Gale: Australia health care is ‘goaled to death’
By Ros Soulsby
Working as a health coach with clients who have diagnosed health conditions requires more than just coaching skills, warned Australia-based health psychologist and coach Janette Gale.
“(This work) requires the health coach to have a sound knowledge of the evidence-based clinical guidelines for managing each condition and the ability to balance medical duty of care with the patient’s right to choose their own course of action,” said Gale.
Australia has health insurance funding for health interventions and every state in the country, except one, has a telephone coaching programme.
In her workshop, she shared her RICK Model, the result of 10 years’ development and put into practice with 6,500 people:
Readiness How important is it to the client personally to work on this issue?
Importance Checking knowledge, build motivation, raise priority
Confidence Will the client make the change?
Knowledge Does the client have the information they need to make an informed choice?
Her research revealed four critical aspects of setting health care goals: clinical targets (physiological goals); broad lifestyle and treatment categories (behavioural goals); motivational drivers, and a specific personalised health plan.
She outlined three critical sets of processes for behavioural change: person-centred; processes to form a behavioural goal intention, and processes to convert the intention into action and maintenance.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy/Coaching is critical to help people through procrastination as it’s rarely about a lack of knowledge, she said.
Gale suggested the health system is being ‘goaled to death’ whereas the question should be, “How do I really tap into the client’s issues?”
She cited an example of people who have left hospital not knowing they have had a heart attack as it’s assumed someone has told them.
Be mindful of your client’s vulnerability – feel their fear
By Eve Turner
When a client gets emotional, are we able to sit with their vulnerability and hold their emotions, or do we defend against this, possibly without realising it because this is how we have constructed our way of being?
In Graham Lee’s session on ‘Mindful supervision: Working the edges of vulnerability’, he argued that many of us have had years practising how not to expose our vulnerability.
He showed that by using a mindful approach in a supervision context, we could engage the authenticity and wholeheartedness of the client alongside their brains and behaviours, embracing what may be difficult for us in the face of an amygdala trigger.
Participants did two mindfulness practices, then used the cleared interior space to explore what is evoked by a difficult client.
When we thought about this client, how were we feeling, and what did that feeling say about us? What strategy might we use to deal with the feeling? An example was feeling frustrated by a client and then becoming directive. We continued by concentrating on our bodily sensations. Where did we feel our fear? We were encouraged to breathe through that area to tolerate what was there, living with the intensity rather than ‘running away’ from it.
These practices showed how mindfulness is an invaluable technique for individual or group supervision in order to hold the coach’s vulnerability and help them develop greater resilience and presence through its embodiment.
Lee also offered a case study of the significant personal shifts coaches can make using this technique.
Let’s build our foundations on neuroscience
By Kate McGuire
Neuroscience could become the underpinning body of knowledge for coaching, said Professor Paul Brown in his keynote address.
As research techniques become more sophisticated, evidence is increasingly available for how and why coaching works, he said.
Coaches need the ‘core competencies’ of being able to create trust and safety, and activate clients’ ‘surprise’ emotion to help them take risks, triggering new neural pathways, he said.
Brown described eight basic human emotions as the primary colours that mix to create human feelings.
The five survival emotions of fear, anger, disgust, shame and sadness drive escape or avoidance behaviours, which use a lot of energy on staying safe. This often means an internal focus on self-protection. The attachment emotions of excitement/joy and love/trust create energy directed outside the body to form connections with others. The potentiator emotion of surprise/startle is often a precursor to all.
Good leaders, posits Brown, hook into the attachment emotions to create engagement and momentum; good coaching should do the same.
Environments (and leaders, and coaches) that trigger survival emotions, intentionally or not, while also demanding action, commitment and motivation, create a human system consciously trying to direct its energy into the outer world, while unconscious survival mechanisms focus internally and drive ‘staying safe’ behaviours. This leads to stress, possibly burnout.
Coaches, says Brown, should diagnose whether their clients work in ‘survival organisations’ or ‘engaged organisations’ – which trigger the nervous system in basically different energetic and emotional ways.
While organisations may find it easier to create fear and anxiety, trust and safety are more powerful generators of commitment and motivation, leading to engaged, productive, happy employees.
He said ‘Limbic leaders’ and, by extension, limbic coaches, can manage their emotions intelligently, to connect with others and be worth following.
Coaching in schools earns marks from teachers and students
By Ros Soulsby and Liz Hall
Coaching has an important role to play in education, increasing teacher efficacy, improving students’ results and attitudes to learning, enhancing their wellbeing and cognitive ‘hardiness’, and leading to higher levels of emotional intelligence, said
Dr Christian van Nieuwerburgh.
In his session on ‘Coaching in education: theory and research into practice’, he cited studies including Cornett & Knight’s (2008), highlighting coaching’s impact on teacher efficacy; Shidler’s (2008), suggesting coaching teachers on specific educational content can have an impact on student achievement, and Knight & van Nieuwerburgh’s (2012), showing coaching increases implementation rates following professional development.
Research also shows how coaching impacts students positively. Green, Grant & Rynsaardt’s (2007) study found that coaching for students led to “significant increases in levels of cognitive hardiness and hope…”, while research in the West Midlands (Passmore & Brown, 2009), showed “coaching can contribute to student performance”.
Research by Madden, Green & Grant (2011), showed how coaching can increase students’ wellbeing, while a study by van Nieuwerburgh, Zacharia, Luckham, Prebble & Browne (2012), showed that secondary school students trained to coach reported higher emotional intelligence, while those coached at least met academic targets.
Training secondary school students to become coaches can lead to better study skills and improved attitudes to learning, increased emotional intelligence and better communication skills, according to another study by van Nieuwerburgh & Tong (2013).
Van Nieuwerburgh has also researched weaving adult learning with L&D theory to apply into the classroom and education. He has developed a module in MSc on coaching in education, asking delegates the same question he used in his research: “What is the ultimate purpose of schools?” Answers shared included to: conform, socialise, prepare citizens, acquire knowledge, provide a safe place, find and grow potential and increase love of learning.
He said education had to be about L&D. “Fundamentally, it is about self-directed education, alongside everything else we do. And while coaching is that safe place, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the whole school was a safe place?”
Coaching at Work, Volume 8, Issue 5