Crossing the Line How many times have you felt that there is a fine line between where your role as a Fitness professional ends and where dealing with a client's personal issues begins - after you have crossed it?
NLP Trainer and Coach Pam Rigden explains how developing your coaching skills will help you avoid getting out of your depth with a client.
Why Life Coaching?
If you have ever felt you would like to be able offer MORE to your clients then Life Coaching is for you. It reaches the parts that more traditional methods cannot reach and can seriously improve the results you achieve with your clients.
How does Coaching work?
Great Coaches recognise that the real skill in Life Coaching is not offering solutions, as does a consultant, but eliciting the solutions from the real expert - the client!
Using exactly this approach, Life Coaches are highly successful in helping people achieve their fitness goals, which illustrates the point that it is not the knowledge that we have, but rather the process we use that facilitates change in an individual.
Learning how to coach involves developing a skill set that enables you to do just that - to help clients work out for themselves how they can best include exercise in their lives and start to eat more healthily.
Coaches do this by asking thought provoking questions to help their clients clarify their goals and what they need to do to acheive them. Using tools such as The Balance Wheel (see below), clients identify their priorities, which enables them to take appropriate action based on those priorities. By providing ongoing structure and by holding their clients accountable for the actions they have said they want to take coaches enable their clients to stick with the programme.
Developing their own strategies in this way is infinately more empowering and motivating than being told what to do - a complete no no in coaching and yet something which most of us in the Fitness Industry are guilty of ;
"Do this exercise, eat this, don't eat that".
Not surprising then that retention rates across the UK are so low!
Not only that, this 'advise' is offered at the behavioural level; it doesn't allow for who clients perceive themselves to be, and the values and beliefs they hold. Consequently we often find ourselves out of our depth with clients simply because they bring more to the relationship than their behaviour. People are not just what they do and don't do.
For example, we have all heard clients say things like 'I'm just a fat person' and 'I'll never be slim'. Even where these clients take on board your advise and make a change,because the old beliefs are still running the show it is often not sustainable . If we are to truly succeed with these clients we need to go beyond telling them what to do, we need to be able to work with their thoughts and feelings, and facilitate their progress through such blocks and fears. What coaching offers is a complementary skill set with which we can safely do this.
As a Fitness Professional you are ideally placed to enable people to effect real and lasting change in their lives -afterall, you already have the knowledge and expertise of a consultant - just imagine how much more effective you will be with the facilitative skills of a Coach?
BALANCE WHEEL EXERCISE
As people's lives get busier and more complex the challenge your clients face in finding the time to address their health and fitness needs has never been greater. The Balance Wheel is just one tool a Coach might use with such a client.
The eight sections in the wheel represent balance. Seeing the centre of the wheel as 0 and the outer edge as 10, rank your level of satisfaction with each area of your life by drawing a new outer edge. The areas include career, money, health and fitness, friends and family, love and romance, personal growth, fun and recreation and physical environment
Imagine how smooth/bumpy your journey though life would be were this a real wheel? Which areas need attention?
Earn up to £1000 and spend a week in on a Greek Island
Pam Rigden facilitates a number of workshops at her Greek Island base for people interested in Self Care and Personal Development. Pam invites Fitness Professionals, and other Practitioners, who would like to learn more about NLP and Coaching, to organise a group of their own clients to attend a workshop. Pam acknowledges your role by paying commission on course fees.
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