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Wellbeing is something that will show up in the coaching room in all different shapes and forms, so it’s something that we have to be aware of as coaches and recognise that we might be asked to address it even if we don’t see ourselves as a wellbeing coach.
Some clients might show up saying ‘I need to think about my wellbeing’. Others might come with topics that fall under the umbrella of wellbeing.
Knowing what you mean by wellbeing is important because if a client is saying that they need to look after their wellbeing and they meant their health, nutrition, or physicality, but they went to a wellbeing coach who was a positive psychology trained, wellbeing coach, they would be talking at odds with each other.
What Is Wellbeing?
- Wellbeing could be relating to:
- physical wellbeing, or health.
- emotional wellbeing,
- psychological wellbeing,
- work-life balance,
- or having a well-rounded life,
- And if you look at wellbeing in terms of positive psychology, there’s potentially a different definition of wellbeing compared with someone who’s a health coach.
Let’s start with positive psychology. What would their definition of wellbeing be?
Even within Positive Psychology, there are a number of different definitions. The one that perhaps is most common is the idea of subjective wellbeing, and that is a combination of the amount of positive emotions someone feels in their life related to the amount of negative emotion, plus their level of life satisfaction.
High wellbeing equals high positive affect or emotion, low negative affect or emotion, plus a good level of life satisfaction.
It’s worth noting that positive emotions aren’t just about feeling happy, but would include other things, like curiosity, enjoyment, achievement, and adventure. Generally speaking, someone with high subjective wellbeing is a fairly content person, and they’re satisfied with where they are in their life, they experience a higher ration of positive emotions to negative ones. That would all equate to a high level of subjective wellbeing. The opposite would produce a low level of subjective wellbeing.
When someone is bringing wellbeing into the coaching room as a topic we really need to drill down into that and what they interpret it to mean.
What Else Do We Need To Consider?
When coaches are coaching health professionals, a lot of their time may well be spent addressing stress-related issues, perhaps overwhelm or work life balance. Whatever you’re doing within the health service, if you’re a health professional, it’s going to be tough. That’s going to be within the arena of wellbeing as well. And lifestyle will impact on all of that too because our lifestyle will either add to the stress or help you manage the stress.
Coaching around relationships could be considered wellbeing too. Whether it’s workplace or personal relationships, those dynamics are going to have a huge impact on wellbeing.
How Does It Work In The Coaching Room?
In terms of someone coming to the coaching space, if we firstly clarify and get clear what they’re bringing to the space, what their intentions are for the coaching, then we can start to explore that with them
If you’re not trained as a wellbeing coach, don’t be afraid of wellbeing coming into the coaching room. As a coach you are there to discuss whatever comes up for the coachee. If an aspect of their wellbeing is:
- their relationships in the workplace
- the level of physical activity they’re engaged in,
- they’re not happy
- they’re working too many hours,
then we’ll talk about that.
Whatever it is that’s coming up from them, we’re going to have the capacity to have good conversations about wellbeing and ways that they can improve it, using our coaching skills.
That’s the beauty of doing transformational coaching and having all of these tools and resources and training.
How Does Transformational Coaching Help With Coaching For Wellbeing?
The person-centred approach of sitting and listening and allowing the space for someone to really air their thoughts is a great way of helping someone with their wellbeing, because quite often people just ruminate on these topics and they don’t get spoken about. Just offering that space can be really helpful.
The solution focused approach to coaching could provide them access to their strengths and to plan what they could be doing for themselves to remedy the situation. They might visualise their perfect week and start to put in place things that are going to improve their wellbeing.
There are many ways within positive psychology that we can support wellbeing. We can encourage our coachees to engage with more positive emotions, for example, one thing we do with trainees is get them to create a happy playlist to listen to. Also, focussing on having meaning plays a part in this approach. If we’ve got meaning in our life, quite often we’ll put up with a lot of negative aspects of the life. We also look at engaging with ‘flow’ state, and doing activities that encourage this. So positive psychology is really useful area that coaches can engage with around wellbeing.
If we come on to relationships, Transactional Analysis, one of the approaches we cover in our Transformational Coaching Diploma, explores and helps us to understand relationship dynamics. If someone has difficult relationships, sometimes working them through in the coaching room can help them to gain perspective and perhaps make changes to the way the relationship dynamics work.
Cognitive behavioural coaching, helps us to explore unhelpful thinking patterns that people get into and maybe the stories they tell themselves about situations in their life.
And if we look at Gestalt, then again we can look at bringing everything that impacts on our wellbeing into the coaching room, and really working through it in the here and now. Perhaps that will help in bringing about some change that allows us to be more ourselves and show up as us. If we’re being authentic, if we’re becoming more who we are, then that’s going to help with our wellbeing.
And then finally in terms of neuroscience, the last strand of transformational coaching diploma, understanding the relationship that we have with stress and the impact that activating the sympathetic nervous system has on us is useful. And coaching can help find ways to manage that and get back to our ‘rest and digest’ state.
We hope that we have helped a little in exploring different dimensions of wellbeing that might come up for someone and for you to recognise that you don’t have to be a ‘wellbeing coach’ to be able to address wellbeing issues in the coaching room. If you’ve learned to be a transformational coach, then you’re going to have tools and techniques different approaches at your disposal that will allow you to navigate that space, whatever it turns out to be for the coachee. Allow them to explore what wellbeing means to them, what aspects of it they want to improve upon and then go from there.
Both our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma and our Transformational Coaching Diploma for Lifestyle Medicine cover aspects of coaching for wellbeing. Take a look and get in touch if you have any questions about either.
