NS420 Unit 10 Nutrition Counseling Portfolio Example

I Counsel Best When I Ask Before I Offer: A Unit 10 Nutritional Counseling Portfolio Organized Around One Claim

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

NS420: Nutritional Counseling

Unit 10 Counseling Portfolio

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The clients, sessions and counts are composite; the motivational interviewing text, the coding manual, the stages of change article, the goal-setting review and the nutrition care process update cited are real.

The Claim

My central claim is that I counsel best when I ask before I offer. When I explore what a habit does for a client and ask permission before sharing ideas, clients name their own changes and keep them. When I offer advice first, they agree politely and change nothing. Each artifact below supports, complicates or tests that claim. The portfolio closes with the area I still need to work on, because the same evidence that supports the claim also shows where I fall short of it.

Artifact 1: The Opening Discussion

My Unit 1 post compared two versions of one session with Ray, a bus operator who drank four sodas a shift. In the version where the counselor taught him sugar grams, he took the handout and left. In the version where she asked what the soda did for him, he named three jobs it did, caffeine, a break and a reward, and chose to bring seltzer for his layovers. I wrote that post before I had counseled anyone. It states my claim as a hypothesis. The rest of the portfolio tests it with my own practice.

Artifact 2: The Intake Script, Rebuilt

My Unit 2 intake script for Marco, a line cook working afternoons to midnight, received feedback that two questions still steered him. I have rebuilt the script's middle section here to show the change.

Original question: "Do you get any fruits or vegetables during your shift?" Rebuilt question: "Tell me about the food that's around you during a shift." The original told Marco what I wanted to hear about. The rebuilt version lets him describe the kitchen as he sees it, which might be family meal before service, tasting from the line or nothing at all.

Original question: "How many sodas do you usually have?" Rebuilt question: "What do you drink to get through a shift?" The original assumed soda and invited a low count. The rebuilt question is open and covers water, energy drinks and coffee too.

Rebuilding the intake script showed me that asking before offering starts with the wording of the questions, since a question that hints at the answer is a piece of advice in disguise.

The rebuilt script also moves the importance ruler earlier, so Marco says what he cares about before I ask about specific foods. These changes fit the nutrition care process's call for client-centered assessment, where what the client values shapes the data collected (Swan et al., 2017).

Artifact 3: The Session Transcript

My Unit 3 transcript with Denise, a home health aide eating drive-through lunches in her car, supports the claim most directly. The turning point came when I reflected that lunch was the only part of her day that belonged to her. After that, I asked permission before sharing what others in cars all day had tried, and Denise chose unsweetened tea from a short list. My tally showed she spoke about 69 percent of the words. She kept the tea change through the next session.

Artifact 4: The Readiness Assessment

My Unit 4 readiness assessment for Priya, a teller who recently moved into her own apartment, complicates the claim in a useful way. Asking about each of her three habits separately showed that she was in a different stage of change for each, as the stages model predicts (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983). If I had offered breakfast advice first, as nutrition textbooks often suggest, I would have pushed on the habit she was least ready to change. Asking first did more than produce a better conversation. It changed which habit we worked on.

Artifact 5: The Seminar Reflection

My Unit 5 reflection is the evidence against me. In a live role-play, I offered three suggestions to a classmate playing a father who snacked after bedtime, and he answered each with "yes, but." The instructor paused us. In the replay, I asked what he liked about his evening, and he suggested smaller snack packs himself. The ideas were almost the same as mine. What changed was who said them. This artifact shows that I know the principle and can still break it under pressure.

Artifact 6: The Goal-Setting Worksheet

My Unit 6 worksheet for Gary, a band director eating vending-machine crackers in marching season, kept his sentence at the top and narrowed it into three dated goals. Goals that are specific and challenging tend to produce better performance than vague intentions (Locke & Latham, 2002). Gary set all three goals himself. I asked his confidence for each and adjusted the lowest one before the week began.

Artifact 7: The Self-Evaluation

My Unit 9 self-evaluation coded three recorded sessions with the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity code (Moyers et al., 2016). My reflection-to-question ratio rose across the term, and complex reflections increased. But persuasion without permission fell and then rose again in my last recording, when I felt short of time.

Where the Claim Falls Short

The artifacts support my claim about what works, but they also show that I do not always do it. Two of seven artifacts, the seminar role-play and my final recording, show me offering before asking when I feel pressure, either from an audience or from the clock. Miller and Rollnick (2023) describe the righting reflex as natural for anyone who wants to help. I do want to help, and that is exactly when the reflex returns.

Plan for Continued Growth

My plan targets the specific situations that bring back the reflex. In timed sessions, I will set a timer at three-quarters of the session and use the remaining time for a summary and an open question rather than a plan I supply. In observed sessions, I will remind myself before starting that the client's words matter more than my performance. I will ask a classmate to code one session each month next term, so my counts are checked by someone else.

Closing

Over this term, I moved from believing that asking before offering works to seeing it work in my own sessions, and to seeing where I still fail at it. The rebuilt intake script shows what feedback changed. The coded recordings show what remains. A portfolio that claimed I had mastered the approach would be easier to write, but the evidence would not support it, and the honest version is more useful to me as I start working with real clients next term.

References

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change and grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Moyers, T. B., Rowell, L. N., Manuel, J. K., Ernst, D., & Houck, J. M. (2016). The Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity Code (MITI 4): Rationale, preliminary reliability and validity. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 65, 36-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsat.2016.01.001

Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(3), 390-395. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.51.3.390

Swan, W. I., Vivanti, A., Hakel-Smith, N. A., Hotson, B., Orrevall, Y., Trostler, N., Beck Howarter, K., & Papoutsakis, C. (2017). Nutrition care process and model update: Toward realizing people-centered care and outcomes management. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 117(12), 2003-2014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2017.07.015