53 posts
This week, I was honored to be a keynote speaker for the YMCA of Canada’s annual summit. When the head office asked me in August if I’d be interested in, “talking to the Managers and owners from YMCAs across Canada about organizing, supporting, and training health coaches,” I felt like Renee...
To kick-off a recent Motivator Meetup, Coach Stevo and I reviewed a new study. The researchers of this study asked an important question: What's more important for goal achievement: reducing experiences of temptation or exerting willpower? We summarized the findings below. You also can watch the...
I remember when I thought it was my job as a coach to motivate clients. It was 2014, and I’d been dreaming of playing coach for almost two years. Finally, I found myself coaching a group online. We had 13 men, who all who wanted to look better naked. Perfect. This was going to be my first-ever...
When you know you need to make a change, the number of choices and “should”s in the world can overwhelm you. It can feel difficult to know what exactly to try next. Let’s talk about the top five things you should be working on. But… Below you won’t find twenty things to do when you wake up or the...
June is going to be a huge month for habit-based coaching. I started Habitry, Co. with Vanessa Naylon in September of 2014 with a mission to "help the most people help the most people." We wanted to create a space where coaches of all kinds could come together and talk about working with clients to...
We love fitness. We love helping people. We love helping our clients reach their goals and beyond. But not all of us are able to make a business doing so, or if we do have a business, we would love to be able to expand without eliminating the precious little time we have to live our own lives. What...
In 1963, Jean Nidetch was desperate. She wasn’t desperate to lose weight. In fact, she had lost 20lbs over the previous year. No, Jean Nidetch was desperate to keep the weight off. So she invited 6 friends over to her house to talk about it. Not to talk about solutions. Or fads. Or calories. Just...
There is a quote, probably apocryphal, that changed how I thought about working with clients when I read it. <blockquote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. " </blockquote -- Henry Ford Many clients come to us thinking they know what they need to change...
<blockquote "People don’t want to build a foundation." </blockquote <blockquote "Everyone wants a ‘quick fix.’" </blockquote <blockquote "How do I convince clients that there are no shortcuts?" </blockquote <blockquote "They want to get in shape in no time." </blockquote At every Motivate Summit,...
If you are reading this blog, it’s probably first and foremost because you want to help people. In 2010, I was helping people as a personal trainer and decided I wanted to expand my toolkit to help people change their behavior. So I started thinking about graduate school for Psychology. When I told...
Editor: James Mills might be a candidate for "Most Interesting Man in the World." He is a coach, a Lawyer, and his background is in professional ballet and union contract negotiations. He is also one of the smartest people I know, so when he asked me if he could write an article about his coaching...
Editor: Sean McBride is one of the smartest people I know, so when he told me he was doing 10,000 swings and using a clicker like Seth Munsey, I knew I wanted to get his thoughts on the experience. Luckily, Sean is also a great writer! Last September I went to Utah at the invitation of Coach Stevo....
Here at Habitry, Co. we make communities. We make communities for the simple reason that communities work better. They work better than one-on-one. They work better than “groups.” Communities change people because humans are social cognitive learners (Bandura, 2001), mirror neurons are a thing...
Editor: Michele, a very active member of the Motivate Collective, contacted me about an outlet to tell her story. I was happy to help because I think that these lessons apply to anyone who's thinking of making the leap to owning their own place and following their passion. I hope you enjoy reading...
One of the best features of the Motivate Collective, in my opinion, is that it is a safe space to get advice about what to do with clients that happens to be populated by the best habit-based coaches in the world. Needless to say, the advice is insanely good. Yesterday, a coach asked for help with...
I've been working with people to help them meet their health and fitness goals since 2008. I still work with anyone who shows up on my front door at 9AM every morning. I'm a coach, but in 2013 I stopped coaching people and started making a real difference. When I started graduate school for health...
This month Weight Watchers, the Google of the weight loss industry announced a new ad campaign. With no celebrities. Or promotions. Or promises. Or before and after photos. It's all real people talking about their real struggles, physical and emotional, with weight loss. In an article for USA...
This article originally appeared on Seth Munsey's new blog, "The Client Centered Coach." Seth is one of the many awesome gym owners in the Motivate Collective who are adding habit-based training and behavior change techniques to the way they do business. You can join our conversations on our...
This article originally appeared on Seth Munsey's new blog, "The Client Centered Coach." Seth is one of the many awesome gym owners in the Motivate Collective who are adding habit-based training and behavior change techniques to the way they do business. You can join our conversations on our...
For the past two months, the Motivate Forums have been crackling with amazing discussions about working with clients (Not a member? Why not? It’s free and there’s only mild hazing!). A lot of these discussions have centered on communication, and I have found myself teaching my fellow Motivators new...
We hear a lot of excuses about why people don’t exercise. “I don’t have the time.” “There’s not a gym close to me” etc. And sadly, most questionaries for the CDC, NIH and other government surveys use these misleading answers on their forms, so most of the survey data on how much we exercise as a...
Health and wellness professionals are often united by a common goal of wanting to help others adopt a physically active, nutritionally balanced, and mindfulness-centered lifestyle. As many of us know, this is no easy task. We are constantly facing an array of barriers to exercise and adherence to...
My friend and mentor Dan John is famous for a quote that should be a required tattoo in the health and wellness professions. <blockquoteThe goal is to keep the goal the goal. </blockquote Years ago I realized that my clients often have absolutely no idea where they wanna go (yet), and often just...
The average Utahan (a word I very recently learned how to properly pronounce—no small for feat for a boy raised in the derrty south) is 29 years old, married, conservative, white, “barely” male (49% of the population is female), stands 5’8”, weighs 170lbs, lives in a two bedroom house with 2.14...
You’re a really smart person. You know more than most people about at least a few things. You might even be an expert at some of them. And chances are, if you’re reading this, more than a few people look to you for advice (or even pay you for it). Maybe it’s about what to eat. Or what to do at the...
One of the sessions at the Motivate Summit was convened with the question: “How Important are fast initial results in long-term client success?” It was such a great question that we decided to keep the discussion alive on the Motivate Forums. Andrew McGunagle summarized what I think is a very...
Matt McGunagle convened a session at the Motivate Summit with the post-it note you see above. These are his notes from that session and a small glimpse into an optimistic future. I led a group conversation on this topic recently at the Motivate Summit in Salt Lake City and wanted to share my...
This week a coach I’m working with got a message from a client of his that was rather disturbing and he asked for my help. “Going through a divorce. I haven't been as engaged, but I intend to be from now on.” Every coach will deal with this at some point, and it doesn't even have to be this...
“Every relationship you will ever be in will fail,” begins the advice of Dan Savage, “until one doesn’t.” I have a lot of different ways to try to communicate complicated ideas simply, but one of the most effective ones I’ve found so far is to reframe my clients’ questions using the sage wisdom of...
Coaches love tools. We have our "teach the squat" cues, our "fix the squat" correctives, and our "nice squat!" congratulations high-five. But what about when the client leaves? What tools do you have for the other 167 hours? One of my favorite tools for promoting behavior change is a simple...
This excellent article is one of what I hope to be a series of perspectives from clients, potential clients, athletes, and regular folks about their experiences with their bodies, behavior, and mindset around health and fitness. Andrea Ellen is a force of nature and I want to thank her publicly for...
One of the most powerful words when people are talking about motivation is the word, “should.” “Should” usually means “if I don’t I’ll feel guilty” and is a hallmark in Self-Determination Theory research of what is referred to as introjected motivation. Introjected motivation is internal, but...
By Josh Hillis Josh Hillis has been at the forefront of habit-based coaching for years. In this article, Josh does an excellent job of articulating “identity-based goals” which promote internal motivation (“I am doing this because it is who I am”) versus external motivation (“I am doing that so...
<blockquoteMe: What would you do with a client who was so untrained, that they couldn't do anything? Like not even a movement yet?Dan John: I’d teach them to plank. Me: Ok, but what would you do for the other 59 minutes in the session? </blockquote I started coaching 6 years ago and in that time I...
When our clients come to us, many of us are quick to ask, “what are your goals?” It’s one of the first questions we learn to ask as fitness professionals. But the obvious follow up question to, “what are you goals” is often left out of our education: “Why?” Why do you want that? Why are you here?...
There is a small revolt going on in the world of willpower research. Baumeister’s dominant “resource-limited” or “strength-model” of willpower has come under some hard meta-analysis in the past 4 years. Chief among them is Robinson, Schmeichel, & Inzlicht (2010) meta-analysis of neuroscience...
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="704.0"] 789[/caption] In the early 1990s, Professor William R Miller, Ph.D. and Professor Stephen Rollnick, Ph.D. developed a simplified form of counseling that could be taught to professionals in health care, social work, and many other fields where...
By Dan John I don’t know how I’ve made it this many issues without posting a link to an article by Dan. In this article for Men’s Health, Dan discusses the very heart of what habit-based training takes: other people. All the science from Self-Determination Theory, to Willpower, to Habits points in...
As mentioned in the Research Review this month, I have long used choice in my coaching relationships as a way to foster autonomy in my clients. This can be scary for many new coaches who think that their value comes from programming their clients’ every moment, but as we saw in Wulf, Freitas, and...
David Dellanave has a radical answer. It’s not The Answer, he qualifies, but it’s certainly the best answer he knows for helping people improve their general strength. “I’ve done my job if I’ve gotten that person to lead themselves.” Mr. Dellanave’s answer might even ruffle a few strength-coaching...
One of the most interesting thing about a lot of habit-based interventions is that many don't do wildy better than other interventions in randomized control trials. They seem to do the same or maybe a tiny bet better. 12 weeks, however (the usual length of time for a nutrition or physical activity...
Sometime between 62-67 CE, a new bishop was setting up a new church in Ephesus. The bishop, Timothy was new as well and received a number of letters from his mentor Paul with advice about how best to establish the congregation there. Paul warned him against getting involved with the petty squabbles...
I was very excited for Death by Food Pyramid by Denise Minger to come out. As a dietitian, I do not accept much of the common practice today as fact. I think many of the nutrition protocols we use today are built upon faulty science. Some of these faults are because of limitations in research due...
Fitness professionals can be so enthusiastic about getting clients to their goals. We have all sorts of cool tricks, exercises, tips and habits to offer. Yes, eating more protein, drinking water, adding vegetables and getting exercise in are all pretty much indisputable habits to go after. However,...
By JC Deen JC Deen, also no stranger to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, has a hilarious style and a great system for keeping people on the path to health and fitness. His online coaching is all about “stacking the deck” to make healthy decisions easier to make until they become habit, which is...
One area of debate in the behavior-research community is the interaction between habits and goals. Wood and Neal (2007) proposes an interesting model (above) that depends on three principles that have been fairly well established in prior research: 1) “Habits are cued by context,” 2) “Habit...
Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction author, is one of a small handful of people to have a set of laws named after him. Clarke’s Three Laws are simple, profound, and provide an excellent framework for understanding the the very edges of what is possible. 1. When a distinguished but elderly...
This month’s book is another rare gem in pop science reading, which is to say a book written for lay people by a scientist who did most of the research in the book and who is at the forefront of his field. Brian Wansink, Ph.D. directs the Cornell Food and Brand lab and was Executive Director of...
One of the most common reasons that people say they do not want to join a gym is because they aren’t in good enough shape. Many people laugh at the paradox in that thought, but as coaches we take it upon ourselves to understand where a client is coming from. Many people fear the judgement, real or...
By Sohee Lee Sohee, no stranger to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, writes on Livestrong about the struggles that every one faces with body composition and lifestyle change. Specifically, patience and delegating your energy to the places that matter. As we have learned from the great work of Roy...
Ed Deci and Richard Ryan introduced SDT in 1985 as a framework for understanding motivation and how it can enrich our lives, formalizing it in 2000. Since then, many health interventions have been created with SDT at their core. In their 2012 paper Fortier, Duda, Guerin, and Teixeira, all of whom...
One of the most important topics in coaching that has only recently been studied in depth is willpower. Also known as “discipline” or “ego,” social scientists have finally begun in-depth explorations of how willpower works, is affected, is used, and is improved with training and time. The majority...
One of my first clients as a personal trainer was Erin, an 80 year old Irish woman who came into the gym, straight from Mass on a Tuesday, only to find her previous personal trainer had stood her up for the 3rd time. She was hopping mad, and just wanted a personal trainer who would show up. “My...