Applying Behavioral Styles
Did you know that there is a lot of behavioral change needed when moving from being an employee into a business owner?
I don't mean just the normal organizational skills or money management.
I am talking about behaviors in how you approach your overall vitality in everything from the hours you exercise to the people around you because these will affect your attitude about the important choices you need to make.
A great scalable business plan alone is not going to help the woman who is waking up to the fact that she is close to 40 and is no longer going to sacrifice her health for a paycheck. Today with the technology, global market times, an education and some brandable personality, any woman can very well create her own economy.
Illness should not be your catalyst!
But at the point your body or mind is screaming it is your psychology, physiology, and sociology skills I need to give you some training in.
Everyone sells you the lifestyle but emerging women, especially mompreneurs, often lack the more proactive, whole person health providers and business mentors competent in digging into the person behind the business.
There is an entrepreneur lifestyle part of owning an innovative business but that is rooted in physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, not financial or marketing. Those later two are the trees that grow from fertile seeds of behavioral changes to the person which is the only way to change an employee attitude. The title of CEO won't do it on it's own.
How I figured out self sabotaging can't be changed by only coaching mental patterns alone.
Interestingly enough, behavioral science has demonstrated that no matter what I tell you, no matter how logical my attitude is about a behavior, I will not be able to impose any education or give you any information that will directly transform your behaviors until you change your attitude about that behavior first.
This is not just in healing bodies. I have found this to be quite effective in moving someone through imposter syndrome too. In fact, I was surprised how much of my health science skills came into my executive mentoring and business coaching.
It makes sense when I review how many hundreds of dollars avoiding the right coach at the right time I lost trying to implement business strategies with a self defeating behavior pattern tied much more to childhood self worth and ultra independence than confidence. You literally can not teach an old dog new tricks unless they become receptive to change. So how do you help a woman who has become ultra independent and believes she is better off doing everything on her own?
There lies the caveat. How the hell do you make surrender more acceptable?
Well, if I knew how to sell that in a bottle I firmly believe I would have created the medicine that heals war but in the interim, I am focused on understand the motivators fueling your behaviors and then I create a social support structure to reinforce a better attitude for the outcome then I can design a way to coach you into making some self care decisions seem much more doable and worth while.
The best part of training these life leadership skills is that his goes hand in hand in their marketing too!
If the person you are marketing to actually does different things and has physiological changes that initiates a psychosocial desire to participate in the new helpful behaviors as their own, then selling health to them gets much easier.
This is where an even deeper layer of understanding behaviors and motivators may help me plan our conversations. I can then give you the positive validation you may crave for confidence while you develop personal conviction. After enough of that relationship and trust, WE will see a transformation.
ASSESSING THE OBJECTIVE OF BEHAVIOR
As I ventured into a health coaching model of service delivery. Here I came across some psychosocial assessments that had been birthed out of the work of the late Dr. David Mefford.
I began to play with these tools to figure out if I could get a better objective assessment tool for my biopsychosocial model of evaluation and I did.
4 STYLES HAVE BECOME VERY HELPFUL FOR COMMUNICATING ACTION PLANS
The popular disc assessments are great but the language of the assessment does not take into account the mindset of the person approaching the questionnaire. Therefore, if I am supporting someone who is unhappy in their feeling of poor competency as a postpartum mom, I need to consider her attitude about life might not just be about raging hormone shifts.
She misses her former valued career. I need to help her figure out that resolve or the myriad of yoga therapy, antidepressants and thyroid healing may not really tap into her mindset .
Here is how I have partnered personality with coaching wellbeing.
THE DOMINANT PARTNER:
This client is a natural leader but he or she may not be one wanting to work as a team. The better I have a direct return on her investment of time and money outlined the more she will become compliant to the plan. If I listen, she is focused on a goal of not wasting her money ( again) and getting back to her busy life which may mean she goes back to ignoring her needs. Here I have a choice. I can
- Learn to speak to her need for dominance and help her connect the dots on being the CEO of her entire future comforts
- Play the band-aid and savior role and meet her needs to see progress every session
- See if I can appeal to her character traits enough to have her graduate from this episode wanting to let life be in charge once in a while and learning how to go with the flow.
- I may also see anger when challenging her on her role in this relationship
My solution...Present one or two choices for the day but have her lead what we are going to do.
THE INFLUENCER CLIENT:
This client is everyone's friend. She just lights up the room with her energy and she wants to talk all the time. Well, as a clinician or teacher in a classroom, I may want to:
- present a list of things we need to accomplish that day and engage her as a helper
- Redirect her a lot during the session making sure she is keeping the focus on not getting too social with the group in the room and staying focused on turning that influence inward
- I may use her in the group to lead the others as reinforcement of her progress as well.
My solution: Use her desire to influence others but make standards and expectations to become a leader very clear.
THE STEADY MINDED SOUL:
This one a bit more quiet. She comes to my coaching sessions with a question of where to focus and then really takes to being part of a team so she knows her job and does not need the glory as much as the safety she is going to be allowed to finish her job. I may want to:
- List out the tasks on the plan for the day and ask her for her thoughts
- Present an outline for the month to quiet her mind (she does not like fast change) and explain where we are headed as a team.
- Follow up with her when things are changing in her life for better or worse. Make a need to change have a clear path from A to B so she is not stressed with the alternative route.
THE CONSISTENT CLIENT:
This one ALWAYS shows up, in fact she has a problem when you are sick and have to cancel because she would have shown up as scheduled anyway because "IT WAS RIGHT AND EXPECTED" . She follows the rules of your care plan to end so I don't jazz things up on a whim or become too creative because she will get a bit uneasy. She really needs to know what the risk of things are and would feel much better if I sent that to her to decide her comfort level online before with lots of evidence supporting those assessments. My best bet with this client is:
- Take the time to be thourough with client expectations and clear on my expectations from her before investing a lot of time and energy into the relationship
- Listen to what the ROI would look like to be successful because it may be very tied to past experiences no matter what I say or offer
- Meet resistance with lots of the right questions because this is a communication issue more than resistance after the first two points have been made.
See how having some objectives might tap into setting up a more helpful behavior and compliant attitude? The time it takes for my client to complete the psychosocial assessement may make the intake process longer but it saves us a ton of time prequalifying if we have the best therapeutic alliance potential or if she needs a colleague or another service line. She takes the assessment, gets tons of clarity to understand some of her strain and I then physically evaluate the bodily pain. Best part, my subjective part of my notes will have nothing to do with her quantitative and qualitative results and I can usually clearly see the story beneath her behaviors and complaints.
Want to learn more about your behaviors and motivators that make you unique or hold you back from a more abundant career? Need to improve client compliance by having a better way to help you both communicate? Book a Lady Biz consult HERE
Resources
Hartman Institute(2014). In Memoriam: David Mefford https://www.hartmaninstitute.org/memorial-david-mefford/
( Originally posted May 17th, 2016 )
http://www.drlisahollandpt.com/makingchange/2016/3/11/cirf1501h4h0nhjswp0tsl8f5rhcnu
