Moving from expert to coach can facilitate adoption of healthy behavioral change

Key takeaways:

• Moving from expert to coach requires behavior change from the health care professional.
• A coach approach allows HCPs to harness the patient’s own expertise about their life to make a positive behavioral change.

DENVER — “Behavior change is at the heart of lifestyle medicine,” and the “coach approach” in clinical practice allows a health care professional to work with the patient to make positive health lifestyle changes, according to an expert.

“Going from the expert approach to a coach approach takes behavior change in the health care professional (HCP), especially because we have been trained in the expert approach,” Beth Frates, MD, FACLM, DipABLM, the current president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, said here at the Lifestyle Medicine Conference.

“In the expert approach ... the expert is using their own skills, knowledge and expertise, and it is often a race against time in a lot of these situations ... we are racing against time because it could be life or death,” Frates said.

“When we move to a coach approach, we are talking about patients who have chronic conditions that are lifestyle related. We are not racing against time. Time is our friend. In fact, we are working with time. It took time for [the patient] to get into the situation they are in, and it will take time some time to make a change,” she said.

The coach approach allows the HCP to work with the patient’s expertise in their own life, Frates said.

As a coach, one must be curious about the patient’s past, strengths, weakness, social determinants of health and their vision of the future; be open and nonjudgmental; be appreciative of any forward movement; and be compassionate, she said.

“When we use the coach approach, the patients can set goals for themselves,” Frates said. HCPs who use the coach approach can help tap into a patient’s motivators and their “why” — the reasons the patient wants to make a change to their health.

Frates suggested a five-step cycle on how to coach a patient to be successful: be empathetic; align motivation; build confidence; set SMART goals; and set accountability.

With accountability, the HCP needs to follow up, and “the patient needs support in order to power upward that spiral of change.”