What is META-Health Coaching – and how can I use it?

Health Coaching is a synthesis of the philosophy and practices of life coaching with healthcare, to assist clients to attain greater wellbeing. Therapists from all disciplines can utilise the coaching principles and questions introduced in this article to bring insights and a wellness focus into client relationships

Life coaching developed in the USA in the early 1990s to help people achieve more from their careers, businesses and personal lives. Despite its growth, coaching has only recently started being used within healthcare. Perhaps this is partly due to the popularly-held beliefs that illness is a mistake of the body, and that doctors, rather then ourselves, are responsible for our health. There has also been, until recently, little awareness of the crucial impact of our thoughts and beliefs on our health.

Yet therapy and coaching fit naturally together, especially when we adopt the perspective that the body doesn’t make mistakes. META-Medicine, an advanced biopsychosocial system of health understanding, shows how all health issues are meaningful reactions to a stressful event - and this means we can take control to change them.

What Health Coaching Isn’t – Two Traditional Health Models

Health Coaching is very different to two well-known health approaches:

1)       Prescribe and Treat - The conventional medical model, in which the healthcare provider knows more about the client’s problem than the client does. While experienced healthcare providers may know exactly what a client needs, this approach doesn’t ensure compliance and can be disempowering for the client. When this approach is necessary, even in complementary and alternative therapies, it can be supplemented by coaching

2)       Health Education – Providing health information to motivate people to change their habits. While it is certainly valuable, health information can be overwhelming, and much health information seems to contradict. This can lead to confusion which doesn’t encourage clients to change - Also when fear is used in advertising e.g. cigarette and alcohol this creates an internal conflict.  On the one hand the advertiser is saying smoke and drink on the other hand the government is warning us about the significant  especially when fear is used as motivation! Coaching can help by supporting clients to develop a sense of responsibility and facilitation to make lifestyle changes

What Health Coaching Is – An Empowering Approach

Coaching is based on the premise that everyone has the inner potential to overcome their barriers and achieve their goals. A health coach is a partner who guides the client through the maze of healthcare choices, and helps them to overcome hurdles, particularly self-limiting beliefs, that arise on the path to wellness. Because coaching is client-focused and flexible, it can be used with people who simply want a healthier lifestyle, as well as those with serious or chronic health conditions. It can also be combined with the treatment and education approaches above.

Any therapist, however short or infrequent your appointments are, can make use of the coaching model. Seeing clients regularly over a certain period of time (usually 3-6 months) enables rapport, trust and openness to develop. However, even in one or two sessions, you can utilise the first three of the core coaching principles below.

Four core features of a Health Coaching relationship:

• A focus on positive future outcomes: Thinking about solutions instead of problems. In the health context, this means focusing on achieving wellness rather than overcoming illness 

• Self-empowerment and self-responsibility: Encouraging the individual to maintain control of their results

• Actively listening to the client

• Providing ongoing support

Why Take a Health Coaching Approach?

Benefits for Therapists

Have you ever given a treatment and not known how successful it was because the client didn’t come back? Or had clients who expect a quick fix for a long-term problem? These situations can be extremely frustrating. Setting a broader framework through coaching may help. Coaching involves commitment to more than a one-off treatment: even within a short timescale, a client could be encouraged to set future actions and arrange a brief follow-up conversation to ensure continued progress. If you have a course of appointments, this enables rapport to develop, and for you to uncover clients’ core blocking beliefs.

It’s been discovered in cutting-edge fields of bio-informational and epigenetic medicine that our thoughts and beliefs are programming our cells at a DNA level. Therefore, helping someone change their beliefs from self-limiting to positive will have an effect not just on psychology, but also physiology. META-Medicine takes this understanding even further.   

Benefits for Clients

From a client perspective, having a partnership devoted to their success can be both empowering and supportive. It:

• Increases awareness of the importance of self-responsibility for healing

• Enables the client to set goals and take action

• Maintains motivation through accountability - knowing you’ll check on their progress!

• Provides support for overcoming barriers and getting out of their comfort zone (even uncomfortable ‘comfort zones’, like illness, are familiar territory)

• And if the partnership is longer-term, it will see them through relapses of behaviour and old habits

How to Get Started – Coaching Questions to Use with Your Clients

If a more active coaching focus is appropriate in your work, try experimenting with these questions: 

Setting Wellness-Focused Goals:

• What does being well really mean to you? What will you feel, hear, and see when you achieve wellness?

• What do you want to achieve within the next 3, 6 or 12 months in your health and wellness?

• What can you do to make sure that your goals are: Specific? Measurable? Realistic? Achievable? Motivating? 

Generating Options:

• What actions could you take to move you closer to your goals?

• What changes could you make in different life areas, such as work, home life, relationships, nutrition, exercise and relaxation, to move towards your goals?

• How can you increase your wellness in everyday actions such as eating, sleeping, breathing, feeling, thinking and communicating?

Making a Commitment to Action:

• What will you do by our next appointment?

• How will you measure your achievement?

• What three things can you do to overcome any barriers to taking these actions?

• How can you increase your commitment to taking these actions?

How We Work – META-Medicine Diagnosis and Therapy within a Coaching Framework

META-Medicine provides an understanding of clients’ health issues at every level: mind, emotions, body, spirit, social interaction and environment. Once we understand the meaning and cause of a health issue, then we are in a position to help a client to overcome it. The goal-based and supportive ethos of coaching provides our framework. 

Step 1. META-Medicine Diagnosis

META-Medicine enables us to pinpoint the specific cause and meaning of a client’s symptoms, and the emotional patterns underlying them. For example, as our earlier articles explain, we know that eczema is the healing phase of a separation shock: a traumatic feeling of disconnection from a loved one. The meaning of the skin reaction is during the preceding stress phase, when the skin desensitises to enable the individual to overcome the shock. The eczema is a symptom of regeneration. 

A META-Medicine diagnosis aims to uncover:

• The specific emotional pattern behind a health issue

• The shock or traumatic event that led to it

• Where the client is within the healing process

• The triggers within the client’s life that cause the issue to recur

During a diagnostic session, our approach is coaching and question-based. It’s the client who has the answers – only they know the stressful situations in their life and how they thought and felt. While the META-Medicine models guide us in the right direction, META-Medicine diagnosis is essentially an enquiry process, as each client’s specific experience is different.

For example, cystitis is defined in META-Medicine as a territory-marking conflict: an inability to establish and maintain boundaries. With two clients with cystitis, one was caused by an argument with a housemate, while the other’s started when she left her husband, moved out of their house and didn’t feel at home in rented accommodation.

Step 2. META-Health Planning

 Once we’ve identified the root cause of an issue, we co-create a plan for healing. This covers all aspects of a client’s experience: physical body, mind and emotions, spirit, social interaction and environmental changes. The last two areas particularly lend themselves to coaching: changes must be realistic and achievable, yet powerful enough for the client to overcome their triggers. For example, with a cystitis issue, the client may benefit from support in setting boundaries with others.

Step 3. Integrating Therapy and Coaching

 Because META-Medicine explains the importance of beliefs to health, our work focuses primarily on changing mental and emotional patterns. We use approaches such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), Time Line Therapy and brainwave entrainment, and refer clients to other professionals for therapies such as acupuncture, homoeopathy and nutritional therapy.

Alongside therapeutic work, coaching helps clients to:

Change their focus from illness to wellness

Overcome disempowering and limiting beliefs

Set goals and actions

Understand the barriers to healing, and create strategies for overcoming them

We’ve had experience using this integrative approach to help clients to not only overcome problems such as chronic musculoskeletal issues, anxiety and depression, but also to increase their wellbeing at all levels. We believe that through integrating the key principles of a positive focus, client empowerment and ongoing support, clients are inspired to achieve wellness, rather than simply alleviating symptoms.

Find Out More

Authors Robert Waghmare and Joanne Ross are META-Medicine Health Coaches and Master Trainers. They run regular 2-Day Introductory Workshops in META-Medicine, which cover the meanings of common health issues, how to create a META-Health plan and how to do root-cause diagnosis. They’ve trained therapists from a wide range of disciplines including homeopathy, acupuncture, holistic therapies, counselling and modern medicine.

 The META-Medicine Health Coach Training integrates META-Medicine diagnostics with health coaching and gives you qualified Health Coach status. This year’s course takes place in three 5-day modules from July 2010.