typically includes words like ‘angry’,
‘depressed’, ‘hopeless’, ‘resentment’
and ‘self-pity’. Although I usually solicit
about five words from a volunteer, one
phrase that he mentioned particularly
stood out: ‘I feel like a failure.’ These
words seemed strange considering he
was a highly successful man who had
earned his masters degree and had
nearly 20 years’ experience. From the
outside, he was anything but a failure.
Next, I sought to uncover what in his life
brought out these feelings. I asked him
to outline the events of his day starting
from the time he woke up until the time
he went to sleep. He began to detail the
events of an average day and by doing
so, he realised that by midday he had
experienced all of the negative feelings
on his list, including feeling like a failure.
The problem wasn’t that he was a
failure; the problem was in how he
chose to view the events of the day. By
mid-morning, after checking emails,
staff members would begin arriving at
his door to ask for help with assorted
problems. Instead of embracing their
problems as something he could help
them solve themselves, he viewed their
problems as his own – and ones that
he could not solve by himself in a short
timeframe. This made him feel anxious
about receiving them in the first place.
My volunteer considered the problems
an intrusion, an interruption to his day.
However, dealing with these issues was
actually part of his job. Because of the
anxiety he experienced dealing with these
‘interruptions’, he would go to McDonalds
to eat a cheeseburger, a large fries and, on
particularly bad days, drink a milkshake.
He felt like he could bring certainty to his
life by selecting something that would
make him feel good as he ate it.
I did a follow-up workshop for the same
group one month later. The volunteer
had already lost four kilos. What had
changed? He had recognised that the
interruptions were an opportunity to
help mentor his staff members. He
realised that he did not have to solve
each of their issues – he simply needed
to coach them to answer their own
problems.
When he began to take on less ownership
of his staff members’ issues, he felt
less anxiety and less need for ‘comfort
eating’. Consequently, he made wiser
choices for lunch, making his weight loss
relatively easy. He didn’t have to spend
three hours at the gym or starve himself,
he simply made different choices based
on recognising the feelings that had
caused the unhealthy patterns.
The exercise I took him through is mostly
about mindfulness. We know that our
habit patterns can cause undesirable
results. The problem is, the habit pattern
is based on feelings. If a client doesn’t
deal with the feelings associated with
their weight gain and the reasons for
staying overweight, there is a good
chance they will stay that way.
Connect with your client
Your client’s goal of weight loss, while
meaningful, is not the end goal. The end
goal is to feel more vibrant, like the way
they look and have more energy. When
you connect with how they are feeling
and you understand what is driving
them toward their goal, you can make
more significant headway.
You don’t have to pretend to be a
psychologist to use this strategy – it’s
simple coaching. After asking them
to list a few feelings they would rather
not experience each day, and after
they have explained how they wind up
experiencing them anyway, you can ask
your client to come up with strategies to
change the way they look at a situation
or actually change their actions each
day in order to feel happier. This is like
shoveling information (instead of dirt)
and watching them continue to step up
until they are no longer bound by the
walls of the proverbial well.
I didn’t tell my volunteer how to change
– I simply reflected the information
back to him and asked him to create his
own strategies for climbing out of the
emotional rut. Sounds simple, and it is.
Simple but powerful. When your clients
are able to break the habit patterns
causing them to stay unhealthy, they
can begin making positive choices that
support their goal of feeling good again
and losing weight.
Your client may not initially have the
resilience of the donkey in the story,
but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn
how to think that way. Just like proper
form comes with training, for those
who don’t naturally have it, resilient
thinking comes with training too.
Remembering that you might be the
only hope your client has in moving
them towards better health, I suggest
you don’t end your training session on
the mat stretching. Instead, how about
ending your sessions by training them
in the skills they can use to help change
their behaviours on all the days that they
don’t train with you in the gym?
Stephanie Weichert
Stephanie is a certified life and executive coach, strategic interventionist, published
author, speaker, and strategic director for START Fitness ® , the longest-running Boot Camp
fitness program in the USA. She is also certified as a personal trainer through the National
Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) and has a BA from San Francisco State University. For
more information visit www.stephanieweichert.com
WWW.FITNESSNETWORK.COM.AU \ NETWORK AUTUMN 2014
39