The What, the How and the Why of Lifestyle Improvement
Health and wellness folks are sometimes confused about the role each professional might play in helping individuals to live their best life possible. Our clients are seeking to be healthier by losing weight, managing stress, stopping smoking, becoming less isolated, and often, managing a health challenge of some kind. To do so they need:
- excellent wellness information
- great treatment (if that is called for)
- and a way to make the lifestyle changes that will ensure lasting success.
So, who is responsible for what?
Fitness trainers, rehabilitation therapists, physical therapists, dietician, various treatment professionals and health educators can help their clients/patients to know what lifestyle behavioral changes will move them towards improved health and wellbeing. What we often hear from these medical and wellness pros is frustration with a lack of success on their client’s part in making the recommended changes and making them last. The reality is, most people simply don’t know that much about how to change the ingrained habits of a lifetime.
The physical therapist works with their client in their session and sends them home with exercises that must be done every day. The dietician creates a fantastic meal plan that their client must put into practice. The fitness professional creates a tailor-made workout plan, but their client needs to exercise on their own, not just in front of their trainer.
Health educators, treatment professionals, etc. provide the
WHAT
Health and Wellness Coaches provide the
HOW
Our Clients find their
WHY
Everyone’s challenge is the how. It takes more then will power and motivation. What is often lacking is an actual well-thought out plan that the client has co-created with the help of someone who can provide support, accountability and a well-developed behavioral change methodology. Translating the lifestyle prescription into action and fitting it in to an already busy life is often where, despite good intentions, our clients struggle. This is where having a trusted ally in the cause of one’s wellness pays off.
As field of health and wellness coaching grows, the challenge coaches sometimes face is clarity about their own role. Sometimes the confusion is all about the what and the how. For coaches to be proficient at “writing” the lifestyle prescription they need additional qualifications. It becomes a question of Scope of Practice.
To guide coaches the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaches (NBHWC) has developed a Scope of Practice Statement. Here is the part most relevant to our question.
“While health and wellness coaches per se do not diagnose conditions, prescribe treatments, or provide psychological therapeutic interventions, they may provide expert guidance in areas in which they hold active, nationally recognized credentials, and may offer resources from nationally recognized authorities such as those referenced in NBHWC’s Content Outline with Resources.” (https://nbhwc.org/scope-of-practice/ )
If coaches can “wear two hats” professionally they can combine the what and the how. Otherwise the key is to coordinate with other wellness professionals or work with the lifestyle prescription that their client already has.
Beyond the what and the how is the why. The “why” of behavior is all about motivation – initiating and sustaining behavioral change efforts by drawing upon the energy and desire to do so. The key here once again is the question of who is responsible for supplying this. People may initiate behavior based upon external motivation – the urging and cheering on of others, the fear of negative outcomes. In order to sustain that motivation, it has to come from within. The challenge here for all wellness professionals is to help our client to discover their own unique sources of motivation.
Seasoned wellness professionals realize they can’t convince or persuade anyone to be well. However, when we help our clients discover their own important sources of what motivates them, they discover their why. Motivation is fuel. Now with the aid of a coach our clients can find the vehicle to put in. They know what they need to change. Now they have a way how to change and grow, and they know themselves, why. (See our previous post Motivation Plus Mobilization: Coaching For Success At Lifestyle Improvement. https://wp.me/pUi2y-mn)
(A modified form of this blog has appeared in the Medical Fitness Network)
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.
In the last ten years the field of health and wellness coaching has continued to evolve as a professional filed with standards, credentials (
1. Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change,2nd Ed. (2014), Michael Arloski. (
3. Co-Active Coaching, 4th Ed., (2018) Laura Whitworth, Karen Kimsey-House, Henry Kinsey-House & Phil Sandahl. (
4. Changing to Thrive: Using the Stages of Change to Overcome the Top Threats to Your Health and Happiness (2016), Janice & James Prochaska. (
5. Becoming a Professional Life Coach: Lessons from the Institute of Life Coach Training, (2015) Patrick Williams & Diane Menendez. (
8. The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, 2nd Ed. (2012) Dan Buettner. (
9. Your Journey To A Healthier Life: Paths of Wellness Guided Journal, Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., (2017) Michael Arloski. (
14. Raw Coping Power: From Stress to Thriving, (2014) Joel Bennett. (
Coaching for Better Sleep and Napping
Sleep and Rest are Keys to Wellness
For the very best in wellness and health coach training look to REAL BALANCE GLOBAL WELLNESS SERVICES, INC. Over 10,000 wellness & health coaches trained worldwide. 
For more about effective coaching refer to Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change, 2nd Ed., by Michael Arloski, Ph.D., PCC, CWP, NBC-HWC. 
and to Your Journey to a Healthier Life (Paths of Wellness Guided Journals) by the same author. 
Key Number Three: Understand the Rejection Dimension of Illness Identification
Seeking Connection
RESOURCES for helping others and helping ourselves during this crisis:
Observing by Scanning
This blog was taken from a chapter in Dr. Arloski’s forthcoming book Masterful Health & Wellness Coaching: Deepening Your Craft, being published soon by Whole Person Associates. 
The heart of coaching is the coaching relationship itself. Creating that alliance supplies the client with a trusted resource for support that can be relied upon unconditionally. As the coach exhibits the qualities that make up great coaching presence (supplying the facilitative conditions of coaching) (
For more about effective coaching refer to Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change, 2nd Ed., by Michael Arloski, Ph.D., PCC, CWP, NBC-HWC. 
and to Your Journey to a Healthier Life (Paths of Wellness Guided Journals) by the same author. 
The life work of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (
MOTIVATIONAL SPECTRUM
Autonomous behavior is about choice. Deci, in an effective video interview (
For over twenty-five years I worked as a psychologist and devoted much of my focus to helping people with stress-related disorders. I was an early adopter of the use of biofeedback and relaxation training methods. Combining those modalities with psychotherapy, my work was able to be of great value to clients suffering from muscle-tension and migraine headaches, a wide variety of gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia, Raynaud’s Disease, and many more issues. I delivered hundreds of stress management workshops and became so involved in the field that I eventually became President of The Ohio Society For Behavioral Health and Biofeedback.
For thousands of years people have found ways to bring about this PNS arousal. Methods of meditation, breathing, movement, prayer, chanting, etc. all have the potential to bring about this state of profound relaxation. Harvard cardiologist, Herbert Benson, coined the term ‘Relaxation Response’, and his groundbreaking 1975 book by that title created a whole new way to approach dealing with stress. His research since then has continued to demonstrate the profound utility of bringing out this quieting response through mind-body practices. Benson managed to demystify meditation and to distinguish it from religious practices. In more recent times, Jon Kabat Zinn has done the same with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction techniques. Bringing out the Relaxation Response allows us to recover from stress. I will be delving into how to coach clients to do this in my next blog posting.
There is, of course, a point where the stress becomes excessive and this is where we see this positive stress become Distress. This is where one’s stress related disorder may kick in. The headache comes on, the difficulty sleeping begins, the gastrointestinal problems start, the skin reacts, etc. Practicing some kind of method that brings out our Relaxation Response on a regular basis may, however, bring our baseline level of stress down enough for us to remain in eustress longer and perhaps not cause us to cross over into distress. Thus, the wellness coach may work with a client to help them find a way to integrate some kind of regular practice that brings out the Relaxation Response. Performing such practice could be an activity the client keeps track of and sets up accountability agreements about with the coach.
Advancing The Craft Of Health & Wellness Coaching 