Blog Posts For Our Practitioner Community

I’m deeply calmed – and motivated – by information.

For example, if you explain to me how refined carbohydrates turn into simple sugars in my body, forcing my pancreas to pump out insulin to usher those sugars into my cells (for energy), but that the more refined carbs I eat, the more insulin my pancreas pumps out and the more numb my cells become to the effects of insulin, I’ll listen with rapt attention.  

Then if you continue by describing how, when my cells stop “hearing” the insulin (similar to the way you stop really hearing that Justin Bieber song your tween daughter plays on repeat), my pancreas pumps out more and more insulin in a frantic attempt to get my cells to hear it, which leads to high circulating levels of insulin in my blood, which is associated with all the major chronic diseases including, stroke, cancer, dementia, and heart disease, I’ll have pulled out a pocket notebook and will be scribbling furiously. 

Finally, when you tell me that insulin resistance is associated with premature aging, which, sheerly from a vanity perspective, is enough to whip me into shape, I will change my behavior. Goodbye, processed sugar!

(If you keep going and tell me all about the negative downstream consequences of mismanaged blood sugar on my hormones? Well, no helping you then. I will have the biggest nerd crush on you.)

That’s just is how I work: When I understand the intricacies of an issue and I understand the consequences, I make the change.

Naturally, of course, I assume everyone else in the world works that way, too. In the presence of good information – explained in laborious detail by Yours Truly (ahem) – they will shift their behavior. Voila! Presto! My job here as a health coach is done!

Um, no.

Here’s one of the first things I learned in the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy program: Only 10 percent of people change their behavior based on information. Only 20 percent change based on an emotional reaction.

A whopping 70 percent change their behavior because of the path to healthier habits that we as coaches partner with them to create. And the skills it takes to create that path are wholly different than the skills it takes to walk someone through the hormonal changes that occur during a blood sugar spike.

As someone so data-driven, I feel blessed and lucky (thanks Natalie Merchant) to be learning the skills to help people actually make healthy changes.

It reminds me of functional medicine doctor Amy Myers’ saying, “You aren’t what you eat. You are what you digest and absorb.”

Which is to say that you can eat all the Brussels sprouts in the world, but if your body can’t absorb the nutrients in them, you don’t get the benefit.

Similarly, you can talk until you’re blue in the face about giving up sugar and eating more crucifers, but if your clients don’t actually take your advice, they don’t get any healthier.

So the call for us as practitioners is to not always default into the “expert/dictator” role, but to build genuine relationships that empower clients to make healthy choices.

When I say “dictator,” I don’t mean: 

1. a person exercising absolute power; or
2. a person invested with supreme authority

I’m talking about:

1. a person who authoritatively prescribes conduct.

The best news? This choice also benefits us as coaches. As one of the amazing teachers noted in a recent class: Building relationship competency with clients gets more results for them and spikes cortisol less for us. Feeling like we have to be experts all the time – always having to be ‘on’ with our knowledge – is a really cortisol-heavy state for us.

You should have seen the look on Jill’s face when we came across this last statement in our first class module. I think it’s worth repeating: Feeling like we have to be experts all the time – always having to be ‘on’ with our knowledge – is a really cortisol-heavy state for us.

Also, when we get more results for clients, they’re more satisfied – and more likely to recommend us to others and help us build our networks.

Having the knowledge is essential, too, of course. Not only will you encounter info-loving clients along the way, but having a strong functional medicine knowledge base is the foundation that will help you partner with your clients to build that forward path to health.

So it’s a win-win-win: better for you, better for your clients, better for business.