How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Page 401

describe four key components of motivational interviewing as OARS:
 Open ended questions
 Affirmations (positive)
 Reflecting
 Summarizing
Positive thinking to achieve success
Coach your clients to use self-talk to recognize negative or irrational
thoughts, stop the thought, and rewrite the thought in their mind in a
positive way. Negative thoughts can get in the way of your clients
accomplishing their goals. Thinking positively can affect their actions,
mood, and feelings about their goal of a positive change.
Thought-stopping is one technique that can help clients get rid of
unwanted or negative thoughts. Your clients may dwell or obsess on
thoughts that make them worry, feel sad, or feel bad about themselves.
When they practice thought-stopping, these unwanted thoughts occur
less often. Over time, the thoughts become easier to ignore or may not
occur at all.
Here's an example of how thought-stopping might work. Pretend that you
are on a diet. One night, you go to a birthday party and eat several slices
of pizza and a big piece of cake. All the way home, you are mad at
yourself for consuming so many calories. “I don't know why I bother
trying to lose weight. I have no will power. I might as well forget about it.”
You get home and continue to eat, even though you are not hungry. You
eat because you feel you fell off the plan—so, now everything is over. This
is not true!
When you start to think of yourself eating more or forgetting about the
healthy eating plan all together, you say “stop” out loud or quietly in your
mind. You get up and move around or find something else to do. Then you
think of something pleasant to take your mind off of that thought, such as
a trip you are planning to take or a movie you recently saw that made you
laugh.
According to Marianne Flagg, author of Positive Thinking Stopping
Unwanted Thoughts, thought-stopping includes three parts:
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