Do Affirmations Have a Place in Your Coaching Practice?

May 10, 2022 by Liz Carter

Do Affirmations Have a Place in Your Coaching Practice?

Written by Mark Teahan Director of Education Programs

I recently had a phone call with a colleague and the topic of affirmations came up. It struck me as a coincidence because I was just working on the use of positive affirmations and motivational interviewing in coach training. If you are familiar with my coaching style and its impact on Spencer institute coaching programs, you know how and why we love and appreciate motivational interviewing. It is a standard for dialogue in the early stages of coaching and it’s important to do it right.

Depending on where you are in your coach training journey and experience, you might know this already. Largely through trial and error, previous generations of coaches fine-tuned and tweaked coaching deliverable services without any training related to psychology, where motivational interviewing has its roots. They were winging it. I know this to be a fact, I am guilty of it. [Read more…]

Holistic Health Practices that Work Well with Traditional Medicine

March 3, 2022 by Liz Carter

Holistic Health Practices that Work Well with Traditional Medicine

Holistic practices such as massage, meditation, and acupuncture are getting immense attention because they help the body recover faster when combined with traditional medicine. Another reason for their wide usage these days is that they accompany the most negligible side effects.

Although modern medicine is a blessing for today’s world, they also have various side effects. Therefore holistic health practices are gaining traction as global health challenges become complex. But it is important to know what holistic health is and how it works with traditional medicine.

What is Holistic Health?

Holistic health refers to an approach to life in which multiple aspects of wellness are considered. In holistic health practice, an individual recognizes his body, mind, social, mental, spiritual, and intellectual wellness. A person has to take an active role in his health decisions and healing processes through adopting a healthy lifestyle.

Holistic health practices have their roots in ancient tradition. The prime motive of holistic health practices is ancients’ use to cure their diseases and remain healthy. Holistic health approaches are divided into the following categories:

Mind-Body Interventions: Includes relaxation classes using behavioral and psychological techniques.
Manipulative and body-based Therapies: It Utilizes movement of the physical body and practices like massage therapy and chiropractic
Biologically Based- Therapies: it includes biological and plant-based treatment using herbal medicines.
Alternative Medical Systems: Traditional Chinese Medicine is an excellent example of an alternative medical system developed from the western biomedical approach.
Energy Therapies: These therapies involve some form of healing treatment using ultrasonic, thermal, or subtle energy. Practices include Reiki or healing touch.

[Read more…]

Chemicals to Avoid in Your Personal Care Products

December 14, 2021 by Liz Carter

Chemicals to Avoid in Your Personal-Care Products

The average adult uses nine personal care products daily, exposing him or her to 126 chemicals every day (for many women, the numbers can be higher). This statistic accounts for personal care products alone—not the chemicals in your foods, environment, or home. Here are some interesting facts about personal care products sold in the U.S. marketplace today:

Fact: The Food and Drug Administration, unfortunately, does not have control over what goes into personal care products. In fact, the FDA has confirmed its inability to control what goes into them. Essentially, the agency has no oversight with respect to chemical ingredients in products, which means manufacturers can put just about anything they want into them: plasticizers, degreasers, surfactants, carcinogens, reproductive toxins or endocrine disrupters.

Additionally, our government does not mandate safety-testing of industrial chemicals that are used as base ingredients in everyday personal care products like shampoos, conditioners, soaps, lotions, makeup, deodorant, detergents, spot removers, and air fresheners—and the list continues! [Read more…]

Coaching 2021: A Summary

November 11, 2021 by Liz Carter

Coaching 2021: A Summary

Time is such a powerful force, it even trickles into the coaching world. There was a time when a coach could skate by through working with clients, without any formal education! If you are already certified as a coach currently, you know how crazy this is. But this was how things were 20 or more years ago.

But advances in coach training do not come at us as quickly as advances in other areas, say, for example, science. Changes in the coaching profession come from either different techniques and training and how coaching services are delivered, or they are changed by events like our current pandemic. This results in a shift, whereby millions of people are forced to – literally – look inward at their own health. But the pandemic has also slowed down the already trickle speed of coach training. We didn’t really get to learn too much in 2020 apart from COVID19, we were focused on survival. But now that 2021 is nearly over, we’ve learned a few things in hindsight. [Read more…]

Can a Green Living Lifestyle Help Prevent Disease?

November 2, 2021 by Liz Carter

Can a Green Living Lifestyle Help Prevent Disease?

The truth is, most of us would not be able to afford to pay for medical expenses directly out of pocket but when you combine our current healthcare crisis with this fact, it becomes unsettling to think of what might happen if our client needs treatment for a serious or terminal illness. This is why we have to look at taking our own health and our health care needs into our own hands. This involves becoming our own health advocate, of sorts, and to become familiar with the term “preventative medicine” in the more immediate sense. [Read more…]

Reasons That Going Green and Sustainable Living Makes Sense

October 7, 2021 by Liz Carter

Why Going Green Makes Sense

There is a variety of reasons to go green, but most come back to supply and demand. We have a limited amount of resources available and more and more people using them up. If we want our future generations to enjoy the same standard of living we’ve experienced, we need to take action.

Green building is a great place to start, as buildings consume 14% of potable water, 40% of raw materials, and 39% of energy in the United States alone (according to the US Green Building Council). That’s 15 trillion gallons of water and 3 billion tons of raw materials each year! If that’s not enough to convince you, here are some other reasons to go green:

For The Environment

Want to make the world a better place? Implementing green practices into your home or office can help reduce waste, conserve natural resources, improve both air and water quality, and protect ecosystems and biodiversity. [Read more…]

Benefits of Bodyways Therapies for Your Clients

February 11, 2021 by Liz Carter

Bodyways (sometimes called Bodyworks or similar) can be one way for your client to benefit from an often-overlooked method to improve their holistic health.

What is Bodyways?

By definition, Bodyways are used in alternative medicine to describe any therapeutic or personal development technique that involves working with the human body in a form involving manipulative therapy, breathwork, or energy medicine.

[Read more…]

Empowering and Repowering Your Clients

February 4, 2021 by Liz Carter

Reaching Holistic Goals

A great coach distinguishes his or herself by how well they empower clients to begin to take responsibility and take steps towards their holistic goals. Since it helps to identify and untangle some of the barriers that have kept them stuck, we want to look at what our client sees as important.

Your First Meeting and Assessment

Holistic goals that require change for our client are not going to happen overnight but we can usually organize a complete strategy for clients within the first couple of sessions. With this in mind, be sure to inform clients that your first meeting with them is really a conversation – about the fit between yourself and the client. It is also a time for assessing if Holistic Coaching is right for them.

[Read more…]

How to Prioritize Holism in Your Lifestyle | Holistic Nutrition and Living

January 29, 2021 by Liz Carter

Holistic Nutrition and Living

The word holistic denotes interconnectivity. Prioritizing a Holistic lifestyle means understanding the importance of various factors in health, and how they are interconnected. It means that for a healthy lifestyle, one needs to take multiple steps.

Holistic health or lifestyle is a neglected thing in conventional medicine, which focuses on signs and symptoms and treating disease conditions. However, a holistic approach to health and nutrition forms the basis of most traditional forms of medicine.

[Read more…]

Using Positive and Negative Emotional Attractors in Your Coaching Model

January 21, 2021 by Liz Carter

Using Positive and Negative Emotional Attractors in Your Coaching Model

Personal visions have a long history in coaching and form the backbone of our work done with clients. For a client to reach holistic goals, there has to be a clear vision, and yet holism itself implies more than a single facet of our client. But getting to our client’s vision is so coveted, that it is a model used in other health, fitness, and wellness settings. [Read more…]

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