the health
Part 5: health coaching expert Professor Stephen Palmer, and Professor Cary Cooper and Kate Thomas, examine multimodal health coaching
Multimodal health coaching can be used for a wide range of health-related issues, such as undertaking and maintaining exercise programmes, weight management, stop smoking, managing stress, enhancing resilience and alcohol reduction.
It is also a useful approach to assist clients who relapse, which often occurs when they become stressed. For example, many of us will use comfort eating or drinking to help us cope with work overload, and this can increase our calorific intake, yet we are too busy to counter this by taking more exercise.
This is not very useful if you want to maintain your existing body weight, especially as our choice of comfort food, when stressed, can be of a high calorific value.
Others, when stressed, will either start smoking again or smoke more if they have not already stopped. Not surprisingly, this can have a negative impact on their health coaching programme. In these cases, it may be preferable to have a more comprehensive understanding of the different issues that may be having an impact on the client. The multimodal approach, originally developed by Arnold Lazarus, literally takes us back to basics, where the coach assesses the different factors involved.
Multimodal: BASIC I.D.
Multimodal Health Coaching (14) encourages the client (and coach) to focus on seven key modalities: Behaviour, Affect (ie, emotion), Sensory, Imagery, Cognitions (ie, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and attitudes), Interpersonal and Drugs/biology. This framework forms a memorable acronym: BASIC I.D.
The coach and client collaboratively develop a Modality Profile that includes relevant items or problems from the BASIC I.D. and possible solutions/interventions taken from the same modality, eg, disputing unhelpful beliefs in the cognitive modality. This profile can be drawn up on paper or on a pre-prepared three-column blank word document.
Palmer, Cooper and Thomas (15) illustrate a stop smoking case study, Jayne, where she had previously experienced relapse. Jayne’s completed Modality Profile is shown in the case study (see previous page). Note that a comprehensive approach is taken in order to help Jayne tackle different health-related issues.
Motivated clients are often keen to develop and modify their own Modality Profiles, which can be considered as in progress.
Multimodal health coaches actively encourage clients to read, listen and watch relevant health-related material that will assist them in understanding the issues involved with their health coaching programme. These are usually undertaken as in-between session tasks.
Health-related bodies
Health and wellbeing coaches may find it useful to join health-related professional bodies in order to attend relevant conferences and
receive their journals.
Institute for Health Promotion and Education: www.ihpe.org.uk
Royal Society for Public Health: www.rsph.org.uk
Professor Stephen Palmer is director of the Coaching Psychology Unit, City University London, and founder director of the Centre for Coaching:
www.centreforcoaching.com
Professor Cary Cooper is Distinguished Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health, Lancaster University Management School:
www.lums.lancs.ac.uk
Kate Thomas is director of the Stephen Palmer Partnership:
www.stephenpalmerpartnership.com
References*
1 A M Adelman and M Graybill, ‘Integrating a health coach into primary care: Reflections from the Penn State Ambulatory Research Network’, in Annals of Family Medicine, 3, Suppl 2, July/August, ppS33-S35, 2005
2 S Palmer, I Tubbs and A Whybrow, ‘Health coaching to facilitate the promotion of healthy behaviour and achievement of health-related goals’, in International Journal of Health Promotion and Education, 41(3), pp91-3, 2003
3 S Gale and H Lindner, The Health Coaching Australia (HCA) Model of Health Coaching for Chronic Condition Self-management (CCSM), 2007
Documents from www.healthcoachingaustralia.com
4 S Burrell, ‘Weight management: Traditional vs. coaching models for success.’ Presentation at the Health Coaching Symposium, Australia, 2006
5 A Bandura, Social Learning Theory, New York: General Learning Press, 1977
6 A Bandura, Self-efficacy: The Exercise of Control, New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997
7 J O Prochaska and C C DiClemente, ‘Transtheoretical therapy: towards a more integrative model of change’, in Psychother Theory Re Prac, 19, pp276-88, 1982
8 W R Miller and S Rollnick, ‘Ten things that Motivational Interviewing is not’, in Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 37, pp129-140, 2009
9, 10, 12 W R Miller and S Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People for Change (2nd ed), New York: Guilford Press, 2002
11 S Rollnick, C C Butler, P Kinnersley, J Gregory and B Mash, ‘Competent novice: motivational interviewing’, in BMJ, 340, c1900, 2010
12 M Neenan and S Palmer, Cognitive Behavioural Coaching in Practice: An Evidence Based Approach, Routledge, 2012
13, 15 S Palmer, C Cooper and K Thomas, Creating a Balance: Managing Stress,
British Library, 2003
14 S Palmer, ‘Multimodal coaching and its application to workplace, life and health coaching’, in The Coaching Psychologist, 4(1), pp21-29, 2008
* For articles 1-5 in Coaching at Work’s Health Coaching Toolkit series
Coaching at work, volume 8, issue 1