Top 10 Rules for Working with Clients

Rule #1: Approach Each Client with Empathy and Compassion

Set Aside Judgment

Empathy and compassion mean setting aside judgment. As parents, we feel judged all the time. When making food and lifestyle changes in pursuit of health, we can often feel especially critical of ourselves.

We realize that choices we made, albeit with the best of intentions, may have contributed to our child’s illness. Is there any worse feeling in the world than this? For some parents, this feeling is so overwhelming that it acts as a block against seeing or accepting new ideas or evidence.

As a health coach, it will benefit you to develop skills to guide parents through this emotional journey. I offer this Maya Angelou quote as inspiration: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

You can reassure parents that what they have done up until this point is what they were able to do. Non-judging acceptance of prior efforts is a necessary step toward being ready to make changes. If you approach parents with empathy and compassion, they will not feel judged, and this will enable them to begin to make healthful choices.

Push the Boundaries When You Can

Having empathy and compassion does not mean that you don’t sometimes push the boundaries of your client’s comfort zone and challenge them to accept new ideas, to change their paradigm. That’s your job as a coach.

Changing lifestyle habits is necessary to transform health. When you challenge parents to make changes, you recognize just how difficult that challenge may be for them. Taking a kid who won’t eat anything that is not white and asking the parents to get them to start eating kale and fish oil and organ meats is not an easy task. It may involve tantrums. It may require foregoing social engagements. It will take time and fortitude. If your client thinks that you don’t appreciate how painful a child’s tantrum can be, they will think that your recommendations are too much or that they’re inappropriate for them.

Transform What Seems Impossible

Compassion and empathy give us the ability to identify with a client’s sense of the impossible, and to transform it into possibility.

Here’s an example. I had a client for whom I recommended an elimination diet. When I first started working with her, I knew that this was going to be way too overwhelming. This was a typical cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, and pasta for dinner. Every time I met with her, I told her that at some point, we were going to have to consider a 100% elimination of gluten from their diet for a period of time.

Each time I mentioned this to her just to plant the seed, I always said, “Don’t worry. We will do it when you are ready.” We spent a long time working together to find alternatives to wheat-based meals and cutting back slowly. After some time of working with her, I suggested that we try it.

She was really unsure if she could. We spent some time exploring what her sense of resistance was coming from. I asked questions like,

• “What would it look like if you could do this?”
• “What needs to change in your life in order for you to be able to do this?”
• “What can I do to support you in this journey?”

We determined that what she really needed to make this happen was more support from her husband. We then devised a plan to get him on board by making sure that during the elimination period, the two of them had scheduled dates where they could leave the house and eat whatever they wanted.

If you can see things from your client’s perspective, you will be better able to understand their obstacles, and that is the first step toward figuring out how to make things happen.

Determine the Type of Approach

Another way compassion and empathy can guide you to making an appropriate individualized recommendation is when it comes time to figure out whether your client needs a step-by-step-slow-and-steady approach, a rip-the-band-aid-fast approach, or maybe some kind of combination of the two. Are they a tortoise or a hare? Again, using the idea of the elimination diet, which will likely be a very commonly used tool in your box, some folks really need a stepped-down approach to eliminate foods from their diets, whereas others do better by getting rid of them all at once and starting fresh.

The stepped-down approach takes longer, but the risk of the quick approach is that it can be overwhelming and clients may not stick to it. Remember in the story when the hare took a nap? You need to decide for each client which approach is best, and having a deep understanding of where they are coming from will help you to make this decision.

Rule #2: Meet Each Client Where They Are

Tailor Your Recommendations

Every client is starting from a different place, and even the very healthiest of people can build and improve their habits and lifestyle. You are coaching people through a very small period of what is ultimately a lifelong process. Following the idea of empathy and compassion, your clients will likely come to you at varying stages of their recovery process, and it is important that you recognize where they are and tailor your recommendations to that.

You can probably relate to being given a hard sell by one or another health-based direct-marketing company. I had a family member once give me a sales pitch for a meal-replacement product, like the shakes and bars and those sorts of things, and I was really hesitant. I was thinking, “This is not real food. This is highly processed, laboratory-created, in the words of Michael Pollan, edible food-like substances.”

Even though the product he had chosen to sell was a really high-quality product, it was pure and free of contaminants, made from organic fruits and vegetables with all the essential vitamins and minerals, and even some herbs, in my mind, this is still fake food. It’s not something that I would eat. It’s not something that I would generally recommend. But at the end of our discussion, I realized that this fake food is really appropriate for some people.

This person that was giving me this pitch was mostly selling these foods to people that were within his network. These are people who were working out of their vehicle for 12-14 hour days, traveling from customer to customer. And for the last 20 years breakfast and lunch had been coming from a drive through. When that person wants to transform their health, these shakes would be a huge leap from fast food and probably a really manageable change.

Give Recommendations in Baby Steps

Don’t give clients more to do than what they can manage. If a client comes back week after week not having followed your recommendations, you need to adjust your recommendations. Give them smaller steps. You don’t go from a Standard American Diet (SAD) to a Weston Price diet overnight. Taking some quasi-healthy steps along the way to bridge that gap can be a really appropriate thing to do.

Vicki Kobliner has said before that gluten-free foods are not healthy. If a child on the spectrum is found to have a gluten sensitivity, you don’t really want this client to simply swap their pretzels for gluten-free pretzels. But if having gluten-free pretzels around helps the child acclimate to their new diet and provides some snacks as the child is learning to eat more fruits and vegetables, that’s okay.

Be Mindful of Your Client’s Resources

Meet your client where they are and give them baby steps. Meeting a client where they are doesn’t just mean assessing their current habits and next steps. It also means being mindful of their resources. Someone with limited time but a wealth of financial resources is going to have a very different path to health than someone with limited financial means but maybe a little bit more flexibility with their time.

Similarly, the more responsibilities a parent has, the slower your progress may need to be. This could be in the form of other children, other sick children, jobs, ailing parents, or their own illnesses. Sometimes you may guide clients to give up some of their other responsibilities in order to increase their capacity, but other times you may just have to work with what they have.

Be Mindful of Your Client’s Capacity

Another thing to be mindful of when assessing capacity is that clients are often very motivated on the first visit. However, this enthusiasm can wane when the client starts to do the work and feels overwhelmed. A good and experienced health coach will be able to skillfully assess each client’s true capacity, which may sometimes mean encouraging clients to slow down their progress, in order to ensure that the changes they make are lasting.

We’ve all burned out on projects before. Perhaps you’ve had a client that was really motivated in the beginning and then disappeared on you. Whatever you do, it is your job to reassure them that what they are doing is okay. Remember rule number one about empathy and compassion even as you push their limits. On the other hand, some clients underestimate their capacity, often out of fears of, “What will happen if things change? What will happen if I fail? What will happen if I succeed??

These are the clients you’ll want to encourage to take on a little bit more. Everyone has a different journey.

Rule #3: Harness the Power of Your Client’s Intuition

The concept of bioindividuality means that no two people are the same. One person’s cure is another person’s poison. The same symptoms can have very different underlying root causes.

We can look at one child and assess everything about this child, and then look at this huge array of strategies that we might use to help this child improve their health. We know that we can’t do it all at once, so how do we decide what to do? What is best? Always remember that the expert on you is you.

How Intuition Can Help

Perhaps with a child, this is his or her primary caregiver, the one who knows precisely how they think and feel in ways that sometimes can’t be expressed in words or captured even in the most detailed history form. This is your most valuable resource as a health coach. This is where health coaches can really expand on what medical practitioners do and offer something that is uniquely valuable that those within the medical field simply don’t have time to tap into.

There’s no magic to this. Intuition is not about being psychic or having ESP, at least not in the conventional sense. It is about recognizing that our brain has a much greater capacity than what we can harness on a conscious level. It is about acknowledging that our brain can process more information than what we are able to put into words. This is why art therapy can be so immensely effective. This is why meditation works, and it is what underlies many of the therapies that Janine discussed in lesson nine.

We (the collective of human beings) have to begin to recognize that there are so many things that we think we understand that we really don’t understand, particularly the conventional medical community. Scientists long ago discovered that nutrition could be broken down into fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, and they thought, “We’ve uncovered everything we need to know about what the human body needs to fuel itself.” Then some time goes by, and there are sailors out at sea for months at a time, and they’re getting scurvy, which prompts the discovery of vitamin C, which then cascades and leads to the discovery of all the vitamin and mineral micronutrients that the body needs to function. And then the scientists say again, “Now we really understand everything that the body needs.”

More time goes by, and scientists discover these other components that are needed in order for vitamins to be absorbed and used efficiently. And you start seeing bottles of vitamin C supplements sold with rutin or bioflavonoids in it to aid in its absorption. By the way, all along, oranges contain vitamin C, along with everything thus far discovered that we need, along with our vitamin C, to process it correctly.

So at what point do we learn the lesson that science never has all the answers, that we boil things down into simple pieces in order to understand it, but that our understanding is never complete? Haven’t grandmas been telling us for generations to eat chicken soup to combat a cold? We can study chicken soup all we want, and we can try to discover the compound in it that is effective and try to replicate it, manufacture it, market it, and sell it. But at the end of the day, why can’t we just say, “We know this works, and let’s just get it from the source and make more chicken soup at home?” This is the power of intuition. Sometimes we know things that we don’t have a scientific understanding of or explanation for, and that lack of explanation does not dilute the value of this information.

If mom has a sense that one or another event from infancy had an adverse effect on her child, she’s probably right, even if she can’t explain why. If you describe to her three different possible dietary changes she can make, and her eyes light up and one seems to really resonate with her, that’s really valuable. You want to pursue the things that strike a chord.

Distinguishing Intuition from Fear

Sometimes we can confuse fear for intuition. I might have some resistance, say, to giving up dairy, and it might be rooted in the fact that I really love to eat cheese, and I don’t want to give it up because this was the comfort food of my childhood, and I’m really attached to it. I might say to my health coach, “No, I just don’t sense that dairy is an issue. I don’t want to do that.” And a good health coach is going to be more objective and is going to be able to help a client really explore whether their sense of resistance is stemming from intuition or fear.

Intuition is emotionally neutral, compassionate and affirming, and expands the possibilities of actions. It usually can’t be explained. It has a sense of, “I don’t know why, I just feel that this is right.” Fear is based on our emotional attachments. It goes along with a feeling of anxiety or self-judgment, and it reflects past emotional ties.

Often, when fear is being expressed, it is followed by a reason or justification. I might say, “I know in my gut that cheese is not an issue because I’ve always eaten it, and I never had a problem.” Do you see how this statement reflects an attachment to my childhood and that the stated gut feeling is immediately rationalized? Those are big red flags that being expressed as fear rather than intuition.

Being able to make this distinction is a skill and one that will develop over time and with practice. The key is listening and asking good questions. Sometimes, if a client states something that they think is intuition and you read it as fear, the best thing you can do is ask them to contemplate that intuition over the next couple of weeks and to revisit the topic at the next session.

Rule #4: Make a Distinction Between Outcomes and Goals

A goal is something that is 100% within your control. An outcome is something desired that you work toward but that factors outside of your control can also contribute to. I first heard this distinction made by a coach in the context of athletic achievement.

Take a runner, for example. The runner needs to train in pursuit of certain goals. If what the runner desires is to win a particular race or qualify for the Olympics, that is something to work towards, but it is dependent on factors outside of the athlete’s control in this case, the performance of other runners.

This coach’s advice was not to pursue outcomes dependent on other factors in training. Instead, an athlete should pursue goals as things to work toward in training that are 100% within the athlete’s control, such as a particular time over a particular distance. The time goal might be a best guess at what will be required to best other runners and achieve the desired outcome, but the idea is that setting a goal that is not dependent on external factors holds success or failure entirely within the athlete’s control, and we want our success to be within our control.

How does this apply to health coaching for chronically ill children? I listened to a series of incredibly enlightening lectures as part of an online autism summit, and one of the doctors was telling a story about working with a young man who was very, very ill. This young man was a teenager and unable to speak. He communicated by using a typing pad. When this doctor first met with the patient, she asked what he most wanted, and he said he wanted to be able to talk with other kids and communicate the way other kids communicate.

She worked with him over a period of time, and he made great improvements in his overall health, but in the end, he was still unable to speak. The doctor felt like a failure. She said she felt like she had completely failed this child, but she had a conversation with his parents, who said that before they started working with her, their son had been in chronic, debilitating pain every single day of his whole entire life. He had endured numerous surgeries to address this pain. After working with this doctor, who worked with him on healing the gut and all the things that we talk about in this course, he was no longer in pain every day. The relief from pain was life-changing.

When we as health coaches encounter patients, we want every single one to be that miracle story where every health issue they face is completely resolved. That would be the ideal outcome for each patient, but that outcome is beyond our control.

If we instead focus on factors within our control, specific dietary and lifestyle changes, the outcomes will follow. The fact that our stated goal is entirely within our control lends a sense of accountability to that goal, and it makes it easier to achieve.

I would encourage all health coaches, when setting goals with clients, to set goals that are specific and controllable, and work with clients to accept whatever outcome follows. Something good will always come out of making positive dietary and lifestyle changes, even though the outcome achieved may not be exactly what you had envisioned or hoped for from the beginning.

Rule #5: Cultivate Patience and Perseverance

It does not matter how small that first step is. If it is a step in the right direction, you are on your way to your goal. There is a difference between things that are easy and things that are simple.

We need to remember as health coaches that what we’re asking of our clients may be simple. We ask them first to eat whole foods as close to their natural state as possible and maybe take some supplements and make time to bond as a family. As simple as this is, we all know it is not easy. Even something as simple as taking a supplement each morning is easy to forget or fall away when a stressful life event comes up.

You might be a great model for healthy living, but how did you get there? Probably through many years of research, learning, trying new things, and slowly making changes. The more we practice our lifestyle and the more we advise clients to make lifestyle adjustments, the more we might forget how much effort is required to make these changes. We must be patient with our clients, and we must encourage them to be patient with themselves. Setbacks are inevitable, but two steps forward and one step back is still forward progress.

Rule #6: Prioritize Interventions with Logic and Discretion

Foundations First

Our natural inclination, because we so badly want to help these children, is to want to try everything and to gravitate toward the most sophisticated, new, and sexy treatments available.

I once had a new client in my office, and this was a client with very limited resources who wanted to see what she could do to help her son with autism. In the course of our initial conversation, she mentioned that she had heard something about hyperbaric treatment, and she’d even looked into it, but it was just something that they couldn’t afford. She had this sense that there wasn’t much she could do to help her son. Meanwhile, the family was on a 100% Standard American Diet: cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, and pasta for dinner. Our food provides the building blocks of every function in our body. Until we address diet and take simple steps to eliminate toxic exposures, more sophisticated therapies are of little benefit.

In fact, the opposite might be true. If we try a sophisticated therapy too soon, before a proper foundation of health has been built, the therapy is likely to have little or no impact. Imagine building the walls and roof of a house before building its foundation, and then what happens?

Be sure to ready Shandy Watters’ article about How to Prioritize Therapies for Autism, SPD, ADHD and Other Neurodevelopmental Conditions for more about understanding the order of operations of interventions.

No Wonder Doctors Often Discourage Non-Medical Interventions

The client’s conventional medical practitioner, who probably discouraged the therapy as a waste of time and money in the first place, is reinforced in this opinion: Have you been told by a client, “Well, I spoke with my doctor, and he said that we could spend all this time and money pursuing these unproven treatments, but they are unlikely to work and then we would have wasted all these resources and we will be so disappointed”?

Truthfully, I can’t blame these doctors. They are advising their clients based on what they have seen in their experience. What they have seen is patients who have heard about a new treatment, taken it off the shelf, spent a lot of time and money on it, but have had no professional guidance in using that particular therapy, and didn’t lay a proper foundation before trying that particular therapy, and then it doesn’t work.

Then our job as health coaches becomes so much harder convincing our clients and their medical team that these therapies are worth trying. They just need to be applied at the right time and under appropriate guidance. This is where, as health coaches, we can really make an impact not only on an individual client by guiding the timing of the therapies that they pursue, but we can also have an enormous impact on the community around us.

We know from anecdotal evidence that many of these alternative therapies work. The science is lacking, and sometimes we don’t quite understand why or how they work, but there are therapies that involve little to no risk that have, in certain cases, provided an enormous benefit.

Health Coaches Can Help

If health coaches can guide clients to using these therapies not in a throw-everything-at-it-and-see-what-sticks approach, but rather in a logical, well reasoned, individualized, and methodical way, then the therapies are more likely to work.

If we can document our work, we can help scientists, practitioners, and other health coaches to better understand how, why, and in what specific circumstances these therapies can work.

If conventional medical practitioners start seeing stories of where these therapies do work, then they might stop discouraging patients from trying them, and start believing in their value which then may lead to more attention, more scientific scrutiny, and better treatment protocols for every child.

Keep Mindset in Mind

When prioritizing, also keep in mind your client and their open mindedness, or lack thereof, to a particular treatment. The placebo effect is said to account for about 30% of any medication’s effectiveness. It also holds true that if someone truly believes that something is not going to work, it is not going to work.

As a health coach, you should not recommend a therapy that the client is having trouble understanding or believing in. It’s very difficult to be in this position where you just absolutely know you have knowledge that can help someone, but they are not open to it.

You want to respect their process and their boundaries and not be too intrusive. Instead, you can find subtle ways to slowly and gently plant the seeds that will allow the client to be more open to new ideas. You have to keep in mind how long it took you on your own journey. Remember that things that seem completely logical and commonplace to you may be really foreign to a client.

I have found myself frequently recommending grounding or earthing to clients. It seems so logical to me. We pick up all this EMF radiation all day long, and we walk around in rubber-soled shoes on floors, and we are never able to discharge it. Imagine the reaction of someone who can barely wrap their head around the idea that wheat is not the best and most nutritious food we can eat, to then embrace the idea of purchasing a silver threaded sheet to plug into an electrical outlet each night. That sounds crazy. I’m sure some of you students out there think that this sounds crazy.

I’m telling you: Check it out. Read a few stories of people who have been transformed by this practice. Read about the French Tour de France team who adopted it. Over time, it starts to sound less crazy. You need to give clients enough time to absorb information about a new therapy or intervention. Introduce information just a little bit at a time, and acknowledge that it might sound strange and unfamiliar, and just encourage them to keep opening their mind to new ideas.

Rule #7: Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First

We know this is referring to appropriate self-care, right? We can’t take care of others if we are not taking care of ourselves. As a health coach, model good self-care. Get your sleep. Meditate. Care for your adrenals. Guard your personal time and space unapologetically. Lay out appropriate boundaries. Not only will this help you be a better health coach, it will model for the primary caregivers that you are working with the good habits that they will need to adopt in order to appropriately care for their child.

When you design your individualized program for each client, make sure that you include recommendations calculated to support the primary caregiver in minding their own health and well-being. You can even explain to a reluctant mom that by taking care of herself, she is modeling to her child the importance of good self-care. That child will get older and more independent, and if they see mom meditating five minutes every morning and taking her fish oil, it becomes something that everyone ought to do to care for themselves, and not something that mom is just imposing on the child.

Rule #8: Always Remain Mindful of Your Scope of Practice

What Health Coaches Can and Cannot Do

A health coach cannot diagnose or treat a medical condition. A health coach’s role is to assist clients in incorporating health-promoting habits into their daily lives. When you focus on client habits and behaviors, your practice remains solidly in the realm of health coaching. In some states where nutrition counseling can only be practiced by a licensed nutritionist or a registered dietitian, you even need to be cautious about how you work with clients on nutrition.

I often say to my clients, “If you don’t know what you ought to be eating, you can go to a nutritionist to get a plan, and then I can help you implement it.” For some conditions that may require a very specialized diet, such as for diabetes, this might even be necessary.

But most people looking to optimize their health know what they ought to be eating, maybe less sugar, maybe some more greens. My job as a health coach is to help you figure out how to do that, such as figuring out what you can eat instead of sugary cereal for breakfast that you still have time to prepare amid the morning rush.

Create an Elevator Pitch

I have a prepared elevator speech for all the introductory questions I typically get from prospective clients. I advise all health coaches to prepare specific scripts like this to use to make sure that you are always defining your scope of practice very clearly and within the legal boundaries of your individual state.

I have heard from various health coaching message boards of health coaches who have found themselves entrapped by someone calling or coming in for an initial appointment and then reporting or questioning them about practicing without a license.

If you speak to someone and they use words like prescribe and treat and patient to describe their relationship with you, this is a red flag, and you ought to correct their language right away and explain in very clear, practiced terms precisely what it is that you do. The truth is, most people are not out to entrap you, but they may be confused about what your role is. Your best protection against a disgruntled client is to make sure they really understand from the outset what it is you do, that you have set their expectations appropriately.

I went so far as to gently decline a prospective client recently because she kept using these red-flag words. I was a little paranoid, yes, but I also know she didn’t quite understand what the relationship was, and I felt better meeting with her once and providing her a referral to a traditional nutritionist. You can also help protect yourself by requiring that every client be under the active care of a licensed medical practitioner. That way, you have someone to refer them to if anything comes up that they’re unsure of, or if you at any time feel like a doctor ought to weigh in on something.

Supplement Recommendations

I want to share just a couple of scripts that I rely on in my practice as examples, and I am putting them out there so that you can borrow from this language if you feel like it would be useful to you.

Recommending specific supplements is one of these gray areas where sometimes it kind of looks like practicing medicine, especially if you tell a client, for example, Take two thousand units of vitamin D daily.

Instead, you can tell a client, “I read this source, which I find to be trustworthy, and it recommends two thousand units of vitamin D as a really good daily dose.” A vitamin D recommendation is a good example because the RDA for vitamin D for an adult is four hundred units per day. This dosage was set at a level to prevent rickets, which is a disease of vitamin D deficiency, and it is widely recognized as woefully insufficient for optimal health, particularly in northern climates. It is likely that this RDA will be adjusted upwards at some point in the near future.

I will let a client know all this information and have citations ready if they’re interested. Most people would feel comfortable making a decision about vitamin D dosage at this range without consulting a doctor, but that is up to each individual client. I do not want my clients to substitute my judgment for their own. I just want to save them a lot of time in combing through and trying to understand all the research.

As a general rule, if a client is healthy and the supplement that I would like them to consider is within mainstream RDA guidelines, I am comfortable with them making that decision on their own.

The more unstable a client’s health and the farther from the mainstream the supplement or dosage is, the more likely I am to recommend that they run it by their physician first. In the case of children, the severity of their illness will be a good guide. If they are severe enough that they see physicians frequently, the physicians really ought to weigh in on everything the health coach recommends. This is one of the reasons it is important to steer clients toward an open-minded or functional-medicine-oriented medical practitioner.

Health Coaches Cannot Make Medication Recommendations

There are unintended side effects to every medication, and I often see clients who are taking medications that I know to be problematic, but I definitely don’t want them to stop taking a medication on my recommendation. This is going to arise frequently when it comes to symptom-suppressing ADHD medications that are vastly overprescribed, but that schools often push for because it enables students to function within that environment.

In my experience, most doctors are really open to trying alternatives, provided that the parent is motivated to do the work required because changing diet and lifestyle requires a lot more effort than taking a pill.

Keep in mind that when helping a client to explore the elimination of a particular medication, there are lots of different approaches, and it is a good idea to rely on a doctor to determine which approach is best. Dosage may need to be stepped down gradually, or an alternative drug might need to be used for an interim period. Or, you may need to implement sustained dietary changes for a specific period of time before trying to step down a medication.

Anything that involves the use of medication must be done with the involvement of a licensed medical practitioner, but the health coach can be the catalyst for starting a productive discussion about what medication is right for the individual.

Help Your Clients Work with Their Doctors

You can also provide your clients with scripted questions that they can use with their doctors to help facilitate discussions. Doctors can be intimidating, and sometimes their egos bulk at the notion of a patient, untrained in medicine, questioning their expertise. Haven’t we all heard doctors lament about patients who trust Google more than their doctor?

Yes, the internet can be a source of faulty and very unreliable information, but most people are perfectly capable of finding good, scientific, high-quality research using PubMed. We can help our clients discuss what we find with their physicians in a way that is gentle and respectful of the physician’s training and expertise. If a physician is particularly discouraging or closed-minded, your notebook of referrals will help you to suggest to your client that they seek a second opinion, preferably from someone who is knowledgeable about the functional-medicine approach to health.

Rule #9: Never Stop Learning

What’s the big complaint that we as a health coaching community have about mainstream medicine? It takes far too long for new information to get incorporated into best practices.

The health-coaching industry may be more open as a rule, but it is not immune to this problem. The protective mechanism of our egos makes us inclined to dismiss new information, particularly when it contradicts information upon which we have relied in the past.

You might recommend something this year, and in five years it might come out that that recommendation is actually damaging. Oops! That’s a tough pill to swallow. We approach everything with the best of intentions and such a pure desire to help others, and it can be very difficult to accept that something we have done in the past may have been useless or worse.

This can be especially humbling when dealing with clients. Let your clients know that you, too, are always learning, and that when you learn new information, you’ll share it with them, and that it might change your approach. As long as you never hold yourself out to be the ultimate authority on health, it will remain possible for you to change your views, and that’s really, really important.

Rule #10: Find Joy in What You Do

You will better serve your clients if you enjoy what you do. You’ll pass on your joy and enthusiasm, and this energy will motivate them to work harder and to achieve better results. If you find that you’re dreading your work and not enjoying it, explore that. Do you need a break? Do you need to change something about your practice? Maybe there are certain types of clients that you don’t like working with, and in this case, you should gently refer them elsewhere. Your energy affects the health and success of your clients. If you really dislike working with somebody, you are not serving them well to continue that relationship.

I came to the realization that the clients whom I most like working with, and who achieve the best results with me, are those that come to me on their own or on someone’s personal recommendation.

I made the decision to sharply reduce my outreach, including newsletters, speaking, and participation in wellness forums because I found that the clients I get when I am truly selling my services are more interested in purchasing a solution than in doing the work. Have any of you found that to be true in your work as well?

This advice is against every lesson I learned during my time at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, but I don’t seek out clients anymore. They come to me. It’s certainly not the quick path to a six-figure health coaching practice, but I’m happiest working with people who really want to work with me.

My advice to you is to structure your practice in a way that brings you joy and fulfillment, however unconventional that structure may be. We at Documenting Hope are so grateful for the passion and commitment of our health coaches who help to spread the message of hope and healing across the world.

About Lisa Wilcox