Practitioners can use ‘appreciative inquiry’ to foster behavior changes

Key takeaways

• Use the developmental theory of appreciative inquiry when coaching a patient to make a healthy lifestyle change.
• Coaching as a health care professional includes listening, reflecting and asking questions.

DENVER — Your attitude toward a patient’s motivation for change is influential in their achieving their health goals, Charles Inniss, DPT, PCC, NBC-HWC, said at the Lifestyle Medicine Conference.

“Coaching equals listening. Coaching equals reflecting, and coaching equals questions,” Inniss said.

Inniss reminded the audience that for both themselves and their patients, “if you don’t believe you can be successful and you have no hope of accomplishing the goal, you won’t even try in the first place.”

“Our mindset is a product of our focus and our story,” Inniss said. “What we focus on affects how we feel ... the story we tell about what we focus on affects how we feel. How we feel and think influences both how we are and what we do.”

When helping a patient get healthy, Inniss recommended against focusing on a specific behavior, but instead suggested focusing on “how someone is thinking about or approaching a situation.”

“When you focus on the pros, the positives and the benefits of making the change, it is more likely that we pursue [change],” Innis said.

He also described the concept of appreciative inquiry and how it fits into clinical practice.

“Appreciative inquiry is a developmental theory that, in part, says that a positive question is more likely to lead to a positive conversation, positive emotions, positive action and positive results,” Inniss said.

Even in among busy clinical interactions, “sometimes all it takes is one positive question to be the match to get someone’s flame going,” he said. “When we ask questions that help [patients] to focus on their hopes and their dreams, their visions and their values, their strengths and their abilities, it serves to increase their drive to pursue [healthy behavioral changes].”

“We can [be] experts in health and beacons of hope through our presence and our conversations. We can evoke our patients’ motivation. With appreciative inquiry, we can feed their optimism,” Innis said.