What happens in a coaching programme?
Your story, your life, and your IBD are unique. As such, your programme will be personalised to your situation and your vision of your life made better with IBD.
As your programme goes on, the health coaching process will naturally take us in the right direction that best serves you at that moment in time. That said, each of my programmes follows the same broad structure, which will give you a big-picture view of what to expect from session to session.
The process, session by session
Before session 1:
The journey starts with a 20-minute discovery call. This is a chance for us to meet and for me to start understanding your IBD and what you’d like to achieve from a programme.
In the week before your first session, you’ll complete an intake form, providing me with more context about your health history and other important details for me to know.
You’ll also keep a Food and Symptom Diary for at least 5 days, so I can get a sense of your overall diet pattern.
Finally, you’ll complete your first IBD Symptom Severity Matrix. This is a tool we will revisit periodically throughout the programme. It sets a benchmark for your current experience of IBD and will enable you to see and track your progress.
Session 1:
There will be a lot of ground to cover in session 1, so allow between 90 minutes and 2 hours for the session.
We’ll start by creating your IBD Well Life Vision - what does your best life with IBD look like? Getting clear on where you want to get to is crucial to finding the path to get there.
From there, we’ll set your SMARTER Goals for the programme which will move you towards that vision.
We will explore your unique Strengths and Values. These are the things that will keep you motivated and empowered to make change.
I will introduce you to the principles of the blood sugar balancing way of eating.
Lastly, we will review your Food and Symptom Diary and you’ll come up with some easy swaps and changes you can make right away to start rebalancing your blood sugar and improving your wellbeing.
Subsequent sessions:
Each subsequent session will be around an hour long.
There will be time to evaluate and review how you did on the actions you committed to in the previous session.
Every session will put you in the driver’s seat. You will decide what is most important for you to focus on in the session to move you towards your goals. It could be diet, exercise, relationships, stress management, etc.
Then, I will coach you to taking committed actions that move you along the path towards your IBD Well Life Vision. Expect to gain greater clarity on your situation, discover the levers you can pull to achieve your goals, plan for the barriers that may arise, and uncover the motivation to take action and make change.
After each session, you’ll complete a Summary Form. This will confirm the actions you have committed to in the session. Writing your actions down helps you to be accountable, follow through and therefore get better results.
Between sessions, you will fill keep a Food and Symptom Diary, which you will upload to me ahead of the next session. I will review this and add my comments and observations.
One day before the next session, you’ll complete a Progress Form. This is a quick review of how well you were able to follow through on your agreed actions, allowing us to maximise the use of our time together.
Other things we might do in session are work through specific coaching tools if they become relevant. Periodically, we will review how you are progressing towards to programme goals and vision we outline in session 1. And also you will complete another IBD Symptom Severity Matrix every 4 weeks so that we can see and measure meaningful change.
The final session:
In the last session of your programme, we will take time to reflect on all that you have achieved so far. We’ll look back on where you started, what improvements you’ve made, and celebrate your successes.
We will look at the goals you set at the outset of the programme and your IBD Well Life Vision and assess how far you’ve come, and think about what the next steps will be.
Maintaining the momentum you’ve gained in the programme is vital. IBD, after all, is a life-long condition that takes a lifetime of commitment to thrive with.
We’ll look at what you want to achieve next, and what support you might need going forward. You might feel ready to take those next steps on your own, fully empowered to keep journeying on towards your vision.
Or, you may feel that you would benefit from some further support from additional coaching sessions. In which case, we can discuss the options of my IBD lifestyle momentum packages.
When you are fully ready to venture forth on your own, I’ll invite you to a short check-in session a few months after our last session together to see how things are going.
