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Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES December 5, 2013

UNSEEN DEGREES The Story of Habit-Based Coaching By Coach Stevo

! One of my first clients as a personal trainer was Erin, an 80 year old Irish woman who came into the gym, straight from Mass on a Tuesday, only to find her previous personal trainer had stood her up for the 3rd time. She was hopping mad, and just wanted a personal trainer who would show up.

“My doctor says I need to lose 15 pounds,” she told me with a slight Irish brogue. She was maybe 5’3” and did not look 80 years old. She was

�1A (hopefully) Monthly Newsletter on Health, Fitness, and Habit-Based Coaching

The Coyote Point Kettlebell Club: a proving ground for great coaching but a terrible place for push ups.

I Know What to Do


active, spry, and still worked a full time job. Her apparent motivation and positive attitude were inspiring to me at 6AM on a Wednesday.

“That should be totally possible, Ms. Erin. We’ll just need to take a look at what you’re doing now for exercise and diet.” I flashed her a confident smile because my freshly minted Strength and Conditioning Specialist Certification from the National Strength and Conditioning Association meant that I had at least gotten some of the answers right on the “fat loss” part of the certification exam. “Then we’ll help you create a caloric deficit with more activity and less calories--”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she dismissed me. “Look, I know what to do. I just canna make myself do it.”

The Wrong Tools We find ourselves in this position every day as coaches. We are tested on our knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, programming and nutrition, but the problems our clients have are rarely a lack of information. As John Berardi, PhD, the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Precision Nutrition notes, “there is a wide gap between knowing about nutrition and doing nutrition.” I have had many people come to me for help with advanced degrees in health, nutrition, and fitness including more than a few RDs, MDs, and even a PhD MD. They know what to do, they just can’t make themselves do it. But my CSCS, and I doubt any coaches’ certification, did not prepare me to actually coach. I had to get an MA in Sport and Exercise Psychology and understudy with the best coach in the world for 2 years to learn just how wrong I was about getting

people from Point A to Point B. I needed a whole new toolkit to help people find their own path.

Skills as a Habit My introduction to the idea of using habits in coaching was from John Berardi and Precision Nutrition in 2008. The team at PN have been changing the way people eat, one habit at a time, since 2000. They don’t mention habits as much in their marketing material now, but 24 habits taught and reinforced one at a time for 12 months is still the core of their brilliant nutrition system. But it wasn’t until I met Dan John in 2011 that I got to see the power of habits in action.


We simply need more tools that a pencil, a clipboard, and a pair of guns.

“There is a wide gap between knowing… and doing.”

- JOHN BERARDI, PHD


After meeting Dan at conference and going to the taping of Intervention, Dan invited me to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club. Every week someone would post the location and time on the Facebook page, we would meet for a workout that consisted of the same Five Basic Human Movements every week, then eat sandwiches and talk about matters of consequence. People would come and go, but those of us with the courage to take Dan’s advice and do the important things (like the Basic Human Movements) every day would get stronger. Instead of “working out” we were “practicing,” and missing a day of practice began to feel like missing a day brushing my teeth. By training strength as a skill, I learned that training is best done as a habit. So I began to take those lessons to my clients, and began my graduate studies with these lessons in mind.

Habits as a Skill As a graduate student in Sport and Exercise Psychology, I read a great deal about the underlying theories behind how and why people change behavior and about the different interventions that have been tested in the social science literature. I also amassed more than 400 supervised training hours trying to put those interventions into practice over 5 internships. I brought those lessons back out to my professional clients as well, and it was surprising to see them all in play back at Coyote Point and in Dan John’s every day interactions. Over our conversations in 2012 which took shape in the book Intervention, a basic structure to any client intervention began to also take shape for me and I realized that acquiring habits is a skill, too. A skill that few people have mastered and fewer still have mastered teaching. It takes awareness. It takes patience. Both as a teacher and a student. Most importantly, it takes a community dedicated to staying focused and staying on the path to success. So I have created UNSEEN DEGREES as a way to encourage this community of coaches to converse about coaching, and to talk about the skill of acquiring habits and teaching others to do so. Every month, I’ll bring you stories of habit-based coaching in the field and research that will hopefully make us all better at our jobs. I’ll round up a few articles and introduce a new concept that will get some wheels turning in the direction we all want to go: helping people by being better coaches.

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More tools, more solutions.


Great Articles !Why Slow and Steady Really Wins the Fat Loss Race By Sohee Lee !Sohee, no stranger to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, writes on Livestrong

about the struggles that every one faces with body composition and lifestyle change. Specifically, patience and delegating your energy to the places that matter. As we have learned from the great work of Roy Baumeister and his colleagues studying Ego-Depletion, humans face behavioral change with a very limited amount of willpower. It pays to pick your battles and place all your energy on mastering a single daily habit. Most people get

lost going half-way down many paths, not going too far down a single one.

www.livestrong.com/article/1008588-slow-steady-really-wins-weight-loss-race/

!Don’t Stop, Understand By Jonathan Goodman !

Jonathan does what good writers do and writes a great article where others would have been content to simply start a fight on Facebook. Stressing “understanding” over blindly struggling forward is simply great advice for anyone trying to help people find their own path in the darkness. Some of the hardest habits to learn are the habits of awareness, and they are usually where I start with my own

clients. I use food journals, training logs, self-talk logs, and time logs all the time, but usually only at first when clients simply have no idea what they are eating, doing, and saying to themselves, but I also love Jonathan’s alternative. Finally, Jonathan’s insistence on asking “why” more than once is huge. In my workshops, participants ask each other that question non-stop for 1-3 minutes. I call it “The Five Year Old Game” and it usually ends in some enlightening answers. Also tears.

www.theptdc.com/2013/10/dont-stop-understand-8-things-a-trainer-wants-to-explain/


“Do what you need to do, and let the itty bitty details take care of themselves.”

- SOHEE LEE

“The biggest stopping point is the feeling of inadequacy, discomfort, mistrust, or a lack of self-efficacy.”

- JONATHAN GOODMAN


Ed Deci and Richard Ryan introduced SDT in 1985 as a framework for understanding motivation and how it can enrich our lives, formalizing it in 2000. Since then, many health interventions have been created with SDT at their core. In their 2012 paper Fortier, Duda, Guerin, and Teixeira, all of whom have intervention studies to their credit, review the landscape of SDT-based intervention studies for promoting physical activity and go in-depth on three new randomized-control trials. For those interested in the real gems that have come out of SDT intervention studies such as how to promote autonomy support as well as how to promote structure while still making clients feel empowered, this is a great place to start learning about the current research. The study is also available free online, which is a price you can’t beat.

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Habit Research Review By Coach Stevo

Motivation


Habit-formation has gotten hot recently with books like Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Martin Grunburg’s The Habit Factor, and Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. The recipe for habit-formation is really quite simple, but paraphrasing Dan John. “never easy.” To see just how not easy, check out Gardner, Lally, and Wardle’s (2012) “Making health habitual.” These three researchers from the University College London are at the forefront of Health Habit research and this free paper represents the cutting edge of advice to practitioners. Included in this review is a reference to Lally (2010) which found that habit formation in the real world does not take 21 days, as mythology has reported. Rather it takes an average of 66 days with a range of 18-254 days. That’s a big difference, and we would all be serving our clients better if we began managing that expectation.

Coaches, bosses, spouses, accountants, late night TV… There is no shortage of people telling our clients that they lack discipline. However, research since 1998 has shown fairly definitively that willpower is not fixed. Discipline might be more limited, and trainable, than we think. The social scientists studying “Ego-Depletion” have made impressive breakthroughs in what has become “The Strength Model of Willpower,” well reviewed by Hagger, et al. (2010). The Strength Model has linked willpower to perceived changes in blood glucose freely available to the brain. Essentially, making ourselves do something (like a desired new habit) or resist something (like an undesired old habit) costs blood glucose. The more we tax the system, the more sensitive we become to failures of will. The implications for habit-change, coaching, and even programming athletes is undeniable and far-reaching. This review of the research so far is a great place to start an academic review of how limited willpower effects our clients’ lives, but for a more lay approach check out this month’s Recommended Reading.


Habits

Willpower

“The strength model offers promise in identifying strategies to minimize short- term decrements in self-control and assist in developing interventions that foster better self-regulation.”

- HAGGER ET. AL (2010)


One of the most important topics in coaching that has only recently been studied in depth is willpower. Also known as “discipline” or “ego,” social scientists have finally begun in-depth explorations of how willpower works, is affected, is used, and is improved with training and time. The majority of that work has been influenced by the “Strength Model of Willpower,” developed by Roy Baumeister, PhD, the Francis Eppes Professor of Social Psychology and his team at Florida State University. A lot of their publications (and there have been hundreds since 1998) are in scientific journals and not for the lay-reader. Luckily, Dr.

Baumeister got together with New York Times science writer John Tierney to write a book that covers the topic of willpower for the lay-audience. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

A lay book written by the social scientist who influenced the majority of the work on a topic is a very rare thing. Most popular science journalism is written by professional journalists, not scientists, and suffers from an unfamiliarity with the zeitgeist of the research and an over-reliance on catchy narratives and cherry-picked studies, ala Malcolm Gladwell. Willpower has some catchy narratives and great stories to take away, but avoids most of the problems of pop-sci by focussing on the narrative of the science itself and how the researchers developed the Strength Model.

Social scientists like Dr. Baumeister have been doing application specific research on discipline for over a decade and Willpower goes over willpower for dieting, willpower for behavior change, willpower for procrastination, and willpower for productivity. The best part of Willpower for a coach are the practical takeaways and tips. Short of providing actual interventions (which there are very few of), Dr. Baumeister and Mr. Tierney do bring up many ways that people can improve their own sense of discipline through the use of habits. Habits, it seems, are the crux of willpower improvement because as habits become more mindless, they cost less and less willpower to actually perform.

I recommend this book not only as a great way to get caught up on the literature, but as a foundation for developing your own models and interventions as a coach. Willpower is a limiting factor in almost everything we and our clients do, and Willpower serves as a fine reference on managing those limitations.


Recommended Reading By Coach Stevo


One of the most common reasons that people say they do not want to join a gym is because they aren’t in good enough shape. Many people laugh at the paradox in that thought, but as coaches we take it upon ourselves to understand where a client is coming from. Many people fear the judgement, real or perceived, of struggling to learn something in public, and it is on us as coaches to make the environment in which we work a safe space for our clients to learn, a “judgement-free zone.”

In my classes, I have Four Rules.

1. Don’t get hurt.

2. Don’t get hurt.

3. If it feels sketchy, it is sketchy.

4. Do not make anyone feel stupid.

The first 3 rules encourage physical safety, whereas Rule 4 facilitates emotional safety. There no place in my classes for judgment, ridicule, or machismo. Because of that emphasis on emotional safety, my clients have continued to come back, bring their friends, and take more ownership over the classes themselves. My clients excitedly tell new prospects about how much fun they have, the improvements they’ve seen, and the goals they’ve met. This focus on the process and the community is all possible because I have insured that my interactions with clients, as well as the interactions of my clients with each other are judgement-free.

Coaches and fitness professionals can take this concept and immediately start applying it to their practice and classes by creating their own list of rules. However, rather than just writing them down and announcing them, engage your clients in the conversation. What would they like the rules to be? By getting them to write the rules themselves, they’ll have more ownership over the process and be more excited about the results. The judgement-free zone with be their zone instead of just yours.

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Concept of the Month By Coach Stevo

The Judgement-Free Zone



Habits gather by unseen degrees, As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

- OVID, METAMORPHOSES, BOOK XV, LINE 155. DRYDEN'S TRANSLATION.

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