What is A Recovery Coach

Hi everybody, and thank you for joining us today. In this presentation, we're going to talk a little bit about what a recovery coach is. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the difference between a coach and a sponsor and a counselor. So over the next 30 minutes or so, we're really going to try to cover what some of the differences are and how coaches, counselors and sponsors interact differently with people who are in recovery from mental health or addictions issues. So the first thing we're going to do is obviously define recovery coaching. What is it? What is the purpose of having a recovery coach? Then we're going to move on to differentiating recovery coaches from counselors or sponsors so we can kind of get an idea about what does the recovery coach do and why might this be a good career choice for me, or why might it be something that I, as a client, might want? And then we'll identify the knowledge and skills that are needed in general to be a recovery coach. Recovery coaching is a form of strengths based support for persons with addictions or in recovery from other mental health and physical issues. So what does that mean? That means we start with what the person has with their strengths. What do they already do? Well, when this problem has occurred before, maybe not as bad. How have they tried to cope with it in a way that's worked? What have they done that works for them? It helps us when we're helping people to recover, to focus on what they already know, because they already know it. So all we're doing is sharpening the tools instead of teaching them how to learn a completely new tool. Now, sometimes people are going to have to learn new tools, but if they can have a foundation that's built on things that primarily they know, it's going to be a whole lot easier for them to transition into a recovery lifestyle. A recovery lifestyle is really what we're talking about when we're talking about the way of living that incorporates positive thoughts, healthy relationships, and just in general, happiness. It's not any particular theoretical stance. It's what it is that you want to live as far as your life, what do you want it to look like that is your recovery lifestyle? Coaches assist clients in stabilizing and recovery and maintaining the gains they achieved in treatment. So people will go to treatment 30 days, 90 days, sometimes they'll be in IOP and spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to get clean and sober or trying to recover from clinical depression or just overwhelming anxiety. And then they get out of treatment. And a lot of times there's Not a gradual step down from intensive treatment to outpatient that meets a few times a week. So they go from really intensive treatment to maybe seeing a therapist once a week. That's not enough for people to maintain their gains. They need something to touch someone, something to touch base with in between. So a recovery coach serves that purpose. The coach solidifies and integrates new coping skills and lifestyle behaviors. So as a coach, I'm going to ask somebody coming out of treatment, what did you learn in treatment that was effective for you? One of the things after working in the treatment industry for 20 some odd years, I learned was people will start out using those skills and tools that they learned in recovery. And over the first month to three months, those tools start to wane and they start falling back into old behaviors and old habits. And a coach is there to make sure people are aware of what they are doing and remember to use these new behaviors. Coaches also help people identify and address triggers in their environment. And again, I am not just talking about addiction. I am also talking about mental health issues like addiction or anxiety and depression. Because when somebody is coming out of treatment, maybe they had a suicidal attempt and they're still a little bit depressed, they're stable, but they're not feeling great. They don't want to walk in and see reminders of the things that made them suicidal to begin with. So we need to look for triggers. What are things that might keep a person sad or might trigger someone's anxiety and try to address those in the environment? Not everybody is going to want to remove them. And obviously we want to empower our clients to do what they want to do. Sometimes they are willing to move those pictures or those triggers or those reminders to another room so they are not confronted with them all the time. But the coach is attuned to looking around the environment and go, what is it in this environment that makes you happy? What is it in this environment that stresses you out? And what is it in this environment that might remind you that you want to use that you want to self harm, that you don't want to live anymore? Let's identify all those things and maximize the positive and minimize the negative. A recovery coach also wants to help people learn how to coach themselves to improve their performance, to learn how to set goals. Most people really stink at setting goals. So a coach is going to teach people how to say, okay, I want to get over here, we're going to call that B. And I'm at A right now. Imagine how that works A to B. But how Do I get there? What are the steps I need to take? People think, well, I want to lose weight, so I'm going to go on a diet and bada bing, I'm going to lose weight. That's kind of vague. What do you mean, go on a diet? You're going to count calories, you're going to go low carb, you're going to start exercising. Specifically, what are you going to do and what are the steps you are going to take to make it a lasting change? So a coach is really trained to help people hone in on those goals and make them specific, measurable, achievable, and time limited. You can't have a goal that goes on forever if you are constantly striving and you are never achieving that end. Eventually you get tired. It is just like, really, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to play anymore. So a coach will teach people how to identify and maintain motivation as well as implement rewards to keep their motivation up and keep them going until they get to point B, when they can take a little breather. And then maybe they set another goal. And that's wonderful, but everybody needs a breather. Everybody needs a plateau every once in a while. Coaches don't diagnose any mental or physical health issues or addictions. Now, coaches are trained to be alert to the symptoms of mental health, physical health, and addiction issues and refer clients out to their primary care provider, a mental health clinician, or a substance abuse facility. If those issues start coming up, if the person, if the coach thinks that the person needs to be in treatment, then they're going to refer the person out because the coach isn't trained to handle those issues and diagnose them and really get them going. The coach is designed to keep the person going once they've got the momentum from treatment. Coaches help people maintain the gains, explore their wants, needs, and choices and, and get clarity, create a change plan, and move into action. So a coach is going to say, all right, you went through treatment. You are clean now. And a lot of my clients didn't really conceptualize the difference between clean and sober. They got out of 30 days and they are like, well, I am cured. And I am like, not so much after 30 days, you are clean. You still have some old behaviors, and you still don't have new tools that are strong enough when life really hands you lemons. So let's look at what you want your life to look like three, six months from now, a year from now. What needs do you have in order to achieve those wants. You know, maybe it means you need to have a new career. Maybe it means you need to move. Maybe it means you need to change people, places and things. We need to look at what the person needs and what they think they need. And then we want to explore the choices they're making with regard to those needs and wants. You want this to happen, you need this to achieve your goal, but you're making choices that are contradictory. So I'm wondering how you're seeing that working together. And coaches are there to point out discrepancies between choices and desires, which helps people get clarity. They start to see how their behaviors can be self limiting, self sabotaging, or downright destructive. Then the coach says, okay, let's create a change plan. Let's walk it through from point A to point B. And there are going to be 10 steps in between. You know, I just picked 10 out of the air. It's not always 10. Let's take these little steps and see what we can break it down to. So you can take small movements toward the end goal so you always feel like you've got achievements. When people feel like they've met a goal, when they feel like they've achieved something, their motivation increases. This keeps them moving in action. We want to keep them moving forward, not fast. Fast isn't sustainable. We want them to be like the tortoise, when the tortoise and the hare just keep going slow and steady and you'll finish the race. We want to help people identify and address triggers and vulnerabilities to create the most supportive recovery environment. So we talked about those triggers on the last slide. Help them identify things in their environment. Now, it could be in their house, it could be in their workplace, it could be in their neighborhood. That trigger their desire to use, trigger their depression, trigger their anxiety, whatever their issue happens to be, and figure out how to address it. Sometimes you can avoid it, sometimes you can eliminate it, and sometimes you just got to deal with it. And it's going to be between the coach and the client to figure out how to handle those things. My suggestion is always to have three solutions for every single trigger. So sometimes, maybe most of the time you can avoid it, but this one time you can't avoid it. So how are you going to deal with it? And if the first thing you try to deal with it doesn't work, what is your backup plan? Always have a plan B and C. I like threes. And then we want to look at vulnerabilities and we're going to talk a lot about vulnerabilities throughout the coaching certification program. But vulnerabilities are basically those things that make you more likely to. To get depressed, to get anxious, to get stressed out, or to want to use in 12 step recovery, one of the acronyms we use is hungry, angry, lonely and tired. Those are some of your vulnerabilities. But vulnerabilities are anything that make you kind of more predisposed to be cranky, irritable, tired. And that can be anything from not getting enough sleep to being sick, to being frustrated, having negative self talk. There's a whole litany of things. The awesome thing is that vulnerabilities are really easy to address. We can look at them and go, okay, we need to figure out something to do about that. What I encourage coaches to do is to work with clients and write down vulnerabilities on flashcards or index cards and work on eliminating one each day or each week. Sometimes it's each week because we don't want to overwhelm people that way. You're not looking at this whole list of vulnerabilities going, oh, my gosh, that'll take forever to get through. Take one off the top of the stack every day and look at it, try to figure out how to address it, improve or maintain their motivation for treatment and recovery. Motivation, as we'll learn about, is not necessarily stable. It waxes and wanes. Think about with if you went on a diet. Think about if you tried to quit smoking. Think about if you made a New Year's resolution. You start out really strong, and then as you start doing it, you are like, oh, this isn't as much fun or as easy as I thought it would be. Do I really want to make this change? So that is when the motivation is waning and coaches will help people figure out tools to stop that waning and kick it back into high gear again. And one of those tools is called a decisional balance exercise, and you can Google it if you want to. The key is the coach is there to help cheer people on and keep them going and keep them from backsliding too far. Now, sometimes we may need to address the service plan and go, okay, maybe we're moving a little bit too fast. Let's slow things down so you can really feel solid in everything that you've done. And then we'll start moving forward again. And that's perfectly fine. That's not failure. That's just acknowledging your own individual needs. And then we have the ability as coaches to help people explore their options for recovery or treatment. Not everybody wants to do 12 steps. Not everybody wants to do smart recovery. Not everybody wants to go to inpatient treatment. So as coaches, we say, all right, we've identified that this might be an issue that you need to see seek treatment for. What can you do, or what are you willing to do for treatment? Likewise, some people don't even want to go to treatment. They're like, I'm going to do it on my own. And as coaches, we can recommend that they go see a therapist, we can recommend that they see their doctor. We can make a lot of recommendations. But ultimately, if they want to do it through self help support groups, that's going to be entirely incumbent upon them. So we need to support them the best we can. And if they start struggling, then again we go back to pointing out the wants, needs, and choices. Again, you want to find recovery, you want to be happy, you need treatment, and the choices you're making to avoid treatment seem to be undermining you. And it's a matter of just really rationally looking at what's going on. We're not treating anything. We're motivating people to make the best choices to get them to wherever they want to be. So what knowledge and skills do coaches need? They need knowledge of chemical and behavioral addictions, mental health conditions, and an understanding of how these conditions interact. If somebody is an alcoholic and has major depressive disorder, how do those two things interact? We know that alcohol is a depressant. And if you're already depressed, you take a depressant, what do you think is going to happen? But we also know that alcohol, when it starts wearing off, increases anxiety and increases the sympathetic nervous system, which creates like an anxiety reaction. So people who are depressed might start feeling really edgy and agitated, which often leads them to take another drink to help calm themselves down. So you can see how the depression and the anxiety, depression and the alcohol may interact with one another. And we talk a lot about the mind, body connection and how addictions are a way of coping when nothing else has worked. Addictions are a way of making pain go away when nothing else has helped, or adding pleasure when there's just nothing that does it for you anymore. And we'll also talk about why that happens, what's going on in the brain that may create a situation where you just don't feel happy anymore. Coaches also need an awareness of current best practices in treating mental health and addictive behaviors. If we're going to refer people to treatment, we need to help educate them. We need to help them see what are your options? What do we know that works right now? And, you know, how might we steer you in the right direction? We also need to be aware of multidisciplinary resources within the community. Now, that can be anything from case management to helping people get a job, to helping them find transportation, legal help, knowing what resources are out there so people can achieve their goals. If they want to live independently and be happy and healthy, but they don't have a driver's license, it's going to, and, you know, maybe they live in the country, it's going to be hard to get to work, which is going to make it harder to achieve the rest of their goals. So we want to look at what options are out there. We want to make sure that people have knowledge of the scope and practice and the legal and ethical guidelines for coaches. So, again, just what we've been talking about. What is it that coaches can do? We can cheer people on. We can help them strengthen their coping skills. We can help them implement the relapse prevention plan, and we can refer them to treatment and work with their therapist when they get out or even when they're in treatment, if their therapist is open to it, in order to help them achieve and maintain the quality of life that they want. And finally, we've talked a lot about motivation. Coaches need to be aware of the concept of motivational interviewing, how to do it and how to help people enhance their own motivation. Because sometimes we've got to do things that we don't want to do. I didn't want to go to the gym this morning. You know, I'll be flat out about that. I love to go to the gym, but this morning I just wasn't feeling it. So I had to enhance my motivation to get my happy little butt to the gym. And one of the things that I know is I am a lot happier and a lot more energetic and a lot more focused if I go and I work out first thing in the morning. And I knew I had a lot that I wanted to get done today. So my wants and my needs were to get some stuff done at work today. And my choice, I had the choice to either not go to the gym or to go to the gym. I knew that going to the gym was the better choice. So, you know, implemented right then and there. Coaches also need to have the ability to establish a coaching partnership through active listening and effective communication. A lot of us don't communicate effectively. We're so busy trying to Convince somebody else we're right, or trying to formulate our response while they're already talking, that we don't listen, we don't hear, we don't paraphrase. So we're going to talk a lot about how to develop rapport and engage in effective verbal and nonverbal communication. We need to talk about how to establish a safe, supportive, and trusting relationship. And just like counselors and doctors and, you know, hey, your best friend, there are things that you kind of lay out there at the outset that this is what's going to go on. These are the rules, these are the expectations. With your best friend, you might not be quite as clinical about it, but there's generally an informed consent, whether it's in a casual setting, whether it's informal, or in a formal setting where it's written. Coaches also need to know how to gain an awareness of the client's needs and wants, because a lot of times, if you ask a client, so, what do you want? They'll look at you like you've got three heads. I want to stay sober. Okay, well, that's great, but that's a really big goal. What do we need to do to get there? Specifically, what does that look like to you when you're sober? What do you want to be the same in your life, and what do you want to be different? Which takes us to learning how to kind of guide the client in effective goal identification. So sober is your big goal. That's where you want to be or happy. You know, if somebody is coming out of the crisis center after a suicide attempt, maybe they want to be happy, but what does that look like to them? Happy to me is very different than what happy looks like to my best friend. So what are we going to do? Coaches have knowledge of specific skills, techniques, and resources to help clients achieve their goals. Mindfulness and self awareness. Too often we go on autopilot. We get up in the morning, we eat breakfast, we go to work, we eat lunch, we go back to work, we come home, we eat dinner, we go to sleep, we get up in the morning, and we repeat. And we don't even really think throughout the day about how are we feeling, what's going on, what are our vulnerabilities? Sometimes during the middle of the day, you might start feeling, you know, an ache in your neck. That's a vulnerability if it's painful enough that it's making it difficult for you to concentrate. So we want to look at what's going on and help clients maintain mindfulness and self Awareness. We've talked already about how we're going to help them learn how to set goals. We're going to learn how to help them find and evaluate self help tools. Not every tool works for every person. You know, it's not like when you go into a. Well, maybe it is, you know, let me take an example and try to make a metaphor out of it. When you go into Home Depot, there are certain screws for certain jobs, there are certain screws for sheet metal, there are certain screws for wood, there are certain screws for concrete. They're all screws. Just like you have certain self help tools that are going to work for some people and not others. So you want to make sure to help educate your client about what works for them and help them understand that just because something doesn't work for them doesn't mean they're broken or there's something wrong with them. It just means it's not for them. You know, I personally don't like artichokes. Nothing wrong with artichokes. Nothing wrong with people who like artichokes. I just don't like them. Helping them understand that that's really what we're looking at is personal differences. We want to help clients find recovery support. As coaches, we want to be there, we want to cheer them on, but we don't want to be their only cheerleader. We don't want to be their only social support because that creates a dependence on us. And then if we're not there and they have a crisis, they could crash and burn. We want to make sure our clients have a healthy, sober, stable support system. A lot of S's there. It's important in long term recovery because we don't want clients to have to employ us for the rest of their natural lives. I mean, from a financial point, it would be great. From an ethical standpoint, no, definitely not. We want to help people through the initial part of their journey, learn how to master the skills so they can do it henceforth and forevermore. Do they need to come back every once in a while for a tune up? Sometimes. But most of the time, not if we do our job right. We teach them how to find the resources they need. And then finally, we do need to know about psychotropic medications, your antidepressants, anti anxiety, antipsychotics, and the medications that are used to assist in addiction treatments such as Suboxone, Methadone and Antabuse. There are a lot of others, but obviously we're not prescribing these. However, if our clients are struggling to stay sober, if they're struggling with anxiety, if they're struggling with depression and nothing seems to be getting them out of the fog and they're willing, not everybody is willing to look at psychotropics as an option, but if they're willing to look at it, then let's educate them. Let's show them where to educate themselves about these different medications and then encourage them to go talk to their doctor. Initially, coaches meet with clients who've completed or are undergoing treatment for an addiction or a mental health issue. So we're not generally their first stop. They may have tried, they may be in AA or they may be in some other program where they're trying to self help and self treat, but they're in some sort of treatment and they come to us and they go, I need somebody that's going to be my cheerleader, that's going to keep me on task, that's going to help me apply these things. And the coach goes, score, I'm right there for you. We review their current treatment and or relapse prevention plan in order to support them in achieving their goals. So we look at what are you doing right now to achieve your goal and what are you doing right now to prevent relapse again, depression, anxiety or addiction? We're not discriminating between mental health and addictive disorders. Help them figure out what's working and increase that, intensify that, broaden that and help them figure out what may be on there that's just not doing it for them and get rid of it. If it's not working, either modify it so it can work or get rid of it because it's just frustrating the person. And then we'll help them identify and address the triggers and vulnerabilities in their current environment. This is all done in the first meeting or two with a client to help them get sort of a roadmap. We want to help them develop that roadmap early on and then we can go on the journey together on a day to day basis. The coach checks in with clients to prompt them to do a mindfulness scan. I have my clients do a mindfulness scan at every meal, really fast, really easy. They check in and they go, how am I feeling physically, how am I feeling emotionally, how am I feeling mentally? You know, am I feeling foggy headed, negative, irritable? Those are all things they can identify. We just talked about it in less than 10 seconds. If they think about it, it could take 30, but it's not something that's going to take 5, 10, 15 minutes. It's something they can do really fast, easy peasy. And then they have a plan. If they figure out that they're struggling that day, what are you going to do about it? Early on, clients might have to call you and go, you know, I'm not feeling well today, I'm really struggling, I'm foggy headed, I can't stay on task, I'm getting really frustrated and I don't know what to do. And the coach can say, ok, what have you done before when this has happened that has worked? Or what is it that you are needing right now? Helping people identify the fact that, you know, sometimes you just got to go, I'm out. I cannot get all this accomplished today on a day to day basis. The coach also reviews what clients are doing on their own relapse prevention plan. So we want to make sure they're still using those skills and tools and focusing on changing the behaviors they need to that they identified when they were in treatment. And we'll help them monitor their progress toward meeting their personal development goals, whatever those are. You know, like I said, a lot of times it'll start out way too broad like being happy or being sober or hey, both happy and sober score. But that breaks down to a lot of different sub goals that we need to help them track. And I encourage coaches to help people identify a manageable number of goals for people to work on at a time. If they start trying to change everything in their world at once, they're not going to succeed. They're just not. I haven't ever seen it happen in 20 years. Identify two, three things that they want to start working on. As they start working on those, if they've still got more time and energy, add one more. But don't take on 15 goals at once because it's just not possible to focus on that many changes. Change takes effort and time, but effort, it is exhausting. The coach helps people focus on the present, maintain their motivation to prevent vulnerabilities. I keep talking about these vulnerabilities. Get enough sleep, eat healthfully, regulate your circadian rhythms by getting outside, getting some sunlight. These are not hard things to do. Stay healthy by washing your hands, taking your vitamins, trying to reduce your stress. Some days there's going to be stress, that's a vulnerability. Some days there are going to be things you don't want to do. You have to do them so you can't prevent that. How do you prevent it from triggering you to relapse Part of that is identifying what you can and cannot control. When clients encounter distress, coaches assist them in identifying the cause of the distress in the present moment. You got cut off in traffic and you are just all over raged right now, enraged. What is it that is causing that rage at this very moment? A lot of times people look around and go, well, I am parked on the shoulder on the side of the road and I am safe and nothing. And the coach would go, okay, so is it worth the energy and the emotional upset to continue to nurture this rage even if you caught up to that person? A, would it be the safe and smart thing to do? B, would they care? And C, is it going to change anything? No. So the coach can help people walk through the logical consequences. We can help them identify what tools they have to deal with whatever the distress is right now. When you've gotten cut off in traffic before and you know people do and it's irritating, what do you do about it? How do you handle it? How do you diffuse that stress? And then we can help them create a game plan for using tools to address this situation now and in the future. So, you know, if they're struggling and they call you and you go, okay, what tools work? You identify some that work or figure out some new ones, and then you make a plan for what to do whenever this happens, henceforth and forevermore, then the person will start to learn how to develop their own game plans, if you will, during a stressful situation. The coach is also a coach. We help clients think clearly. We help them get out of that emotional mind. We go, okay, slow down. Let's figure out exactly what we're dealing with here. We identify what the clients are doing. Well, because a lot of times when clients are in distress, they're focusing on everything that's going wrong. We can focus on the fact that they're still sober, they're still alive, they called you. Those are all three strengths right there. And there's probably a lot of other stuff. So coaches are there to kind of balance out the negative and help de escalate the person. And we help them identify potential relapse traps and encourage clients to address them. If we see somebody has been burning the candle at both ends for too long, you know, sometimes you do it for a day or two, but if you're doing it for a week or two or a month, eventually you're going to get tired. And the more tired you get, the more foggy you get, the more frustrated you get. And your neurotransmitters start getting out of whack, which means your mood starts to go down. So it's really, really important that coaches point out what they see as potential relapse traps. After a stressful situation, the coach and client can review the game tape. And what I mean by that is when you meet in your weekly coaching meetings, it's time to go over the game tape and say, tell me about the stressful situations that happened this week and how did you handle them? What worked, what didn't? What do you hope to do better the next time? And then we also want to review like coaches do. We want to review what you did really well because that is important. It is vital in maintaining motivation and maintaining optimism. So people can say, yeah, I did that. Okay, I had a little slip, but yeah, I did all those other things too. Score for me. So. John's mother was an angry and emotionally abusive alcoholic. When he was growing up, he never felt like he could get the one thing he desperately wanted, which was her approval. As he grew up, his relationships and self worth became dependent on getting other people's approval because he never felt good enough. This caused constant anxiety and depression that he numbed with alcohol. He went to treatment and started to understand why he felt the way he did. Today, John is getting ready for a visit with his mother and is getting progressively stressed and wanting to drink. So what's the coach's role here? You know, he's already been to treatment. He understands the underpinnings of his problem. He's probably developed some tools to handle his anxiety. But now he's going to have to go confront this trigger or be in front of, not necessarily confront, be in front of this trigger. So what's the coach's role? The coach would help John identify what it is about her visit was causing him distress, what tools he could best use to deal with this situation. So if he's already gearing up for her to be insulting, okay, you know, I hear that you're doing that. So if that happens, if she comes in and the first thing she says is, wow, you couldn't have even cleaned up before I came. How is he gonna handle it? What can he do to remind himself of his own value? And how can he deal with hurtful comments to prevent a relapse? How can he kind of let it roll like water off a duck's back? What can he do leading up to the visit and during the visit to best take care of himself and prevent vulnerabilities? So not drinking, not having alcohol in the House trying to get plenty of rest, having some sort of social support to kind of buffer between him and his mother, maybe have some other activities that they can do so they're not just sitting there in the living room staring at each other, going, what can I say? There's a lot of things that they can brainstorm to do in order to prevent him from being stressed out before he gets there, before she gets there, and in order to prevent him from ramping up his stress and just winding tighter and tighter and tighter while she's there. Now, the coach would not delve into helping John work through his mommy issues. This is for the therapist. What we want to do is help him figure out what tools do you have to deal with this situation in the present moment so you don't relapse. During the visit, the coach would regularly check in with John and get a status update, like halftime at a game. When we would have clients go out from residential on to furlough, we would have them call in every four to eight hours, depending on how long they'd been in treatment, just to check in. So we knew they were doing okay. We had a code word that they could use if they needed us to come pick them up. We want to provide reinforcement for what John is doing. Well, when he calls, you have to find something. You know, even if he is starting to melt down, we need to get an understanding of what's going on, but also an understanding of, okay, what's going well. Again, he called, and that's positive. He's doing the next right thing. He wants to stay happy and sober. What else is he doing? And then we want to help him regroup and adjust his plans for anything that's not going well. Like I said, if she's sitting in the living room and they're just staring at each other and she's nitpicking, maybe he needs to make a suggestion of let's go out to dinner or let's go do something. That way there's a diversion. After the visit, the coach and John would review what happened, identify what was done well, address anything John wants to do differently, and then complete a mindfulness scan to ensure John has no lingering vulnerabilities. What do I mean by that? We talk about everything. We decompress. We do the after action, whatever you want to call it. But then before he walks out of that room, I want to know that he's calm, cool, and collected. So I want him to do a mindfulness scan and tell me if there's anything else that's still nagging at him or if there's anything else that's still just causing him pain, emotional or physical. So we can deal with it and we can address it. He may have gotten all knotted up and have a migraine from having mom there. How are you going to handle that in a healthful way? In order to help clients achieve their goals in life and recovery, coaches need a vast array of knowledge, including symptoms of mental health and addiction issues, causes of mental health and addiction issues, ways to prevent mental health and addiction issues, because prevention and relapse prevention are kind of one and the same. They need to know adult learning theory, because we're going to help clients learn new tools. So we need to know how to help them learn. And yeah, actually there are steps to it. We need to have effective communication skills, know how to motivate people, and know how to help people learn how to set good achievable goals. The top ways excellent coaches work, they create a safe place for clients to be and explore themselves. I don't want John or whoever it is to try to put on airs to convince me that there's something they're not. I want to know who John is. Because theoretically, and hopefully all coaches accept people as they are for who they are. You know, we all have foibles, so accepting people with their strengths and their weaknesses is a key to coaching. We want to increase the awareness of clients and their situation through active listening and effective communication. We want to understand what's going on. We haven't been in their head, they've been in their head for 20, 30, 40 some odd years. We want to understand their perspective because the way I view something and the way somebody else views something is often really different. We want to help them define their goals, desires and hopes. Not mine, not what I want for them, not what their therapist wants for them, not what their lawyer wants for them. What do they want? Then help them develop plans to achieve and maintain those goals, following up by regularly reviewing and refining the goals. Because as you go along your road trip, you know, think about going on a road trip across the country. You're going to be driving along and you're going to hit a construction zone and you're going to have to decide, well, do I want to wait through the long line or do I want to take a little detour. Same thing is true with goal setting. You're going to hit little snags, little bumps, and maybe that's because life has changed or maybe because it's something you didn't plan on whichever you need to figure out how to adjust it, and it's just refining it a little bit. We want to help clients align their values with their goals and their style in the world, and we're going to talk about that individualization. Not every goal is right for every client, and not every intervention works for every person. So ultimately, we're being an effective resource for clients in every way we possibly can. And through so doing, we model effective lifestyle management and authenticity. We want to be authentic. We want to be genuine with our clients. They're going to sense if we're blowing smoke. So we want to be as honest and open about what's going on without being judgmental towards them, because our job is to help them be who they want to be again, not who we want them to be.