At the Institute of Transformational Nutrition, we know the importance of mastering critical coaching skills as a health coach if you truly want to help your clients get to the root cause of their symptoms and health conditions. Our Certified Transformational Nutrition Coaches study and implement four critical coaching skills and it’s what makes them great.

Let’s take a look at what they are and how YOU can master them too!

THE FOUR CRITICAL SKILLS OF A SUCCESSFUL HEALTH COACH

1. Educating

As a health coach, one of your primary tasks will be to educate clients and your audience on critical factors they need to know regarding their specific symptoms or condition. From there, you will allow them to make their own choices.

You will not recommend, advise, tell, instruct, treat, heal, or cure as that is outside of your scope of practice.

In a nutshell, you, as a coach, are an educator.

2. Offering Support and Guidance

Support and guidance are essential pieces of coaching. As you probably know from your own life, achieving goals isn’t as easy without support and guidance from a caring person.

Without this, clients often find themselves sabotaging their efforts with negative self-talk and quitting before they see appreciable changes in their life.

It’s also essential to have an objective person fill this role – someone who has an outside perspective and who can give unbiased feedback, unlike friends and family.

Friends and family may be too close to the situation so may not be able to see it from a broader perspective like a coach can. They also may interject their own desires into the goal making it harder to get results.

As you can see, offering clients support and guidance as they steer through their health journey is key.

3. Using Powerful Questioning Techniques

The best coaches all use powerful questioning techniques with their clients. When you are with your client, you’re not just there to have a pleasant conversation with them (as tempting as that might be).

You’ll need to dig a little deeper to get to the profound underlying issues.

Powerful questioning techniques will help you identify the client’s thought patterns. It will help you unearth the underlying habitual thoughts that the client has that have sabotaged their progress for far too long.

Questioning also helps the client stay goal focused. It’s not enough to just have a goal and work toward it.

You need to know why the goal is important, understand what the client’s life will look like once the goal is accomplished, and what the goal means to them.

Questioning also helps clients identify their own solutions and ways they can transform. Often coaches just give advice rather than asking questions that help clients uncover their own answers which is a disservice. This leaves the client dependent on the coach and feeling powerless when what you want to do as a coach is the opposite of that!

4. Offering Accountability

Finally, coaches hold their clients accountable. Again, coaching is not about making your client comfortable and just sitting around having a nice conversation.

It’s about making a powerful impact in their life. And part of creating a powerful result may be making your clients slightly uncomfortable.Asking questions like “if you continue the habits you’ve lived your whole life, what’s going to happen to you ten years down the road? Is this what you want for your life?” can help clients see why accountability is so essential to their success.

Asking questions like “If you continue the habits you’ve lived your whole life, what’s going to happen to you ten years down the road? Is this what you want for your life?” can help clients see why accountability is so essential to their success.

When they report making poor decisions, you can ask “Is that moving you closer to your goal or further away?” to help them see how they’re working against their goal.

In addition, it’s important to hold your client accountable for not only the goal they have, but also for their behaviors, responses, and habits.

When they respond with something like, “Well, I’ve always done it this way” they are offering a defensive response to their habits. But the question in this instance would be “Well, has that got you where you want to be with your goals and if not, what else could we try instead?”

As you can see, Transformational Nutrition health coaches are in the business of changing lives in a powerful way! By mastering these critical coaching skills, you can do the same!