or may not add a comment from the “Metaview” – the Big Picture of the course of the coaching to give perspective on the client’s progress.
• The coach my share something inspiring, often in the form of Acknowledgement of the client’s efforts at lifestyle improvement.

Coaching structure is your friend. Don’t make it your master. Use it well and at the same time be ready to “Dance In The Moment”.

Michael Arloski, Ph.D., PCC, NBC-HWC is CEO and Founder of Real Balance Global Wellness Services, Inc. (www.realbalance.com). Dr. Arloski is a pioneering architect of the field of health and wellness coaching. He and his company have trained thousands of coaches around the world. Dr. Arloski’s newest book is Masterful Health & Wellness Coaching: Deepening Your Craft https://wholeperson.com/store/masterful-health-and-wellness-coaching.html