HW450 Unit 9 Coaching Plateau Seminar Reflection Example

The Part of Her Life Coaching Cannot Reach: A Unit 9 Seminar Reflection on a Plateau That Was Not the Client's Fault

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HW450: Applied Health Coaching

Unit 9 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar, classmates and client are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Plateau

By week twelve, Teresa had cut her estimated sodium by about a third, nearly doubled her steps and halved her wine nights, and the averages of her home blood pressure readings had come down steadily. Her stress rating, though, had moved only from 8 to 7, and her sleep was unchanged: six and a half hours broken by her mother waking at night.

I came to the seminar frustrated. I had tried mindfulness suggestions, a wind-down routine and a talk about sleep hygiene, and none had worked. I described the situation as a plateau and asked my classmates what strategy I had missed.

What the Seminar Asked

The facilitator turned the question around: who owns this plateau? A classmate, Yolanda, who coaches caregivers through a hospice program, answered first. "Your client isn't stuck," she said. "Her mother's disease is progressing. You're measuring her against a situation that keeps getting harder."

I had not seen it that way. I had treated the flat sleep and stress ratings as a failure of my strategies, when they reflected a load that coaching could not lift. Teresa's mother wakes because of her illness, and Teresa gets up because she loves her mother.

I was looking for a better strategy when what Teresa needed was for someone to say that her tiredness was not a goal she had failed.

What the Research Added

After the seminar I read about caregiving and health. Schulz and Beach (1999) followed older adults over four years and found that the ones who cared for an ill spouse and felt strained by it died at a higher rate than noncaregivers, whereas caregivers without strain showed no such excess. That finding changed my sense of the stakes. Teresa's stress is not a minor side effect of her situation; it is itself a health risk, and reducing strain matters as much as reducing sodium.

The coaching literature also says something about where coaching works. A compendium of health and wellness coaching studies shows coaching improving many behaviors and outcomes across conditions (Sforzo et al., 2018), but almost always behaviors the client can change. Caregiver strain depends partly on resources outside the client's control: respite, help from family and services for the person being cared for.

How the Final Sessions Changed

In session seven, I told Teresa directly that her sleep and stress ratings reflected her mother's illness, not a lack of effort, and that the progress she had made in other areas had happened despite that load. She cried, then said no one had said that to her before.

We changed the focus. Instead of more sleep strategies, we worked on getting help. She followed up with the adult day program weekly until a place opened in week 15, two days a week. She asked her husband to take one night of her mother's care on weekends so she could sleep through. She joined the caregiver support group I had mentioned and later told me she had never before sat with people who "get it." Using reflective listening rather than problem solving, as Miller and Rollnick (2013) describe, I let her lead those conversations.

What I Would Tell Another Coach

If another coach described this situation to me, I would ask three things. Is the stalled measure one the client can change on her own? Has anyone told her that her effort counts even when the number does not move? And what help exists that she has not been offered yet? For Teresa, the answers were no, nobody and three kinds of help, and finding those answers took one seminar and one honest conversation.

What I Learned About Plateaus

A plateau can mean the strategy is wrong, the goal is wrong or the situation is beyond what coaching can change. I had assumed the first. The seminar taught me to ask which one I am seeing before trying harder. For caregivers, the honest answer is often the third, and the coach's job then is to help the client find support and to name her effort, not to add another strategy.

Closing Thought

I came to the seminar asking what I had missed. I left understanding that I had missed the size of what Teresa was carrying. Her blood pressure improved because she changed what she could. Her tiredness did not, because some of what she carries is not hers to change, and saying so was the most useful coaching I did in those twelve weeks.

References

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Schulz, R., & Beach, S. R. (1999). Caregiving as a risk factor for mortality: The Caregiver Health Effects Study. JAMA, 282(23), 2215-2219. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.282.23.2215

Sforzo, G. A., Kaye, M. P., Todorova, I., Harenberg, S., Costello, K., Cobus-Kuo, L., Faber, A., Frates, E., & Moore, M. (2018). Compendium of the health and wellness coaching literature. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 12(6), 436-447. https://doi.org/10.1177/1559827617708562