In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, we share a recording from the webinar “Dietitian as Coach: Teaching dietitians to have lasting impact with their clients.”
In this webinar, we cover:
- What is coaching?
- How the coach approach can be used by dietitians
- Key coaching questions dietitians can use to facilitate behavior change
Links:
- The DSC Nutrition Counseling & Coaching Certificate is open again! Check out the program information (pricing, components, etc.) here
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. I’m Krista, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, an online learning platform for RDs and students. I am on a mission to help more dietitians build confidence and expertise in running successful, profitable businesses. I went to business school so you don’t have to.
My team and I have grown DSC to a platform that serves hundreds of members. We’ve experimented with all types of marketing, tech, sales strategies, productivity tools, systems, and more. And we want to spill the tea on what’s working, what’s not, and how you can leverage our insights to kickstart, expand, or elevate your own business.
Ready to dive into your business school crash course? If so, let’s get started.
Hey there and welcome to a new episode of the dietitian success podcast. So in today’s episode, I’m actually taking the recording from a live webinar that I just offered this morning. On the coach approach for dietitians. So how to teach dietitians to have lasting impact with clients through coaching techniques.
As you know, as I’ve talked about on. This podcast before I’m currently doing my, level one coaching certification through the international coaching Federation. So I wanted to take some of the things that I’ve learned so far and share them with you to implement in your own practice. It’s been really, really fun, really interesting, honestly, a very new, innovative approach to how dietitians work with people.
And it’s not even just working with clients. One-on-one it’s. You know, how do you talk to yourself? How do you talk to your partner? How do you talk to your friends, your colleagues, the people that you work with? Coaching can be used in any of these scenarios. And so I hope that you enjoy the recording of this webinar. And let’s get into it.
Hello, welcome everyone to today’s webinar, Dietitian as Coach. As you are joining us, please post in the chat where you are joining us from. We’re so excited to have you here today, and we’ll get started in about 20 seconds, just to give people a chance to log on and to again, post in the chat. where you are joining us.
from.
All right, so we have Southern California, awesome. I am located in Calgary, Canada. We have an Omaha, Nebraska. We have Arizona. So great to have you joining us today. All right, let’s get started.
Studies suggest that doctors interrupt their patients an average of 11 seconds after they start talking. Give me a yes in the chat if you’ve ever been to a medical appointment and you felt like you weren’t truly being. I know I’ve certainly been in this situation before. And this is a huge challenge in our health care system.
I am not saying that this is the case with dietitians. What I am saying is that as dietitians, we regularly get longer sessions of time with our patients and our clients. We have an incredible opportunity to make an impact if we sit with a patient, if we understand them, know them and help them move forward in their path.
But how many of us sometimes feel like we’re just not having the true impact that we want to, or could be having with our patients, our clients, or even our peers. My hypothesis and why I’m here today is to talk about an aspect of working with people that is often not thought of in relation to traditional dietetics work.
I think that dietetics education teaches us to be incredible educators, but to truly make an impact, we need to talk less, and listen more. Listening is key. And the framework we can use to support us in the pursuit of listening more and talking less is the art of coaching. I believe that coaching could be that secret sauce that makes dietitians feel empowered, fulfilled, And importantly, has the most impact on the health of our population.
My name is Krista Kolodzisic. Now, I am by no means an expert at counseling. I don’t have a master’s degree in counseling or in behavior change. But I am a dietitian who has firsthand experience feeling the lack of confidence and the imposter syndrome that can come with feeling responsible for helping people make changes in their lives.
And I’ve always wondered why nobody is talking about this topic. It’s assumed that we’ll get out of school, finish our education, and know how to confidently work with people. And I now own a company called Dietitian Success Center. Some of you may be familiar with it, where we constantly work towards solving problems for dietitians.
I hear about the challenges that dietitians encounter every single day and the challenges around client counseling and behavior change are the loudest. This has sent me on a journey to pursue my level one coaching certification through the International Coaching Federation because I’ve seen firsthand that transformative impact that coaching has had on my work with people.
my relationships and myself. So in today’s session, we’re going to be covering three key topics. What is coaching? How the coach approach can be used by dietitians. and key coaching questions we can use to facilitate behavior change. Here’s what you can expect from our session today. It’ll run about 30 to 40 minutes.
Throughout the session, you can use the chat to ask questions. Maria is going to monitor the chat and we’re actually going to take note of all the questions. And we’re going to publish the answers as a podcast episode next week. So if you haven’t already, make sure and subscribe to the Dietitian Success Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify.
So when you post your question, just know we’re going to write it down. We’re going to collaborate as a team on the response, and then we’re going to publish them. early next week. The recording will be sent out tomorrow morning, so check your email for that, and we will also send an email out when the podcast episode is published.
And just to note as well, there’s about a 15 second delay between what I’m saying and what you’re hearing. So when I ask you to post something in the chat, there may be a little bit of a pause between when I say it and then when I acknowledge your response. So just so you know. All right, let’s get started.
So last year, we did a survey of our dietitian community to understand some of the barriers that RDs felt around working with clients and patients. And one of the survey results came through loud and clear. And that was the concept That we know how to provide education, but we struggle when it comes to asking the deeper questions, uncovering the why behind someone’s actions, and truly knowing how to motivate a person towards taking action and making lasting impact in their lives.
Maybe you’ve asked yourself questions like, why are my clients leaving a session and then not implementing anything in between? Or, am I overwhelming them with too much information? Why do I feel like I’ve personally failed if a client hasn’t made progress? Does a no show mean that my client doesn’t value their time with me?
I feel like I need to jam pack my session with information so that my client feels like their time with me is quote unquote worth it. So before we get into how exactly dietitians can use the coach approach in practice, I want to share a bit about my personal journey and how I found coaching. When I first started in my career, I was working as a retail dietitian.
Meaning I was working with a huge variety of clients on anything and everything. From diabetes, to heart health, to infant feeding. And though I knew I was providing good quality evidence based information, I always felt like I was overloading my clients with too much information. I would lead with information.
They would often leave with a laundry list of items to work on. Even I knew that felt overwhelming, but I just couldn’t really figure out how to fill up a 45 or a 60 minute session without covering all that information. And then next in my role as the founder of Dietitian Success Center, I’ve supported over 500 dietitians in starting and growing businesses.
And what’s so interesting about this is that I started to notice some key similarities between my work with patients, And my work as a business strategist, even with dietitians, we would spend a session talking about so much stuff related to strategy, how to start a business, how to build a business. My clients would leave with a huge list of items to work on.
And I would be so pumped thinking, woohoo, they’re going to make so much progress over the next two weeks. And then the same thing would happen. My clients would get stuck in this space of analysis paralysis, overwhelmed. And ultimately lack of action. Now, fast forward to a few years ago when everything changed for me, I actually had the experience to work with someone who was going through the training to become a professional coach.
He asked me if I wanted to practice with him and I said, yeah, sure. Why not? Now, this was a completely different experience than anything I had ever done before, and it led to a huge aha moment for me. My sessions with him were a hundred percent question based, meaning he provided zero advice or feedback.
He simply listened and asked questions. He spoke about 20 percent of the time. I spoke about 80 percent of the time. It was my responsibility to set the course for the entire session. The questions that he asked required that I go deeper and critically think about what I really wanted and how I could get there.
I didn’t leave with a list of items to work on. Instead, I left with a better understanding of myself and my blocks and my barriers. And this sparked a shift in how I started to think about what it means to really work with someone and spark behavior change. Because we all have blocks and we all have barriers that prevent us from making changes.
And addressing those blocks Is what helps us move forward. And so coaching questions act like that, springboard that help us overcome those blocks and get from where we are now to where we want to be. And so I decided to pursue training to become a certified coach to understand where can coaching overlap with dietetics.
And that’s my goal right now is to take what I’m learning and share it with you to make it your own and implement it in your own practice to hopefully recognize the transformation in yourself and your clients that coaching has had for me. So let’s start by defining what exactly is coaching and where is the overlap between dietetics, medical nutrition therapy, and coaching.
Coaching. So what is coaching? So coaching is predominantly question based, meaning that the coach doesn’t provide advice or feedback. The client is seen as a whole capable individual who is the expert in their own lives. The client sets the direction for the entire session and the coach is responsible for creating the space.
For the client to explore those underlying blocks that are keeping them stuck. Now coaching is focused on present and future. It is not retrospective like therapy. So it’s different than therapy. It is focused on how are you feeling today, and what are you going to do about it tomorrow, and in the future.
What actions are you going to take from here? There’s no diving into any past traumas, past experiences. It’s all about the present. Present and future. And the reason why I think some of the principles of coaching can work so well in dietetics is because coaching is rooted in something called self determination theory and self determination theory suggests that in order for someone to make changes in their lives, they have to find their own internal motivation to engage.
And this internal motivation can be found when they have three things. They need autonomy, they need competence, and they need relatedness. Autonomy means that they need to be in control of their own behaviors and their own goals. They have to set the direction. Competence means that they need to gain proficiency in tasks and challenges.
And lastly, relatedness means that they need to feel connected to others. So this theory is really telling us that That people are not motivated to change when we tell them what to do. They have to find it within themselves. And then they have to receive the feedback, the connection, and the support to help them when they run into those blocks.
And dietitians are perfectly positioned to do this work, but it requires that we strike the right balance between our traditional approaches of predominantly advice giving and educating, and incorporate more genuine listening and deep questioning. Listening is key.
So let’s talk about how coaching and dietetics can overlap. First off, letting the client set the direction for the session, putting the ball in their court in terms of what is meaningful for them. Asking deeper questions. to explore blocks, and we’ll talk about what some of those questions could be.
Providing advice, feedback, and information with permission and when warranted. Providing a supportive structure around how to set goals and how to problem solve when you reach those blocks. And ultimately, connection. Coaching requires that we ditch our nutrition agenda and truly put the client in the driver’s seat to understand and overcome their blocks.
So I’ve said the term block a couple of times and you might be wondering, well, what do you mean by a block? How I define a block is a thought, a feeling, a feeling. an emotion or a belief that keep us stuck. When we solve for the block, we end up solving for the root cause of a surface level problem. So for example, a client might come to you and say that they’re feeling overwhelmed when it comes to meal planning, that they just need more ideas.
We might be quick to jump to solving the surface level problem. Which is needing more meal ideas, but when we listen for the underlying block, the thought, the feeling, the emotion, or the belief, we can see that this client is feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelm is what is keeping this client stuck. Not the lack of ideas around meal planning.
There’s millions of ideas for meals online for free. This is not the problem, and solving for it might actually end up overwhelming the client even more by giving them even more ideas when they’re just feeling overwhelmed in general. So some examples of blocks could be keywords like fear, shame, guilt, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, frustration, confusion, comparing yourself to other people, feeling pressure, stuck, anger, avoidance, judging, impatience, insecurities, worry, or feeling discouraged.
Another example of a block, which we hear all the time is the word should. Should can be a huge block that can point to a client’s core belief that, that is keeping them stuck. So for example, I should be getting more exercise. I should be drinking more water. I should be eating more vegetables. I should eat It tells us that the client has a belief of how something should be or how they should be performing or doing something.
Should tends to keep us stuck because it’s very disempowering. We’re measuring ourselves up in an inadequate way against some standard that we’ve kind of just made up in our head. So just to share a personal anecdote. So in the coaching program that I’m doing, we were asked to do an exercise called the should detox, where we take a should statement, like I should be exercising more, and we replace should with I’m excited to.
So the sentence turns from, I should be exercising more to I’m excited to exercise more. That feels a lot more motivating and a lot more empowering. So how exactly do we tackle blocks? Well, we use a concept that I like to call genuine listening. To me, there are some key differences between genuine listening and active listening.
With active listening, we’re taught to lean in, to take in what the individual is saying, to engage, to reflect back to them, to make eye contact. And yes, this may all be true and valid and useful, but there’s one key difference between active listening and genuine listening that when I first heard it, it really struck me.
Let’s run through a couple of scenarios to show you what I mean. Let’s say you’re out for a walk with your partner or your friend or your colleague, and your partner is telling you about this issue that they’re having at work. You’re listening. But, you’re also thinking about the really, really good advice that you just want to share.
You’re half listening, but you’re half waiting for your partner to pause a little bit so that you can just squeeze in a little bit of information, a little bit of advice. Something that you know is going to be so helpful for them in this situation. Does any part of this sound familiar to you? I know it certainly did for me.
Let’s go through another scenario. Let’s say you’re meeting with a new client. Let’s call her Sarah. And Sarah says to you, I saw this amazing article yesterday about how celery juice can help cure ADHD. And I’m just so excited to try it. I bought seven stalks of celery and I’m just going to juice it myself at home.
I might even buy myself a juicer. I’ve just been feeling so lousy lately. It’s frustrating. And I’m really just needing something that’s going to give me energy in the morning. You know, I think I’ll get my kids on it too. You’re listening to Sarah, but your dietitian alarm bells are also ringing. You might be thinking things like, Oh my gosh, I’m so frustrated with all of this misinformation that’s floating around online.
I wonder where she even found this information. How am I going to tell her that celery juice isn’t going to cure ADHD? And how am I going to delicately say that her kids don’t need to be drinking all this celery juice too? Does any of this sound familiar? So genuine listening requires that we listen without thinking about how we are going to respond.
We just simply listen without judgment. We allow the individual on the other end to fully speak. To fully say what they want to say and to feel like they’re truly being heard. We all know how it feels to be on the receiving end of that partner, that friend, that colleague, or that health provider who we can tell is just waiting for us to take a breath.
So that they can interject. And when we aren’t listening genuinely, we end up missing the gems that help us understand someone’s blocks. We focus on the surface problems, not the underlying blocks. And again, the block is what needs to be addressed in order for behavior change to happen. So with Sarah, because we were so focused on our own thoughts and beliefs around what she was telling us, we missed some really key information.
We missed some key words like frustrated, lousy, Low energy. So when we really start to think about this, and we genuinely listen for those key words, we notice that the celery juice is not the problem here. And solving for the celery juice isn’t really going to help anyone. Why is this so hard for us to do?
Well, because we all have a really well intentioned brain. adorable advice monster that sits in our brains and waits until the perfect opportunity to come out and just share our incredible, amazing, wonderful, helpful advice. And yes, you heard me right. I did say advice monster. So this concept comes from Michael Bungay Stanier.
He’s a researcher and an author, and he has an amazing TED talk. I would write this down and watch it after this session. An amazing TED talk about this topic, about this idea that we all have advice monsters that prevent us from truly listen, listening to the person that we’re talking to. Though we give advice from a place of love.
We also give advice from a place of ego, wanting to showcase our knowledge, and when we give advice that was unsolicited, we’re really telling the person on the receiving end that we don’t believe that they can figure this out themselves, that they aren’t really the experts in their own lives.
And so when we tame our advice monsters, we genuinely listen without the intent to respond, we can pick up on those blocks that indicate someone’s underlying why. So when we pick up on a block, how exactly do we dive deeper using coaching questions? Well, we can do this in four steps. Step number one is mindfully and demurely telling our advice monster to be quiet.
Number two is to listen genuinely without judgment and without thinking about how you are going to respond. Number three is as you’re listening, make note of someone’s blocks. Those gems, the thoughts, the emotions, the feelings, the beliefs that might indicate the underlying problem. It can be helpful to actually have a notepad where you can write these down as you hear them to allow you to continue listening.
And number four, and then we can respond with a simple coaching question, probing them to go deeper. For the purpose of this example, we’re going to use the very simple question, I heard X. Insert the block there. Tell me more about that. So I heard frustrated. Tell me more about that. This provides a space for a client to dive into the block that is keeping them stuck.
So let’s go back to our example. I’m feeling overwhelmed when it comes to meal planning. I need ideas. How could you respond to this? You could say, I heard overwhelmed. Tell me more about that. So now we’re going to run through two video examples of two individuals. Who may or may not be the DSC content and operations managers who are expressing a challenge that they’re currently experiencing.
So I want you to listen to these examples, and as you’re listening, see if you can identify the block or maybe the blocks as there may be more than one. The thing that you could then ask them to go deeper on. So when you hear the block, post your idea in the chat. Okay, so Maria, our awesome operations manager, is going to queue up the first video.
So Maria, feel free to queue it up and press play whenever you are ready.
Hi, I’m Olivia and something that I’m struggling with right now is with my four year old son who just started senior kindergarten at a new school and has been having some after school meltdowns. Which are quite tricky, and he’s the kind of kid that when he has a meltdown, or a tantrum, it’s often very big, and very loud, and things get wrecked, and sometimes he goes after his older brother, and I want to be able to be there for him, and to comfort him, and to name his feelings, and do all the things that I know I should be doing.
But oftentimes, it’s also at a time when we need to get out the door, Or we need to have breakfast or I need to pack their lunches or I need to make dinner or I’m in the middle of something and it’s hard to I’m going to combine the two things that need to be done when I’m dealing with tantrums and often they take a long time before they’re over.
Alright, so go ahead and comment in the chat what you think the block here could be. The thing that we could say, I heard Blank. Tell me more. And there is a little bit of a lag, so I’m going to, I’m going to pause and I’m going to wait for the responses to come in. So if you hear a little pause, um, we’re just waiting for that lag to catch up.
Ah, yes. So struggle, struggle is coming up again. Yeah, absolutely. Love that you’re picking up on that for sure. Now, you may not have heard this, um, but. I heard the word should in there as well. So that could be something that you dive a little bit deeper on. Should be doing. According to who? What is it that you should be doing?
So a couple more responses in the chat. I heard struggle, a lot going on. I heard doing all the things I should be doing. Yes. Thank you, Leslie. That’s exactly what I heard too. Um, awesome. So thank you so much for these. Fantastic. responses. All right, we’re going to go on to example number two, so Maria feel free to cue it up and you can press play.
I’m Maria, but for the purposes of this video, I’m Sarah, and I’m here because I need help with my diet and my health. It’s been a struggle for years. I just honestly can’t seem to get it under control no matter what I do. I’m a lawyer and I’m so busy that I barely have time to eat lunch. I’m also having trouble sleeping.
And so then that drains me during the day. I feel like I have no energy. But I’m really here because my doctor warned me about my high blood pressure and my cholesterol. So now I’m worried about developing type 2 diabetes. I’m only 38. How can this be? On top of that, I’m experiencing digestive issues, so maybe I have food intolerances?
Anyway, with my wedding coming up next year, I really need to lose at least 30 pounds before the big day. Honestly, I just feel overwhelmed. No matter what I do, it seems like I can’t get my hell done. I’m scared that I’ll never be able to figure this out and that I’m destined to just struggle forever.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a point in even trying anymore. Awesome. So there were a number of different blocks within that example. So feel free to comment in the chat if you heard one or if you heard more than one and which one you heard. Great. So we have, um, struggle, worried. overwhelmed, no matter what she does, scared, destined to struggle, uh, scared, overwhelmed, worried, need to, yes, love that, um, get it under control, drained, worried, I need to, scared, struggled, yes, awesome, hopeless, yes, Thank you.
Awesome. All right. So you could pick any one of those to dive deeper into, and that’s not the only way that you could pose a coaching question. There’s so many different coaching questions out there. Some examples of other questions could be things like I love this one. What do you believe about yourself?
Um, I think that this one can really get to some of the core beliefs that someone has about themselves that are keeping them stuck. Things like, you know, I’m just not good at meal prep or meal planning. Or, I just can’t eat healthy. Another question, coaching question you could use, what assumptions are you, are you making?
I love this one too, because oftentimes we assume things that just may or may not be true. What is holding you back? This is such a great question. If someone isn’t making progress, we can simply ask the question, okay, so what’s holding you back right now? What do you need in order to move forward? This last one that I find so incredibly powerful.
What is on the other side of your block? So what is on the other side of your frustration? What is on the other side of your fear?
Okay. So let’s recap what exactly we have learned today. We’ve talked about how coaching can be used as a complimentary tool for dietitians. We’ve talked about the fact that coaching requires that we listen more and we talk less. Genuine listening means we listen for those gems without judgment. And all in all, we talked about how coaching could be that secret sauce for dietitians to make lasting impact with more clients.
But ultimately, in order to make this lasting impact. listening is.
So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for listening to our webinar. We love doing these types of webinars for you. Um, if you enjoyed this presentation, if you enjoyed this webinar and you’re interested in exploring counseling and coaching deeper, We do have a program that we’ve created specifically for dietitians who want to build their confidence and their skill set in this area.
If this is of interest to you, awesome. Stay on and I will talk about it a little bit more. If not, that’s totally fine. You can be on your way. We so appreciate your time. We appreciate you spending your lunch hour or your morning hour or afternoon hour with us. So, this program is a self paced course, plus you get a print copy of a workbook that includes hundreds of counseling and coaching questions and prompts, plus scripts for things like how to run a discovery call, how to troubleshoot common client scenarios, how to set goals, and so much more.
And I think it’s such a cool program because it was created with collaboration from, from dietitians in a variety of areas of practice. So what we did is we conducted informational interviews to ask them, how do you approach common client challenges and scenarios? And then we pooled all of that content and we coupled it with the research.
to deliver this super practical program. And then it was also designed as a certificate of completion. Meaning if you finish the program, if you finish the course, you can post it on your resume or on your LinkedIn. And so the doors to enroll in the course are now open. There’s early bird pricing until September 24th at noon Eastern.
So if this is of interest to you, check your email for more information about the content, the pricing, how to enroll. And if not, that’s okay. It’s totally okay. We’re so thrilled to have you as a part of our DSC community. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining me today. Make sure and give us a follow on Instagram at dietitiansuccesscenter.
Check out the dietitian success podcast. I post weekly episodes. So thank you so much for your time. It was so awesome to have you here today. And we’re excited to offer more of these in the future. And just as a reminder with your, um, with the questions that you’re asking, we are taking note of all of those questions and we’re going to publish the responses as a podcast episode next week.
So you will also receive an email with the link for that podcast question or with the link for that podcast episode where you can hear the responses to all of your questions. So thank you so much for your engagement throughout.
