What Is Behavior Change Coaching? Why I Think Almost Everyone Could Benefit From a Coach
I’m a coach, so saying “I think everyone should have a coach” sounds a little like a dentist telling you everyone should get their teeth cleaned.
Fair. But I believed in coaching long before I became a coach.
When I trained for both Ironmans I completed, I hired coaches. When I needed to learn how to swim in open water without completely freaking out, I had a coach. I have a business coach. When I decided to change my relationship with alcohol and ultimately stop drinking, I had a coach.
Why? Because there are things I simply cannot see from inside my own life.
Neither can you.
We all have blind spots. We have behaviors we’ve repeated for so long that we don’t even recognize them as behaviors anymore. We have stories about ourselves that we’ve repeated enough times that they’ve become “facts.” Sometimes we need another human being sitting across from us saying, essentially, “Hmmm. Did you hear what you just said?”
That, to me, is where coaching gets really powerful.
What Is Behavior Change Coaching?
My definition of behavior change coaching is pretty simple: It helps close the gap between knowing what you want to do and actually doing it.
There’s a more formal body of work behind it. Research into health and wellness coaching describes coaching as client-centered and built around self-discovery, personally determined goals, accountability and behavior change. A systematic review found accountability for behavior and self-discovery or active learning among the recurring elements of health and wellness coaching.
I love that distinction because coaching isn’t supposed to be me sitting across from someone saying, “Here are all the things you’re doing wrong. Please fix them before next Thursday.”
A good behavior change coach helps you see what you’re not seeing.
Let’s use alcohol because this is where I do a lot of my coaching. A woman may come to me saying, “I need to stop drinking wine at night.”
Okay.
We could focus exclusively on the wine, but I’m much more curious about what happens at 5:30. What does the wine DO for her?
Maybe that first glass has become the moment she gives herself permission to stop working. Maybe she’s spent the entire day taking care of other people and this is the one thing she considers hers. Maybe she’s trying to quiet a brain that hasn’t stopped all day.
The behavior makes a lot more sense when we stop judging it long enough to understand what purpose it’s serving.
If we remove the wine without understanding the behavior, we’ve left the job opening vacant.
Eventually something is probably going to apply for it.
This is why the framework I use in my alcohol-free coaching is behavior-first: NOTICE → REPLACE → BUILD → CHOOSE.
We notice what’s actually happening before trying to fix it. From there, we experiment with another behavior that might meet the same need. Over time, we build evidence that another way actually works. Eventually, we’re able to choose from a place of information rather than habit or autopilot.
That’s behavior change coaching.
Why Knowing Better Doesn’t Always Mean Doing Better
Humans are fascinating because we can know exactly what we “should” do and still not do it.
Most of us aren’t struggling with behavior because nobody has given us enough information. We know movement is good for us. We know sleep matters. If you’ve been questioning your relationship with alcohol for years, I can almost guarantee the missing piece isn’t learning that alcohol isn’t particularly good for you.
You already know.
The interesting question is why the behavior continues when your rational brain has already decided it wants something different.
Instead of piling more information onto someone who already has plenty of information, behavior change coaching pays attention to what happens between intention and action.
Research into health and wellness coaching suggests that some gains can continue after coaching ends. One systematic review found sustained or further-improved outcomes in at least one measure in most of the studies it reviewed.
That doesn’t mean coaching is magic. Thank God, because I’m terrible at magic.
It does reinforce something I’ve experienced as both a client and a coach: there is value in having structured support while you’re trying to change a behavior.
Coaching vs. Therapy
One of the most common questions people ask is about coaching vs. therapy.
You’ll sometimes hear that therapy looks backward while coaching looks forward. I think real life is more nuanced than that. Both can involve your past, present and future.
The bigger difference is purpose and scope. Therapy can involve diagnosing and treating mental health conditions and working clinically with trauma and psychological distress. Coaching is generally focused on development, awareness, behavior, goals and action. The International Coaching Federation describes coaching as partnering with clients in a process designed to maximize their personal and professional potential.
I am not a therapist.
There are things that belong with a qualified mental health professional, and a responsible coach should recognize that. Coaching doesn’t need to compete with therapy. Someone can work with both because they serve different purposes.
My coaching often begins with understanding where someone is right now, where she wants to go and what keeps happening between those two places.
That’s where we get curious.
Coaching, Mentorship and Life Coaching
Mentorship has been incredibly important throughout my career, but I don’t see mentorship and coaching as interchangeable.
A mentor has often walked a road you’re trying to walk. She may share what worked for her, what she wishes she’d known and what she would do differently.
A coach may have relevant experience too, but the goal isn’t necessarily to give you her answer. It’s to help you uncover yours.
That distinction is especially important to me in alcohol-free coaching. I stopped drinking on October 12, 2020. That’s my story. It doesn’t automatically need to become yours.
Someone might come to me wanting to remove alcohol completely. Someone else may want to reduce. Another person may simply be tired of having the same internal argument about drinking year after year.
My job isn’t to hand her my life and tell her to replicate it. I want to help her understand hers.
“Life coach,” meanwhile, is an incredibly broad term. Behavior change coaching gets more specific because we’re paying attention to the mechanics between intention and action.
You say you want something. Cool. What keeps happening instead?
That’s where I want to hang out.
If a client tells me she wants to stop drinking during the week but keeps finding herself pouring wine on Wednesday evening, I’m not particularly interested in spending our entire session telling her to believe in herself. Something is happening between the intention she had that morning and the glass she’s pouring that evening.
When we slow the behavior down enough to see it, we have something we can actually work with.
Behavior is information. A good coach helps us figure out what that information is telling us.
Why Do High Performers Have Coaches?
Here’s where the touchy-feely woo stuff meets something incredibly practical.
The world’s best athletes have coaches. So do performers and executives. Parents, students and business owners hire coaches too.
We readily accept the idea that an elite athlete can be one of the best people on Earth at what she does and still benefit from someone standing outside her performance and seeing something she can’t.
Why would the rest of us be any different?
When I completed my two Ironmans, I didn’t hire coaches because I was incapable of swimming, biking or running. I wanted expertise, accountability and perspective.
Learning to swim in open water is a perfect example. I could watch videos and read everything available about open-water swimming, but at some point I needed another human being watching what I was actually doing.
The same thing happened when I changed my relationship with alcohol. I could read the books, listen to the podcasts and understand the science.
Having a coach brought another human into the equation. That mattered.
Yes, Coaching Costs Money
Good coaching can be a significant investment, and I don’t think we should dance around that.
Something changed for me every time I’ve paid for coaching. I had skin in the game. I took myself more seriously.
When I hired an Ironman coach, training wasn’t something I would get around to if the day cooperated. Another person knew what I said I was going to do.
When I hired a coach to change my relationship with alcohol, I had accountability outside my own head and access to tools and resources I wouldn’t necessarily have discovered on my own.
Coaching also helped me separate emotion from behavior. I could have a hard day without automatically making a decision based on how I felt during that hard day. My feelings still mattered, but they didn’t have to run the whole damn show.
Most importantly, I had another set of eyes. That is still one of the greatest values I see in coaching.
Before You Hire a Coach, Check Their Credentials
Here’s something I think everyone should know before hiring a coach: coaching is not regulated in the same way professions such as medicine, therapy or law are. There isn’t one government-issued coaching license someone must obtain before calling herself a coach.
That means you need to do a little homework.
Personally, I would look for a coach who has at least one legitimate certification. You’ll sometimes find coaches with several, and that’s great too. I care less about how many logos someone can put at the bottom of a website than whether the certification is legitimate and relevant to the work she’s doing.
Don’t simply take someone’s word for it. Find out who issued the certification and go to that organization’s website yourself. See what was required to earn it and whether you can verify that the person actually holds the credential. Some credentialing organizations, including the International Coaching Federation, provide ways for consumers to verify credentials.
I have one coaching certification. That’s by design.
My certification is through This Naked Mind Institute. I chose that training because it aligned specifically with the work I wanted to do around alcohol, behavior change, curiosity and removing shame from the conversation. This Naked Mind maintains information about its coaching program and certified coaches, so someone considering working with me doesn’t simply have to take my word for it.
I haven’t felt a need to collect more certifications simply so I can put more letters after my name.
My certification gave me formal training, methodology, tools and a framework. Coaching hundreds of people has given me something different: experience.
Both matter. Fit matters too.
I personally want a coach who will challenge me. I want someone who notices the thing I’m conveniently stepping around and isn’t afraid to bring me back to it. I want enough compassion that I feel safe telling the truth and enough accountability that I can’t bullshit my way through the session.
You may need something different.
That’s why the conversation you have with a coach before hiring her matters.
Why I Think Almost Everyone Could Benefit From a Coach
I don’t think everyone needs the same coach. I don’t think you necessarily need a coach forever. I definitely don’t think everybody needs me as their coach.
I simply believe there are seasons in our lives when having another human being outside of our own brain is incredibly valuable.
I’ve hired coaches when I wanted to become an Ironman. I’ve hired coaches to improve a specific skill. I had a coach when I changed my relationship with alcohol. I have a coach in business.
None of those decisions meant I wasn’t capable of figuring things out myself. I probably could have. That’s not really the point.
I cared enough about what I was trying to accomplish to get help seeing what I couldn’t see by myself. I wanted someone to notice my blind spots, challenge my assumptions and hold me accountable to the things I said mattered to me.
Maybe that’s a better way to think about whether behavior change coaching could help you.
Instead of asking whether you need a coach, consider where in your life you’ve been trying to create change using only your own perspective. Maybe you’ve been working on the same thing for years and making progress, but you keep getting stuck in the same place.
You might not need someone to give you the answer. You might need someone who can see the question you’ve been missing.
That’s coaching. Yeah, maybe there’s a little woo in there. I’m good with it.
