PN Level 1 Sleep, Stress Management, and Recovery Coaching …

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Helping people change:

Progressive change, sustainable results

Progressive change, sustainable results

Only action creates change.

Inspiration, ideas, insight, and imagination are all wonderful, useful tools.

So are problem solving, understanding why we do things, making plans, establishing

goals, and visualizing ourselves transformed. These can be exciting and empowering as
they allow us to gain a new sense of what is possible, or explore our inner world more
deeply.

Yet we don’t achieve goals through the mere act of setting them, nor through sheer
force of will.

We cannot think, want, hope, envision, or strategize ourselves into change.

These, while helpful, are not enough.

Eventually, we must do something.

Go from goals to skills to practices to actions.

Think back to our goals-skills-practices-actions (GSPA) framework.

 Identify your clients’ goals — what they want to move towards.

Break goals into skills — the abilities, competencies, or capacities required to do that
thing, or move in the desired direction.

Break skills into practices — exercises and applications that help build the skills.

Break practices into actions — small, specific, concrete tasks that your client can
easily do daily, or as often as possible. Repeated over time, these become habits —
automatic behaviors that are ingrained seamlessly into your clients’ lives.

See Figure 1.13 for the basic framework, and Figure 1.14 for an example in practice with
the goal of “Feel energized through the whole day.”

Figure 1.13: Goals-skills-practices-actions (GSPA) framework

Figure 1.14: Example in practice: Create a sleep ritual

Choosing practices and actions: The 5-S Formula

Working within the GSPA framework, it can be tricky to figure out how to work with your
clients to actually move from the first steps (goals) to developing skills, practices, and next
actions.

We recommend using our “5-S Formula” to identify what might be appropriate and
successful. Whatever you and your client come up with should be:
 Strategic

Segmental

Sequential

Simple

Supported

Let’s discuss each of these in turn.

Strategic

All actions must connect to the goal.

The tasks you choose together with your client must:

remove or reduce a limiting factor ;

teach a crucial component;

fill a gap;

use an existing strength; and/or

somehow add value to the process.

This may sound obvious, but it’s tempting for coaches to try the “latest and greatest” fad
without clearly connecting particular actions to a client’s goals.

Segmental

A practice or action must be a smaller piece of a larger whole.

If you teach complex movements, you know that you must break them down into their
component parts, and teach each one separately.
For instance, if you’re teaching children to swim, you might start with having them put
their face in the water and blow bubbles. You don’t jump right into butterfly stroke.

Most skills and practices — even the ones that seem relatively straightforward — are too
complicated to master in one try. Break them down into smaller chunks.

(Remember that tasks that seem easy for you might not be for clients. Start with smaller
pieces than you think you need to.)

Sequential

Things must be done in a logical order.

Start with foundational steps first. There should be a natural progression from step to step
that gets more complex over time, but is still easy for your client to follow.

Again, if you were teaching swimming, you’d start by teaching blowing bubbles, not
jumping off the 10-meter platform.

Simple

A practice or action must be easy to understand and do in your client’s real life.

(Once again: Something that’s easy for you may not be easy at all for your client.)

If you ask your client, On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that you could do this
practice every single day for the next two weeks, no matter what? — the answer should be a
9 or 10. Anything lower and the practice is too challenging or intimidating.

Supported

Each step requires some type of teaching, coaching, mentorship, and accountability.

The need for support goes up proportionally with how challenging something is. Help
your client feel empowered to overcome the barriers to change so they can actually
practice them.
Up next is a short thought exercise that will show you how the 5-S formula can be put into
practice when you’re moving from goals to skills, practices and actions with your clients.

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