When are you a good lifestyle coach?

This is a question I have asked myself very often over the past few decades as a nutrition coach, but also as a teacher of the Hormone Factor coach training course.

Short- or long-term results

If I were to judge my first years as a coach now as a fitness instructor in a gym in Wageningen, I would give myself a severe failing grade. Actually, I was not even a coach, but a consultant. I gave some guidance on exercises and made training and nutrition schedules. And of course, these often fanatical action plans led to many results in the first weeks to months that the clients started using them. Indeed, these people were highly motivated at the time and saw the kilos of fat melting away and their bodies getting tighter.

Of course, this result was not permanent, but it was the ideal way to keep people engaged. 'Ralph, I've had a couple of busy months at work and have relapsed again. Can we flash again for two months, because I want to be just a bit tighter in the summer.'

The approach I used at the time was very effective in the short term, but was so far removed from the client's old diet and lifestyle that falling back into old behaviour was inevitable when attention and motivation waned. I was never actually mapping and strengthening a client's intrinsic motivation, nor did I have a good view at all on the biggest personal pitfalls of the past year.

The approach was something like 'from tomorrow we will do things completely differently and if you don't turn out to be motivated then that's your problem because I won't keep pulling dead horses'. Looking back on this I feel a bit ashamed, but I can still forgive myself in the gym setting I was in at the time with all the time constraints and my highly divided attention among the many gym members.

Extended consultations and pathways

But what if you really want to do extensive consultations and pathways with people? And not for a quick score, but to really coach people towards lasting behavioural change and long-term results.

If you want to do this, you need a very different approach and, as a lifestyle coach, you have to have a lot going for you. In the Hormone Factor Coach training many students are very insecure about doing their first consultations with test clients. What I then often hear back as a reason is that they think they do not yet have enough in-depth knowledge about nutrition, lifestyle and hormones.

As a teacher, I then make an effort to remove that uncertainty. When I hear negative feedback back from a client who has attended a consultation at a Hormone Factor coach is actually never about lack of knowledge. By far the top two reasons for negative feedback:

1. I had different expectations from the consultation or trajectory.
2. I did not feel heard.

The three hats: the teacher, advisor and coach hat

So it is crucial not to over-promise in your marketing. In addition, you should always properly identify the client's expectations in your consultation and manage them if necessary. When someone does not feel heard, this is often related to not properly adhering to the LSD principle (listen-summarise-ask questions), with good (intermediate) summarisation being the most important part. Good summaries can make the client feel heard and, as a lifestyle coach, you can double-check whether you have understood the saying correctly. If you proceed in this way, the chances of negative feedback become a lot smaller.

Furthermore, I find it very important that, as a lifestyle coach, you can alternate well between 'the three hats': the teacher, advisor and coach hat.

1. With the teacher's cap explain the necessary theory and the rationale for your advice. It is important that the client himself has a good understanding of what can work and why, in order to increase the chances of self-reliance in the future.
2. The second cap is the advisory cap where the best part is that the client understands your nutrition and lifestyle analysis so well that he or she starts formulating agreements with themselves. This puts the responsibility where it should be.
3. In addition, there is also the coach cap. In a world full of unhealthy temptations, coaching towards lasting behavioural change is perhaps the most difficult of all. Increasing intrinsic motivation, harnessing capacity for discipline, identifying the deeper mental causes of unhealthy behaviour and really getting to the heart of the matter requires an awful lot of qualities and experience.

Lifestyle coach with specialisation in hormones

At Hormone factor coach training together with my teaching team, I try to lay a strong foundation in the trainees. The training has an exam, but you really succeed in practice. After every consultation you give, you evaluate yourself and praise yourself for the things that went well, but you also look at what could be done better. In this way, you can eventually become a good nutrition and lifestyle coach, but realise that this will require an awful lot of consultations.

And so to achieve these consultation numbers you need to get your marketing and sales in order, or join an organisation who can do this well. So to get to this level, you have to be quite willing. But if you really want to, you will just rock solidly succeed. And many of my students have already succeeded. And I am very proud of these go-getters!