One of the key aspects of health and wellness coaching is developing the concept of simple complexity motivation and how to reach your goals. There are universal truths when it comes to motivation and whether you’re a business, an individual, or a team, it works the same way.
“I started looking further into that and now use it quite a bit,” said Dr. Jeff Lynn, Ph.D., NBC-HWC, FIOC, and concentration track director for health promotion and wellness at Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions (RMUoHP). “This allowed me to bring the health and wellness coaching track to the master of science and health science along with the health and wellness coaching certificate and to the PhD program to RMUoHP. Students who take the course can sit for the national board certificate and become a national board-certified health and wellness coach.”
The motivation for doing something is often like taking a prescription. A shocking number of people don’t take their prescribed medications, such as pills. “So, if that’s hard it’s going to be hard to do an entire behavior change … like exercise [that may be prescribed] when you don’t like to do it. Fostering behavior change is not telling someone to do something and then they do it – our brains just don’t work that way.”
Resistance to change is quite natural for people. “The good news is it’s totally natural,” said Lynn. “The bad news it it’s not good for you. If I go home and sit on the couch and watch television and then you tell me I should go exercise, immediately my brain is going to start defending sitting on the couch. The argument in the brain is going to be far stronger than any argument made coming from outside the brain. That will be the case whether it’s a coach, a physician, or family member – if someone tells you what to do, you’ll find reasons not to do it –and that’s totally normal. This gives us a good place to start when it comes to a coaching approach.”
Lynn said for anyone who has done something that is life changing or life affirming, something we’re proud of, they should be unapologetically proud of themselves for doing it because it is hard. “We can all think back to something that we’ve done that was tough and we kept on doing it because we believe in it enough to keep doing it. That really is this whole idea of what type of motivation actually works and what types that don’t work in the long run.”
“There is not blanket motivation,” he said. “I run very long races, and some ask why I do that. I have my reasons to do what I do, and others have reasons for what they do. Motivation is very individualized. If we’re going to help someone, we would need to help someone explore themselves introspectively and figure out what it is that really is going to motivate them – that’s what matters. It’s a core value that is worth sticking out when things get tough.”
Lynn said if someone is yelling at you to do 20 pushups, there is a fair chance you’re going to do them. But that’s not sustainable behavior change. Short term motivators are really just going to get in the way.
“Rewards can be a negative in a lot of ways,” said Lynn. “Short term motivators can really get in the way. What I like to do is put it through my relationship filter and say, if you did this in your personal relationship, would it be good or bad? Imagine if you have a significant other and you said, ‘hey, if you do this, I’ll give you a reward.’ You’re not going to strengthen your relationship.”
Sometimes it’s the little things that we can look forward to that can help us keep going. Things like if someone has vacation plans, something to look forward to in a couple of weeks or a month – it can keep us going.
“Happiness and thriving at work are things that we know are critical”, said Lynn. Acknowledgement is one of them. One of the worst things that can happen in terms of employee satisfaction is to ignore them. Getting some type of acknowledgement for what it is they do is one of the critical features of being motivated. If we can help people be more engaged and more motivated at work, “that’s huge.”
“That’s part of the rational I use when I’m coaching and consulting with companies and showing them,” said Lynn. “You get a job, and you do that job really well. Maybe you do it so well that you get promoted to manager. Now, you’re not doing the job that did, but rather managing others who do that job. Now we have a problem because your skill was doing the job and not managing, which most of us don’t get trained in. We see someone else doing the job we did, but they’re not doing as well as we did – we want to micromanage them. What happens is we have people disengaged and unhappy.”
“If the managers can learn how to elicit motivation and happiness to help them develop and empower them by using coaching techniques, then we’re moving in the direction of almost utopia where people come to work happy and engaged and who want to be productive,” said Lynn.
By training managers and leaders within companies to take a more humanistic approach and stop managing people who don’t want to be managed and instead coach them. Managing is command and control – we tell someone what to do. Coaching is where relationships are built. We are able to develop and empower people to see the whole picture and take risks to make decisions, carry them out and follow through, and come up with their own ways to solve problems.
Instead of command and control, it’s about fostering and facilitating. It’s a different type of relationship. Instead of telling them what to do with a problem, we ask them to give us their thoughts on how best to solve it.
“Here’s the paradox,” said Lynn. “If you’re a manager, as long as you’re the expert, you guarantee that no one else is ever going to be. You’re actually holding down your direct reports by being the expert because they don’t have to be the expert. Instead, we should help them become experts by asking more and telling less, by eliciting from them their ideas, giving them the opportunity to think things through and be creative and use their brains. We know from science that this does make you happier. It allows people to contribute more that becomes a better feeling – something worth coming to work for.”
“The key to motivation is knowing why you’re doing it – knowing your why,” he said. “If someone wants to lose 20 pounds, the reality is, it’s never about weight loss. It’s about the why behind it. If we can help people understand what lies at the core that makes them want or need to do these things, then they can tap into that when times get hard.”
Listen to the full podcast episode here.
