Awareness

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This section is going to be dedicated to understanding what we’re trying to achieve in building the client’s awareness of their health. We want to have meaningful interactions with all clients no matter what stage of change they’re at.

 

Precontemplation Clients

For people that sit in the ‘Precontemplation Stage’ there are a few aims which we want to achieve:

• Build a level of rapport to let clients know the door is always open if they ever need anything
• Ensure they know it’s a safe and confidential environment if they ever feel they need to interact with us

At the very minimum we want to ensure that we build relationships with clients and are approachable. Building awareness of Healthy Business and what we do is the absolute minimum employees of a company need to know. Front of mind awareness is a great goal to have within a clients mind regarding their health.

Strategies to reach these people within our Health CI Framework may include:

• Getting to Team Meetings and introducing yourself
• Giving presentations on health topics
• HBPG events orientated around rapport building
• Exploration/proactive calls

Although not directly related to Health CI, these are important things to consider with all forms of our coaching.

 

Contemplation Clients

It’s likely that if our clients have completed a ‘Check In’, they are either contemplating a change based on their assessment scores, or they’re interested overall for further advice.

 

How do we build rapport?

The tools we have at our disposal with the Unlocking Life Manager system can give us several starting points to build rapport. Knowing clients:

• Age
• Marital status
• Children, if any
• Interests
• Sporting teams followed
• Hobbies
• Holidays
• Last consultation they had, if applicable

This can be filled out in both their profile and also in previous notes. If we take notes about things other than just health orientated things, we can always start with that then lead into their specific health issue.

This is a great rapport building tool in our system currently that doesn’t take much effort to do and can take a small portion of your consultation time.

 

How do we elicit a feeling of safety for our clients?

With Health CI, the easiest way to make clients comfortable about potentially opening up is to ensure that they understand the conversation is confidential.

It can be tough with phone consultations, but creating conversation with the client about things other than health in conjunction with confidentiality, can help aid what your clients will divulge with you. Be aware though that there are reasons to break confidentiality, refer to the ‘Confidentiality’ resource to be clearer on what to do regarding confidentiality and when you would break it. 

 

Questioning

Building rapport and creating a safe feeling for the client are the primary aims as a coach. The way in which we do this is ask intuitive questions.

In the resources section there is a question bank that can generate some ideas to help you with improving your questioning as a coach. Having good open-ended questions will help you build rapport but will also help with understanding of your clients struggles.

 

Co-Creating Solutions

The Check In is a great start for us as coaches to get an idea of what is happening in our client’s lives. Remember, the client is the expert on themselves and it’s the coaching style in which we execute the previous aims. Utilising questioning and almost leading the client into solving their own problems, with obviously some input yourself, is an effective strategy long term. 

Creating a two way street regarding creating individualised solutions. You tend to have a smaller amount of success with a strictly prescription model, but being good at all the pillars we’ve outlined will set you up for more success with a much larger proportion of your clients.

 

Confidence Testing

When we are setting our behaviour goals, we want to make them a 9/10 that the client will do the actions we both decide on. By taking a co-creation approach in combination with them deciding on what action they want to take, they’re more likely to do so.

Simply prescribing three ten minutes walks in a week for example can go wrong in many places. All too often we get caught up in telling our clients things but have no idea if that is even achievable for them! Using your questions to ask the client what they think they’re able to do is going to in turn be much more successful. We want to aim to empower them to make change. Prescription is necessary in many areas, but guiding the client into making decisions for themselves will inevitably help them in the long term.

For further reading, refer to the ‘Confidence Testing’ resource.

 

Our aim

• Rapport

• Safety

 

How we do it

• Intuitive questioning
• Co-create action plans
• Confidence testing
• Setting behaviour goals