Dr Mark Rowe www.drmarkrowe.com
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Simon Matthews wellcoachesaustralia.com.au
How relationships drive behavioural change
n his opening conversation with Simon Matthews, podcaster, Medical Doctor and Tedx speaker, Dr Mark Rowe almost baffles his guest with the simplicity and straightforwardness of his first question. Rowe: So Simon, what is health coaching? To start with, we can turn to a definition from the Health and Wellbeing Board in the United States. Their definition is a process in which coaches partner with clients who are looking to enhance their own health and wellbeing through self-directed, lasting changes. The self-directed part is important, and we can come back to that. The other important part is that those changes are aligned with the person’s values. That definition goes on to mention the specific characteristics that coaches ought to display, for example, unconditional positive regard towards patients which goes back to a very old concept and the work of Carl Rogers much earlier in the 20th Century - a fundamental belief in a person’s ability to engage in a process of change and begin to make some change. It's probably important to separate that definition from ideas like a person has everything that they need within them to be able to make the changes they want. That’s not the idea that’s embedded in this definition.
A helping hand We all need a helping hand sometimes. We all need an injection of knowledge or an injection of skill or something like that. The idea of coaching is that it’s not practitioner directed and it’s not an advice-forward means of supporting people. We don’t immediately go in telling people what to do or what they should do. It’s listening, learning and then understanding how to collaborate with a person. Rowe: One of the things I’ve learned as a doctor is that people don’t like being told what to do. As adults, we like to make up our own minds. Certainly, we can be inspired, and we can be influenced, encouraged and supported but making change isn’t easy. Absolutely, and you touched on one of the central tenants of good coaching there, Mark, the point that we don’t like being told what to do. This, of course, goes all the way back to childhood. Anyone who has ever had a child or has ever been in a playground will probably be able to recall a child saying, ‘you’re not the boss of me’. That phrase embodies the idea of autonomy. It embodies the idea that one of the things we fundamentally prize as human beings is the capacity to make a choice about what we do when
34 wholefoodliving.life | Summer 2022
In one of his recent podcasts, Ireland’s Dr Mark Rowe interviewed psychologist Simon Matthews. Simon is CEO of Wellcoaches Australia and a fellow of the Australian Society of Lifestyle Medicine. He writes and coaches on health coaching and behavioural change. we do it, how we do it and, importantly, why we do it as well. Rowe: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the opportunities of bringing that kind of Lifestyle Medicine approach with some positive psychology into the medical consultation. You just tune more into the person in terms of their capacity to direct their own changes with support because, if you think about it, people know often what to do. They know they should do some more exercise, maybe they know they should get more sleep, they know they should eat better, take on less and deal better with stress, but it isn’t so easy to make the changes, is it. That’s exactly right, and that divergence you describe there, the divergence between knowing what we ought to be doing and putting it into practice, that’s the space that any coach is most effective in; to be able to support someone, to bridge that gap. Health coaching is certainly not about getting people to do something. It’s not something to make someone do the exercise; perhaps, in the back of their minds, they have an inkling they should be doing or making someone eat a diet. It’s a process that invites someone to examine their own values, to uncover their motivations, understand more about themselves and ultimately to make a choice that best aligns with the underlying values that they have at that moment.
