#311: Guiding Clients to Real Results – Strategies for Health Coaches

Michelle:
Hello there, Health coaches. Actually, my boyfriend has been struggling with some acid reflux stuff going on, and I was thinking a lot this week about a client of mine from many, many years ago, oh my God, before I had any gray hair, he was one of my very few male clients. And after just a few weeks of changing his diet and lifestyle, he was able to stop taking his prescription heartburn medication. Yay. Right? And he was thrilled because it wasn't even something that he was necessarily worried about. It was just handled with a pill. It was one of those happy little health coaching side effects where a client gets results that they never even dreamed possible above and beyond what they were expecting. Has that ever happened to you? Once I had a client tell me, you know what? My ears aren't itchy anymore. And I'm like, what are you talking about? You never mentioned that your ears were itchy. So I call those happy little side effects.

And then on the other side, I've also had clients in my 13 years of private practice where the opposite was true. They did not reach their goal. Maybe they didn't even come close. Sadness, right? It happens a lot with weight loss. That's a tricky one, right? So today we're going to talk about strategies to guide clients towards results. Now, before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by Practice Better. Whether you're just starting or you're scaling your health coaching business Practice Better is a godsend, you guys. It is built for practitioners like us, helping us run our sessions, track progress, and spend less time with administrative tasks. So if you're looking for a smoother, more successful practice, you can sign up for a free trial and get 30% off your first three months at healthcoachpower.com/pb. That stands for Practice Better. And joining me today is Natalie from Practice Better. Natalie, welcome. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Natalie:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me here, Michelle. My name is Natalie and I Practice Better. I am a product advocate or product expert, so I am really assisting practitioners who are like, help. I need to get my business online or I need to streamline things, what do I do? And then I also have a wellness coaching practice where I'm serving helping professionals who are experiencing burnout and helping them to overcome those challenges in a holistic way that's aligned with their values.

Michelle:
Awesome. And how long have you been a wellness coach?

Natalie:
Just coming up three years now.

Michelle:
Alright, well, I'm interested in hearing any and all stories that have come out of your practice. I'm going to be sharing some from my own. I think one of the biggest reasons clients don't make progress is because in health in particular, and also in wellness coaching, so many improvements are difficult to measure. I mean weight loss, very, very measurable, multiple ways to measure that. But are they waking up with more energy? Are they experiencing less gas, less bloating? Are they generally feeling happier? It can be difficult to quantify these things, so sometimes it's hard to notice that there are improvements happening. What challenges do you see with health coaches and wellness coaches? What are we facing today when it comes to clients seeing results that they want to see?

Natalie:
Yeah, I think one of the first things is just as you mentioned about how are they capturing the data in the first place because how can they track those changes? How can they notice where they started, where they ended? And so I think it's really important at the beginning when you first start working with a client, even for myself, when I work with a client, I always do a really thorough assessment at the beginning so I can get a baseline and I do that assessment on things that I might not even be directly working on. So for instance, my work, I do a lot with mindset and purpose and relationship, spirituality. So some of those more internal things, but I still do what is the baseline with sleep, with eating, with water, with breast, because everything's interconnected and if we believe in holistic practices, we are looking at how do things connect to each other, whether the client realizes it upfront or whether they don't. So I think for clients, for coaches rather, for practitioners, it's how do they gather all of that data? How do they have that baseline? And then how are they tracking it over time to see that their client has made an improvement? And then how do they have everything in one place and out of Google Docs?

Michelle:
Oh yes, I know I have 5 million Google Docs. And when you were just talking, I was reminding myself that I recently started using the Peloton app. I've never done it before. I don't even have the bike, I just do the classes. And I got hooked immediately because there's so much accountability built into that platform. And I was showing it to my son, he's 10, and he was like, oh, it's just Duolingo. And we're finding with all this research about how we can really help motivate people, keep them on track, provide accountability, track progress using technology. So that's really interesting. Now, I mean I started coaching in the dark ages. So one thing I always like to do with my clients was have them rate on a piece of paper areas of their health. I would just give them a scale of one to 10. You could do this, the start of the program, or I would do it multiple times in the middle and then definitely again at the end.
But it gave a way to kind of quantify things that are otherwise tough to measure. So if they circled like Energy one and then later they, there's ER in 2, 3, 4, it goes up over time. You can actually do the math. You can say, Hey look, you rated your energy 50% higher than last month and that's a huge improvement. And then they're like, oh yeah, that is an improvement. I'm making progress. So it kind of comes down to the same idea of tracking the data. So whether we're doing it on paper or we're doing it in a fancier way, why do you think that's such a crucial component? I know Practice Better helps with this.

Natalie:
Yes, and whether it's Practice Better or whether it's paper. I have nothing against paper. Paper good. Sometimes I think people just need visual cues and they just need motivation. There's a lot going on in people's worlds. There's so much on our minds. And I think naturally our clients, they are hard on themselves, so they are kind of coming in maybe feeling a little frustrated or discouraged, especially if they've been trying to overcome those health challenges for quite some time and they haven't been successful. It's so easy to just be negative. We all know our self-talk is really loud, so it's really easy to see everything that's not going wrong, or we can even magnify the things that are happening that are not going exactly the way we want. And sometimes we even exaggerate, but when we have it on paper or we have some kind of visual graph or some kind of representation that show, yes, look at my little graph, it went up. Even if it's just 1%, we're aiming for progress, not perfection. And so I think as coaches, that's something we can really support our clients in. It's not that we're necessarily always trying to get from A to Zed. Sometimes just going from A to B, that's still progress, that is still an improvement and let's celebrate those small wins along the way as opposed to one major accomplishment over time. And so think about it, sometimes people say maybe they want to lose weight, but then sometimes you have to dig deeper and say, well, why do you want to lose weight? And maybe they say, I want to have a better relationship with my young child. I want to be able to play with them and run after them. So that is really the why, that's the motivation. And so if maybe the scale doesn't even change or maybe the scale only changes a little bit, but if they realize they have more energy now they can play, they can chase their kid, they can be up late at night having fun with them, that is where the real impact comes into. And so I think even reminding our clients, what are you really trying to achieve? What are you really going for? And help them work towards that instead of necessarily always tangible metrics and numbers. We all like numbers, but sometimes it doesn't work out in our favor.

Michelle:
That reminds me, maybe I'll tell a story a little bit later about a client of mine who we had to dig for some motivation, but I'm curious, well first of all, for our listeners, I mentioned Peloton, I mentioned Duolingo, what other apps, what other things have you guys used where you're like, this really helps, I'm staying on track because I get a little badge every day or every time I do this thing or whatever. And then I'm curious with Practice Better, can you share an example of where the platform is helping in this way to make a noticeable difference in client outcomes?

Natalie:
Absolutely. So one thing that we have is we have our journals. And so clients can use our journals, they can log their code for instance, or they can log their activity and their sleep. And so over time they can look at the analysis and they can see that graph and they can see how they're trending over time, whether it's two weeks, six months, a year, and they're able to see, wow, I've really made progress. I'm really improving my sleep or I'm logging my foods better or my mood has improved. So them just being able to look at that visual graph and see that plot, hopefully it's trending up, but even if not, then that's just if all it is is information, so it's just a signal that okay, maybe if it's going down, why is it going down? What changes do I need to make?
How can I work with my coach to support me better? So we would try to use data as information, not necessarily a good or bad, it's just information for us that can inspire us to take that next informed step. And I find that even when practitioners, they do little things like they'll give a thumbs up on the journal and all of a sudden somebody feels, a client feels like, wow, they looked at it. I felt appreciated even outside of my regular appointment. Because when you're in traditional healthcare, you only see your practitioner for that 10 minutes and then it's done. But the thing is with coaches, they can have all these ongoing multi-touch with you throughout the week, throughout the month, even if it's just an emoji or an encouragement, you've got this, keep going. All of those things can be incorporated into our journals and allow the client to continue to want to engage and enter their information and track it.

Michelle:
Yeah, you're right. That's a huge difference between standard medical care and working with a coach. You might have an interaction with your coach multiple times a week, but your doctor or whoever you're seeing in an office somewhere, you might only see them once every six months with no communication in between or once a year with nothing in between. So there's so many different ways, even if it's just given that thumbs up to say, I'm, I see you, and isn't that like half of coaching righ t there? I see you. Very powerful stuff.

Natalie:
Everybody wants to be seen and heard and yet for some reason they're not. So I think that is so much of the power and value that coaches can bring to their clients. It's making them feel seen and heard and valued.

Michelle:
Now I'm seeing over here in our comments a couple other apps or tech pieces that are helping with this sort of online motivation, accountability and tracking. Ellen's saying, for example, HeartMath Insight timer or the Tapping app, right? Look into all of those, you guys, these things can be really helpful, not helpful for getting off our damn phones, but helpful.

Natalie:
Absolutely. And something I wanted to add, Michelle quickly is just even wearables. So we're thinking about how do we reduce those pain points for clients? So sometimes it's like, oh, I don't want to have to track this or I don't want to have to do this, so how can we make it easier to get that data from them? By using wearables, we can actually get a lot of that information automatically put into the client portal that the clients don't have to do themselves. So we have integrations with Apple Health and Fitbit, and then just today we released integrations with Ora Ring and Garmin. So you're able to see what your client's daily activity is, what their sleep has been like, how many steps they've done, what their heart rate is like, and this is coming automatically. All your clients have to do is press link and then every day you can get an update and see in real time and they can see in real time how their activity is trending and tracking over time. So wearables are a really good way to encourage client accountability and client engagement for a very low lift.

Michelle:
I like that Kathy says, that's awesome. Yeah, no kidding. A lot of our health coaches really like the aura ring, and then if we're not asking somebody to go into the app and input all of these pieces of data, it's just boom, it's just happening for them. Oh my God, you guys, the world is amazing. Again, going back to when I would've people do this on paper, right? Big improvements. I was also thinking that when I would be doing it that way, okay, so you collect people's data however you collect it. I would have to then myself go back, look at those numbers, create maybe a spreadsheet or whatever, track them and do the math myself in order to then relay back to the client, Hey, that's a 50% increase in energy, or you rated your digestion 75% better than when we started. But you mentioned a graph and a graph is so useful, having a visual when the data is collected for you. So for me, that was a big challenge doing something with the information I was collecting. How else can the technology help with these types of challenges?

Natalie:
That's a good question, and one thing about the grass is that you can choose different categories. So you can compare things. You can compare your sleep to your food because maybe the food is disruptive to the body and it's causing a lack of sleep. Or you can choose maybe your number of steps and your water intake. So again, you're able to mix and match these different metrics so you can track over time not just looking at one metric, but how are multiple metrics playing together? How are multiple data inputs playing together that you get a more holistic picture and you can really see what's going on. You can also use our form summary responses. So you talked about checking in with your clients and having them do those ratings from one to 10. You can do that at the beginning. Maybe you do it in the middle of your program and at the end, or maybe you do it weekly and you can track over time their responses and you can see even that will give you a little pie chart. You can see how their answers are changing over time or they stay the same or they improving, are they getting worse? So all of that helps do the data analysis for you so that you as the practitioner can just look over it and then now you can use your professional judgment and say to your client, this is what's happening and this is what's next. As opposed to using all your brainpower to figure out, oh my gosh, how do I pull in A, B, C, D? And now try to make sense of it because there's a lot on our minds too, so we can use the technology to help empower us so that we can do what we do best, which is supporting our clients.

Michelle:
I don't really need to be doing algebra a pie chart even better than a graph. A visual is so powerful. Anyone can understand it at a glance yourself as the practitioner, the client. I love it. Okay, we've come a long way. So I'm going to tell that story about one of my clients who she's just one of these people who had tried her whole life to lose weight. It was such, she was so in her head about it. She had been to every personal trainer, every dietician, every everything, and working together. She still was not losing weight. And I thought I was taking such a different approach, a holistic approach, you guys, it was going to work and it didn't because health is complex and it's not as just a matter of eating more and eating less and moving more. So right? We tried everything though. Then I just asked her one day, who cares about the weight? I challenged her, does it even matter if you lose the weight? Because something inside me was saying, I just had a hunch. There's more to this story. There's more going on here. Something about her is keeping her stuck, something that she's either aware of or not or whatever. I just had to open a conversation about it because it wasn't really about macros, you know what I mean? And we got talking about her motivation, which you had mentioned earlier, Natalie, and it turned out she's like, I have a great life. She had a husband, a great husband, great job. She's really happy where she lived, everything, and she didn't even really care about her pants size that she was told that that's something she needed to worry about her whole life. But she didn't actually care.
She said, you know what I really want to do is I really want to hike the Mount Everest base camp. She wanted to go to Cat Mandu and hike the Mount Everest base camp. I was like, are you kidding me? That is so cool. And she said, the problem is they don't let you go if you don't have certain health markers. And I don't know exactly what they were, but blood pressure, things like this all had to be certain numbers. So that's where we started focusing instead on getting her to Mount Everest. And it made a huge difference. And she did make it to Mount Everest with her husband. They did the base camp. So that always stuck out in my coaching career is sometimes it's about redefining the goal. So I just want to have everyone listening, maybe write that down, stick that in your pocket. Sometimes what the client comes to us with as their goal isn't necessarily, or it can change over time also. So it's always something to check in with them about. Kathy's saying, this is so valuable. I mean, I think it's just very human that we repeat what we've heard from Weight Watchers commercials on TV our whole life, but it's often something much more personal. So anyway, Natalie, when health coaches are up against this type of obstacle, the clients aren't getting expected results. What else can we do?

Natalie:
Yeah, I think sometimes just pausing is always good. So I think just exactly what you said to your client about that should take weight off the table for a second. Sometimes you just have to pause and either approach it from a different way, see is there anything else that you want to work on or you dig deeper, right? So in your case, you dug deeper to figure out what was that? Why did she want to do it? And then you found the motivation and you're able to attack it from a different lens. But I think sometimes if we're just really focused on a specific goal of like, Nope, I want to lose weight. I've got to help them lose the weight, we kind of box ourselves in. So sometimes we just have to ask more questions. And I know sometimes it can feel a little bit uncomfortable to pry.
Now I'm a natural pryer. I ask questions by nature and people default, but sometimes we do have to get politely, a little bit nosy and just dig deeper, get more curious to understand what else is happening in their life, what's happening in their work, what's happening in their family. Because sometimes the situations aren't even directly with them. There's other things, other trigger points. And when we're looking at life holistically, again, if you're eating properly and sleeping properly, but you have a really stressful boss that is going to impact your health, or if your marriage is in shambles, that's going to impact your health. Or if you have a young child and you're not sleeping properly. So this is why, by asking more questions and figuring out what else is happening in their life, what is their, obviously family history, we talk about that too, but what is their environment and what's their mindset?
What's the mentality? Because sometimes people could be doing all the right things, but sometimes I find actually, I had this client very recently actually, she came to me with these very specific goals that she wanted to work on, and I said, okay, okay, let's get to work on this. But it was very apparent, and I mean from the first session that we couldn't actually get there because there was just all these other distractions in her mind that would not have allowed her to focus on the kind of programming that we were working towards. So I as a coach, have a choice. Now, do I just continue and say, Nope, this is what you came to me for and we're going to keep going down this path. Or do I say, you know what? I know that this is really what you need to do, but this is almost a little bit deeper.
And right now you have so many things on the surface, we can't even dig deeper until we clear up some of the clutter. So I had to pause, I just redirected. And so right now we're working on things that really don't have anything to do with the program, but there are things I can assist with because I just need to free her mind. Even when I just said it to, I looked at her face and I just saw her. She give a big sigh of relief as if I had already taken a burden away from her and we hadn't started yet. So sometimes we have to see what is burdening our clients and weighing them down because if they're mentally stressed or weighed down, it's very hard for them to make progressive changes towards their health until sometimes that clutter is cleared. And so again, this is why a coach is so special, because we're doing so many different things. It's not just a one size fits all approach. We really are trying to get to know that specific client and our treatment or our plan might change for every client. That's like the power of personalization.

Michelle:
So it sounds like in a very gentle way, you called her out, and we get to do this as coaches, and that's maybe the wrong term, calling somebody out, although sometimes that's exactly what you have to do, but sometimes you get a feeling or it becomes very, very clear just from someone's what they're actually saying over and over, their tone, their mood. So I was just thinking, if you guys ever feel a little awkward about approaching a client with something like this, I would often say I would use language. I'm just getting this feeling for some reason, and I could be totally off, and then I would tell them what I was feeling and then they could say, I don't know what you're talking about. And I'd be like, all right, forget it. It's probably just nothing. But I'm going to tell you. 9.9 times out of 10, they're like, yeah, yep, that's it, Michelle.
And I'm like, do you want to talk about it? And that's all you have to say. So you could just a little self-deprecation like that, like, gosh, I dunno why I keep getting this vibe. Just write that down, try that out with one of your clients. And this is one form of accountability because we're there to act as mirrors. Our clients come to us and whatever they're putting out, sometimes they don't even realize it. Like, I'm getting this real anxious vibe from you today. For some reason. That's a big part of coaching. Accountability is certainly following up via messages throughout the week or emailing and things like that. But also reflecting back what we see, I thought maybe accountability is something else that we could talk about. How are some ways that we can hold our clients more accountable? What tools can help us with that?

Natalie:
Yeah, I love that you said mirrors because I was thinking it. So I love that we're on the same wavelength there because sometimes that's what it is. And sometimes it's the power of them saying something out loud. You'll see it, you'll see it. They'll be like, oh my gosh, I didn't even realize. Sometimes they come full circle all on their own, and you just sit there and you watch the process. It's really beautiful when that happens because another thing for coaches, we just need to make space sometimes need to make space and hold space. And sometimes they can come to their own understanding or recognize those blocks all on their own. And so when we talk about accountability, I think one thing that's important is holding your clients to whatever it is that they have said. Again, using that mirror. So using those words back, well, this is what you said you had a challenge with, or This is what you said you wanted to work with.
Now sometimes it's hard to capture all this information, especially if you're in an hour long session. You're so clients, they have a lot to say. It's hard to gather everything. Something that Practice Better has is the AI charting assistant. So that can listen to your conversation, whether it's a telehealth call or if it's in person and it can actually record the call for you, transcribe the call. So you have the full transcript that you can go back to, but then it can also write the note for you. So now you can be more present facing with your client, really with your spidey sense on for things that really stick out to you, you can make a note of, but you know that all this data's being captured in the note, and then you can go back to it. And what happens is our practitioners report, they say, wow, there's more information here that I didn't even realize I had missed something. But now that I went back to this note, I have more data, I can make a more personalized plan, or I can make a more specific plan. And that helps with accountability because then now we can say, okay, we're going to set up check-in form, or we're going to work towards disco, we're going to meet at this time, we're going to message each other throughout the week. So there's different things that you can do to support your clients once they have that data. Something else that our clients love is having a client portal because you can send the notes to them. I dunno if you've ever gone to a therapist and you've had a great session and then a week later you're like, what did we talk about again? And you can't really remember. So I think there's a lot of power, and I do this with all of my clients.
I always send them the notes of the call. I might not send them everything, but I always give them notes of our conversation so they have that to carry on with them, as well as sending resources. So I think here's a video that you can watch that can support you, or here's a link that you can try. Here's the new app that you can try sending those little resources, you can use our protocols or you can just send them just one off as things come to you. That way your clients feel seen, they feel cared for. Wow, they really care about me. How would I not want to be accountable to this person that's going out of their way to support me, that's checking in on me? And so many people feel ignored in life or they feel just not seen and not valued. So when you just take that little bit of time as a coach to say, Hey, this midweek check-in, you can even automate it. So it's not actually you reaching out manually, but you just automated these once a week. But guess what? The client, it doesn't matter to them, they just feel, wow, this person checked in on me. They care how I'm doing. Yeah, let me give a little update. Or I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to do for the first three days, but now I realize they're watching me, so I'm going to start. So sometimes that I think that can really help with accountability as well.

Michelle:
Ooh, automated check-ins. That is interesting. Ellen's saying scary, but wonderful what AI can do. I know how many for lots of things lately. I noticed my kids do it, I do it. I'll just ask AI to summarize something for me, something I don't really grasp. Can you tell me about whatever? And then you just get a quickie summary. But that's such a great way of using it right there with your client sessions. Like, Hey, summarize what the heck we just talked about. Pull out the action steps from this. I mean, that does just make it so much easier for everybody. You guys, in every area of life, technology is really changing the game. I got to get better at using it sometimes, but this is big. Kathy's saying, I had no idea Practice Better had so many amazing tools, I'd better go explore. And Velma, Velma was saying earlier that she loved that story. I think this was about my client who went to Mount Everest. She said, I had a client that was so stuck on losing a certain amount of pounds, yet she had so many positive outcomes throughout our time together. And the more we can pull those out, also, I know so many coaches are worried about our work being too focused around weight loss. Again, that's the thing that's super measurable. So the more we can track data and present it to them on everything else, sleeping better, everything. I had a friend who's the heart rate monitor built in to the wearable, was showing how his heart rate went spiked. He was going through this terrible divorce, and then he went on vacation and his heart rate came right back down to normal. And if that's not telling, I don't know what is. So I love it. I love that that type of wearable device can also help with letting clients know, no, the work we're doing, it really matters. There's a question here from one of our listener watchers over here in Facebook that I'm going to share with you now, Natalie, and just put you on the spot. Is that all right?

Natalie:
I'll try. Try my best.
Michelle:
She's going to try her best, you guys. All right. Ellen says, question for Natalie, talking about sharing AI notes. She said, I found lots of clients felt overwhelmed by notes and too many resources. Can you share your experience?

Natalie:
Oh, that's a good one. So one thing I would say, I can definitely understand the idea of being overwhelmed by notes. Something that I really like about practice Better is that they have note templates. So you can have different sections, but you might not share the entire note with your client. You might just only share one section, which is the plan moving forward, right? They don't need to know the recap or anything like that. So that can be a more manageable way that they're just giving this one little paragraph of what the next steps are. And I think with resources too, I would always say less is more. I think there's this quote from Coco Chanel that talks, it's about jewelry. I think that's her name. It's about jewelry. And she says, but look in the mirror before you leave and take off one accessory.
And I think it's almost the same with resources. We just have this desire to share, share, share. But what I've realized is that clients, it's not that they need resources all the time. Sometimes they just need the support. They need a cheerleader. They need to know that somebody is there for them. So we can think about, okay, how many resources did I send? Would I feel overwhelmed if I received this? Can I maybe pace them out? And so that maybe they're getting one a week of Practice Better has different programs. So you could schedule them out that maybe a client's going to receive them once a week or once every two weeks on a specific cadence so that it's not overall too many things. And also you can choose to face your client. This is a library. This is the one thing I think you should look at.
And if you want extra resources, I've made them available. And then it's up to them if they choose to use 'em or not. But there's so much power, I think sometimes we feel like we have to give so much information, but honestly, people are just overloaded with information these days in general. So I think the real transformation comes in the time that they spend with you and helping and for them to feel seen and helping them to see what are the problems that they have and how are you caring for them and giving personalized support in that time. And it's okay. Just small baby steps I think can help your clients be successful.

Michelle:
I don't know if the note taker does this, but I know when I use chat GPT, one thing I use it for is to take something long that I've written and say, make this 250 words, and then it just shortens it up for me. So nice because depending on what kind of writer you are, notes can get very long-winded for no good reason. And you can summarize that, make that one paragraph. That can be very helpful too. Natalie, thank you so much for getting in there and answering a question and for joining us today to talk all about client outcomes. We really appreciate you.

Natalie:
Thank you so much for having me.

Michelle:
This episode, you guys is also sponsored by That Clean Life. You can help your clients get results with healthy recipe ideas and show them how to easily meal plan for themselves, whether they need plant-based, gluten-free, low carb, whatever. There's recipes for every dietary style. All my listeners, that's you can save 20% off your first four months when you join at healthcoachpower.com/tcl. That stands for That Clean Life. Thank you everybody for joining us today. We'll see you next time. Bye-Bye

Natalie:
Bye.