Shownotes
Even in the coaching world, there’s a lot of baloney that’s out there and all the fads and all the headline chasing. Bradford Cooper resists that with evidence-based work. Bradford is the CEO of US Corporate Wellness and the Cofounder of The Catalyst Coaching Institute. He teaches on how we can take meaningful steps that can surely change our lives for the better through wellness coaching which is focused on evidence-based practices in health and wellness. Stay clear of the shiny object that’s not going to help your life at all. Through this episode, learn to appreciate the benefits of coaching and what effective professional coaching does.
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Wellness Coaching with Bradford Cooper
We have Brad Cooper. Brad is the CEO of US Corporate Wellness and the Cofounder of The Catalyst Coaching Institute. We’ve been trying to get this done for some time, but you were presenting in Germany and working on your PhD. I appreciate you taking time.
It’s a joy to be here. Thank you very much.
Tell us about the business and who you serve?
There are two hats. At US Corporate Wellness, we serve employers. Employers that are looking to improve the lives of their employees in the health and wellness arena. A lot of people think of health and wellness as food and fitness, we go so far beyond that. We may be talking to them about stress or life balance or it could be food. It could be fitness. It could be sleep or any number of things. That hat worked in the trenches. We’re with the employer. We’re putting all those things together for them. The other hat we’ve been training wellness coaches. The wellness coaching industry has changed dramatically in the last few years.
There’s a National Board Certification for wellness coaches. You and I can’t be having a cup of coffee and say, “You want to be a wellness coach?” You say, “Yeah, Brad. That sounds pretty good,” and we walk out the door as wellness coaches. There’s now an extensive training process. You have to go through an accredited program. You have to have a number of practice sessions, etc. We’re one of the programs that if you decide you want to be a health and wellness coach, you can go through our program, become certified and pursue that National Board exam. On the one hand, we serve employers. On the other hand, we serve the people out there doing it. Sometimes there’s an overlap. We’re known in the industry as the coaching experts. The companies that want top level of coaching, they come to us and that’s because they heard of us through The Catalyst Coaching Institute and they didn’t even know about US Corporate Wellness.
For the business owner that maybe hasn’t gone down the road of approaching this as a strategy for the company, what’s the typical problem that business owner will recognize or into it in his company? Why do they typically reach out to you?
There are a lot of answers to that. First off, they tend to look at their medical claims and say, “Are you kidding me? We’re going up another 8% and another 12% or whatever this year. We have to do something about that.” That doesn’t happen like this. You’ve got to get a good plan in place. Oftentimes, that’s the first thing that makes them reach out or have one of their team members reach out and find us and talk to you the details. The reality is it’s so much deeper than that. You talked about culture. I interviewed a guy on our podcast about resilience.
What is the name of your podcast?
It’s the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching podcast. It’s focused on evidence-based practices in health and wellness. You and I were talking about all the baloney that’s out there, all the fads and all the headline chasing. We resist that as a company, but through the podcast, we want to try to say, “The Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching podcast is all about evidence-based. It’s not the stupid stuff. It’s not the ridiculous things that get your attention, shiny object, but frankly, it’s not going to help your life at all.” In any case, I completely lost where I was with that. I love getting off the rail so let’s keep doing that.
What we were talking about is the business owner and how they recognize the next level.
The medical claims or the sick time are oftentimes what brings them to us initially. It makes them think, “We should probably do something like that.” What makes them happiest long-term is they see the impact it’s having on people’s lives. My PhD is on performance psychology. It’s all about how do we improve our performance through a number of different ways. They’ll notice things like, “People are sleeping better.” Do know what happened once you sleep better? It doesn’t make you feel like you’re less sleepy. It improves your performance in a dramatic way. One of the studies I did for my PhD was on sleep and mental toughness. How does time in bed influence your rating of mental toughness? How does mental toughness affect everything else?
Coaching is never telling. Coaching is always drawing out.
We found outstanding results. It’s something simple like that. If we only take everything off the board where we’re talking about all these different things, but we for a moment said, “Let’s address sleep,” if we only influenced that, the business owner would say, “We have better relationships. We have better energy. We have less sick time. We have better financial decisions.” It’s crazy. A simple example of you, if you didn’t sleep well last night, and I don’t mean chronic sleep deprivation. I don’t mean you’re going off the rails. This has been going on for a few months.
Your likelihood of exercising, even if you normally would, goes down somewhere in the neighborhood of 35% to 40%. That hunger pain you get at [3:00] in the afternoon, your likelihood of choosing junk food instead of something healthy at that [3:00], [3:30], whatever time people take goes up on the junk food side dramatically, the same 40%, 50% if you didn’t sleep well. It’s those kinds of things that the business owner will notice is, “I thought we were addressing medical claims. This has changed our culture. This has made people happier. This has improved their marriages. It’s across the board.”
You don’t have to have a membership and you don’t need to buy a set of weights. As you say that I’m struck by, I wonder how many business owners and people recognize that fact.
What’s missing frankly is people hear about coaching and they either think of their third-grade teacher who had them do push ups in PE or they think of the insurance companies’ coach and nothing against coaches that worked for insurance companies. They do a great job. It’s a different model. This is all about you. This is how can we make your life better? A funny example is we had a coaching certification out in New Jersey. We have mentor coaches come in and I was sitting in on one of the sessions where a new coach was coaching another coach and they’d go back and forth. They started off. This gentleman when the first coach said, “What would you like to talk about?” He said, “I’d like to talk about cats.” I was like, “Is he joking? What do you mean?”
Within about four minutes, it wasn’t all about cats. It was about his relationship with his wife, how he is a treasure to him and he wanted to be better. Here’s what he was going to do to improve. That’s what effective professional coaching does. The traditional or the old school coaching is, “Are you eating your fruits and veggies? Did you exercise? Yes. No. Okay, good.” That doesn’t do any good. That’s a waste of everybody’s time. Professional meaningful changes the equation because I start off saying I want to talk about cats and it turns out I want to improve my relationship with my wife because I love her. I want to make sure that she knows that. It’s those things that come out with coaching if it’s done well. That’s the exciting thing for me.
I think about the business owner. I like business owners. You are brought on board and you go through the entire population of employees with your coaching sessions. Are they one-on-one or one to many?
It’s one-on-one. It’s a personalized one-on-one setting. It’s telephonic. It’s done around their convenience. That keeps it from being too expensive too. It’s not cheap. This is not an X and O on a computer screen. This is a person. They’re scheduling time out for you who is highly credentialed. When you do it right, it doesn’t have to be that expensive either.
You’ve got that. I’m the employer. We’ve set up and all my employees have gone through one time through. Is it a one and done or is there follow-ons or how does that work?
It’s different models for different companies. Budget often is the driver for that. The most common model is quarterly. They have a pre-scheduled quarterly coaching session to keep the ball rolling. They reach out to them via email in between that. It can create a lot of emails back and forth if they got questions. We have companies that do a lot more than that. We have companies come in saying, “Brad, we love this concept. This makes so much sense, but we’ve already budgeted for next year. Is there any way we can get in at a smaller level? Those companies oftentimes will do two sessions a year and they’ll do one early in the year. If you’re coming out of New Year’s resolutions, you’ve got some ideas, maybe you’ve done some biometric screenings or something, and you have that conversation. You’re going follow up with that same coach, six months later.
That’s not optimal. It’s twice a year. We’re not changing the world twice a year. Compared to what most people have, most people don’t have that at all. They go through their life. They’re grinding it out. They’re trying to survive. Suddenly they have this conversation with the coach and they say, “I never thought about that.” The coach doesn’t take, “That’s a good idea,” and say, “I’m glad you’re going to work out three times a week.” They’ll say, “Monday, Wednesday and Friday. What are you currently doing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday?” “I have to drive my kid to school on Monday. I can’t do it on Monday.” They talked that all that stuff through. It goes from being this concept to being a reality.
When it becomes a reality, that’s when exciting things happen. That’s the problem with New Year’s resolutions. People have these great grandiose ideas while they’re on vacation between Christmas and New Year’s. They’ve got extra time. They’re sleeping in their loving time with their family, hopefully. Regardless, they’ve got this extra time, they forget that they’re working ten-hour days. They drive an hour each way. That’s twelve hours and they got to get their kids to soccer. The coach brings reality. They say, “Awesome, I love it.” That’s a goal. What does that look like? Not for Joe out here in the clouds, but for Bob in this next month with your current schedule.
Wellness Coaching: The coach brings reality. When a concept becomes a reality, that’s when exciting things happen.
It’s how to do it. You hear, “You should get in shape,” and you go, “Thank you for that. I should be taller.”
It’s not even a “you should” because one of the keys to coaching is the coach never tells the client what to do. I could tell you what to do. You could tell me what to do. We would both nod. We’d be friendly. We’d smile at each other. We wave and go, “Thank you very much. That’s great advice.” As soon as we leave the room, you go off doing what you are doing. I go off doing what I was doing. Coaching is never telling. Coaching is always drawing out, “Bob, what were you thinking you’d like to do?” “I’ve been wanting to work on this.” “What ways have you been thinking about doing that?” “I haven’t thought about it before.” It’s taking it from, “I know the right answer for your life.” I don’t. It doesn’t matter how many PhDs I have. I don’t know the right answer for your life, but you do. Oftentimes, you don’t have that conversation with somebody to draw that out and create that meaningful step that will frankly change your life for the better.
Do you think there’s a push back on coaching?
Yeah, initially because they don’t know what it is. Generically, if ever 1%, 5% of people are saying, “I don’t like this,” absolutely. We are not the perfect thing for everybody. I won’t pretend that but lion’s share 90%, 92% in our surveys of people who participate in the coaching say things like, “I had no idea what this was and now I won’t miss my coaching call for the world.” We were doing a live event with one of our clients. She was standing up front and sharing her story. She said, “Through everything that I had going on, all the stuff, there were two people that I knew were in my corner. One was my husband and one was my wellness coach.” That’s the relationship that you create.
You’ve been doing the performance athletics side of the house all your life. I can tell.
No, I’m a latecomer. I ran with it in college. Nobody knew I was there because I was so slow and I’d get hurt all the time. I enjoyed basketball, tennis but I started picking it up in my ’40s. I fell in love with endurance sports. Now I’ve done probably 60 triathlons, eleven IRONMAN’s, four times at the world championship in Hawaii. Jerry Schemmel and I did The Race Across America bike race. We won that a few years ago. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a nice combination with his business frankly because it allows me to have a different place to share this information than the typical.
Thinking about the concepts, practices and disciplines that you’ve learned doing endurance sports, how do you bring that into the business of coaching that you have? What difference did that make in your coaching efforts?
In my coaching efforts or more in a leadership role?
How about the leadership role?
I would say it’s similar. For example, when you think of training for a triathlon, you think of swim, bike, run. That’s a small part of it. If you’re not eating well, if you’re not sleeping, if you’re not recovering from those workouts, if you’re not fueling appropriately, it’s not going to matter. That type of concept as a CEO, as a business owner, Stephen Covey’s old sharpen the saw off. If you’re not sharpening the saw, you’re not going to be as effective as you could be. The data is clear. If you’re not doing those things, you will not be the potential person that you could be. It’s incredible. That’s where that comes in. As CEOs, as business owners, we have all these things that are on our plate that we’re supposed to be focused on. As a triathlete, you have these three things. I’m supposed to swim. I’m supposed to bike. I’m supposed to run. If you focus on those, you’ll do okay. If you realize all the complementary aspects to it, you could be awesome.
The part that always strikes me is professional athletes have at least one coach and many of them have multiple coaches. Yet in the civilian world, non-athletic world, it’s not common for an individual to have a coach. I think about trying to frame and figure out on your own, particularly if you’re not an avid reader, fairly difficult to take and get that done.
The belief drives the training, which drives the belief; it’s cyclical.
Even if you are an avid reader, taking that to what it means for you is stuff to do. The value of that coaching is they help you process. If you look at the research on resilience, it’s all about the high challenge and high support. If you have a low challenge, high support, you don’t build resilience. If you have a high challenge, no support or low support, you don’t build resilience. The key is you want that high challenge. All of the reading your blog have, is a high challenge. Do you have the support? Do you have that coach that can help you figure out the sleep, the eat, the scheduling and how do I keep moving? How do I keep from gaining that 40 pounds? All those kinds of things. We think they’re subtle. They are immense. They’re important. You’ll be such a more effective CEO, business owner, dad, wife, husband, mom, if you’re taking off these other things.
Are you seeing recognition in the coaching space by business owners where there are more business owners bringing your coaching into the workplace?
What we’re seeing is they’ve historically said, “We have that to our insurance company,” and they do. It’s a different model but they’re finding that when you bring in accredited, so they’ve gone through the National Board Certification Training Process. It is confidential. It’s not part of the employer. It’s not part of the insurance company. It’s you and the coach, that’s it. There’s nobody else in this room. It’s meaningful. We’re not telling you to do something. We’re not jamming something down your throat. We’re not telling you about kale, running shoes and all this stuff. We’re taking it to you. That’s where the power is. Once they see that, they say, “It’s a good deal.”
I wonder and you see it when we do podcasts, we talk about it before, where you’re listening to your guest. I wonder when the coach is listening to their client, how many times the client has been listened to without some preconceived agenda?
You nailed it. When we talk to somebody, they’re waiting for space to fill as soon as you stop talking. A coach is all about reflecting back what you said, what does that mean, what that leads to and why do you want that to be different. You’re right.
We’ve gone off the rail on the script anyways, which seems to be more of a recent occurrence. What are the influences that have led you down this path or books that you’ve read that are influential for you?
One I’ve read, we interviewed David Epstein on the podcast. He wrote a book titled Range. I don’t know if you remember David Epstein. He was the science writer for Sports Illustrated. He went on to...
