Blog Posts For Our Practitioner Community

Jill and I work with clients with hormonal imbalances and autoimmunity – and many people find us when their symptoms have gotten really bad. They want quick, easy answers and who can blame them? Their lives have been taken over by pain, fatigue, weight gain, hair loss, joint pain, muscle pain, headaches or, for an unlucky few, all of the above.  

But there’s no silver bullet in the form of a supplement or a single food. As coaches and holistic practitioners, you know that lifestyle medicine is about consistent, sustained, multifactorial lifestyle change. For many clients, this can be a hard pill to swallow (pun intended).

When we explain that balancing blood sugar and supporting the adrenals are often the first critical steps in healing, there can be confusion or resistance. I came here with a thyroid problem, people think. What in the world does that have to do with my blood sugar?!  

It’s easy to get exhausted by this resistance or to be flooded with self-doubt.  “Maybe blood sugar isn’t playing a role after all. Maybe I’m a terrible coach.” But what their resistance and ambivalence calls for is empathy.

A lot of us became coaches because we faced our own personal health challenges and we found profound and dramatic relief from lifestyle medicine. We gave up gluten and dairy long ago and now we don’t even think about it. We switched to buying only organic and have gotten used to the increased cost. We’ve done the elimination diet, maybe several times, and we’ve forgotten how scary and limiting it can feel.

We may feel so much better than we used to that we occasionally have little cheat moments where we have a low-glycemic black-bean brownie (or three)…perhaps after we’ve spent the day coaching clients to give up sugar altogether. 

As we feel better, and the major turning points of our healing are behind us (even though healing and optimal wellness are lifelong processes), we can lose empathy for people who are new to the journey. We forget how hard this can be.

I’m writing about this today because client resistance is not an if, it’s a when. Ditto with ambivalence and occasional hostility. And it can be easy to lose our empathy for clients when we face this over and over. We can also start to take it personally. “Why are they frustrated with me? I didn’t cause their symptoms!”

But their response isn’t about you. It is about their own fear, anxiety, and grief. You’ve experienced it, too. It may just have been so long ago, you don’t remember the depth and breadth of the feeling. Did you feel a deep pang of sadness when you realized that eggs could no longer be your go-to breakfast food? Or when you learned you couldn’t eat citrus or nightshades?

The world needs you as a coach. Your clients need you. And they ARE benefiting with your help. Don’t let their resistance wear you down. 

The call to empathy comes with one caveat, however: we can’t just resign ourselves to the role of “listening friend” (the same way it can be easy to slip into “tyrannical taskmaster” when we don’t embrace empathy). Our role is to find a balance between the two. We need to listen and redirect; we need to empathize while motivating them to change.

So the response to client resistance becomes something more like: “I hear you. It IS hard. And we really need to address _______________ .” Or: “That sounds tough. I know, I’ve been there. At the same time I want you to imagine what your life might look like in the future if you make some changes today?” (In my last post, I wrote about how beneficial it is to get clients to dream of the future.)

Coaches who get the most results for their clients (and, hence, get the most referrals) incorporate relationship-building and information. Support and education. And, when you are able to do both, you will experience less professional burnout. It is a win-win.