Inaugural Catalyst Coaching Podcast – A Conversation on Health and Wellness Coaching
Welcome to the Catalyst Coaching Podcast. This is episode 1. My name is Brad Cooper and I’ll be your host. I am the CEO for US Corporate Wellness, and founder of the Catalyst Coaching Institute.
Let’s start off by talking about this word “Catalyst,” there is 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 health and wellness coach, if you’re a current health and wellness coach, if you’re looking for ideas, or 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.
The way this is going to be structured or focused is on the subtitle you saw on the description of this Podcast. The art, science and business, of 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 this is going to help you make the right choices out of the gate, instead of learning the hard way about which way to go. That’s what we want to be for you, and we’d love your help in making that happen. so, if you have questions, if have ideas, if you have 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 is results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com. Any ideas you’ve have, 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 going to actually make a fourth C today. We want to throw a lot of stuff out there and help you glean the things that matter 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 going to 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 talk through it in our podcasts.
Now what can you do with the information that 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 fits into their life and the things that they’ve learned being coaches for five, 10 or more years. The main aspect, we’ll focus on is 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, will come back to that.
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, overview, research or whatever it is that we went through at 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 on the application, that is key to wellness coaching, and its key to this one.
Let’s go ahead and jump into this session’s overview. I’m going to take you through this introductory podcast and I want to give you a flavor for the types of things you’re going to hear about. We 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 talk about how you can apply the initial pieces of that and then come back with each podcast and address each one of these at a deeper level using a number of different tools and resources. Once again, the three C’s are, Competence, Credibility and Clientele.
Our audience is quite varied. We have people listening to this who have never coached a single person as a health and wellness coach. We have people that have been an athletic coach or triathlon coach or people that have coached their son or daughter’s athletic team, but in terms of health and wellness coaching, this is brand new to you. You’ve heard about it. You like the idea and it 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 thinking about it. In fact, that’s a big part of our audience.
We also have people who are experienced health and wellness coaches. You’ve been doing this for a while. 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 and 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 and clientele, those are great. They’re going to 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 has changed pretty recently in 2017. One of the most important aspects is selecting your training and your certification. 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 NBHWC. That’s the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching. You can look it up at NBHWC.org. They are the national board, a nonprofit organization, that oversee’ s other programs that offer certifications to become board-certified. They do not provide a certification themselves. 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 that list.
Then your second piece, once you’ve found a couple of organizations from that list that makes sense to you in terms of the NBHWC 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 will you get from them? Ask all those questions, but begin with the NBHWC 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. Like I said, we’re going to go through some of the applied research training that you’ll get from listening to this podcast. It will also help build some of that continued education in terms of the things you’ll learn, regularly reading is a big part of becoming a professional health and wellness coach and understanding how to look at the literature and review it. like I said, we’ll 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.
The first C is Competence. The application is 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. 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 NBHWC 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, is the awareness others have of your competence and increasing yours in the eyes of your clients. Potential clients are 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 follow-up, 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. It’s critical to understand that going in. 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 we’ll go through, I’ll occasionally just take a podcast, just you and me and I’ll take you through some business concepts or some of those things on how to build onto that second C, Credibility.
The third C, again, it’s Competence, Credibility, and the third C is Clientele. Once you’ve established your Competence and your Credibility then 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 in Credibility. “Building Your Business” 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. With Clientele, will take a deep dive into what that looks like in terms of pricing, 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 offer 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? If you’re within an organization, is there something you could do to promote, maybe it’s a challenge you set up, utilize something 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 another one. You’ve got the three C’s, Competence, Credibility, Clientele. There’s one other C, we may not change the name to the four C’s, but it’s critical and I was reminded of it this morning. It’s your “calling”.
If you’re going to be an effective health and wellness coach, regardless of your setting, 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 my last intervals, a soccer coach and a few of the kids came over to the track. I was changing out of my spikes and into my running shoes just to do a little warm down, the kids lined up at the starting line on the track and they started running and I just turned to the coach and said, “hey, 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 them and then 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. I was talking about, you know, little tips here and there like, get your head up and use the arms and we can do this. Come on buddy, you got this, you can do this. And it was so fun. 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. I did a few more laps just warming down and he kind of wondered up to me as I was coming by and he says, “man, thanks so much” and I tell you what, my whole affect changed from when I got to that track and remember I love to run, so usually going to a track is fun for me. It’s exciting, it’s energizing, 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 that just changed the morning. 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, that’s where it’s exciting. That’s why we’re doing what 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 a list of 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 NBHWC, they were actually invited by the NBHWC 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 the exam.
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 and 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 your “calling”.
I mentioned to you I’ll 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 that you’ll find 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. We’ll 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 Health and Wellness field an 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 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. 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 “#betterthanyesterday”. 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 the wellness committee. It’s about helping each and every individual become better than yesterday. Helping them 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 to live a life that’s #betterthanyesterday. Thanks for joining us.
