Using design thinking to create healthy habits that stick

Using design thinking to create healthy habits that stick

As health and wellness coaches, you have plenty of experience talking to your clients about their current health habits and identifying which ones can be improved.

The challenge for health and wellness coaches and clients is to identify which habits can be improved and how to achieve long-term sustainable change.

Before embarking on a healthy lifestyle journey with a client, you must ask yourself whether the goal is to achieve a health behavior change or a mindset change. To decide, you should know the difference between the two and understand how they are closely related in effective health strategies.

Here we provide an overview of health behavior and mindset changes and introduce you to design thinking as one of many strategies you can use to help your clients adopt long-term health-related habits and lifestyle changes.

Behavior Change and Mindset Change: What's the Difference?

Mindsets

A Mindset is a set of beliefs and assumptions about how malleable certain attributes are in the world around you. From a psychological perspective, there are two types of mindsets: fixed mindsets and growth mindsets.

People with fixed attitudes have beliefs that are fixed and unchanging. A client with a fixed mindset is unwilling or unable to change their perspective on their condition and challenges. A coach with a fixed mindset might believe that clients either have the natural ability to change their behavior or they don't.

If we look at the transtheoretical model of health behavior change below, a client with a fixed mindset may not be able to progress past the contemplation stage. They recognize the need to change, but face barriers to change. On the other hand, a coach with a fixed mindset may assume that a client does not have the willingness or ability to move beyond the contemplation phase and therefore does not provide useful tools to help them migrate into the preparation phase or beyond.

On the other hand, people with growth philosophies have beliefs that can change with more information, critical thinking, and commitment. Clients and patients must adopt growth philosophies to envision the possibility of change in their lives and improve their subjective well-being. Coaches must also have a growth mindset, viewing their clients as experts in their personal experiences and being open to changes in methods and techniques as they arm themselves with new information.

It is possible to develop a growth mindset for health either in yourself or in your client. Some ways to do thisinclude:

Recognizing and embracing imperfections Viewing challenges as opportunities Finding new and different ways to achieve the same goal Stay informed about the latest research and guidelines on health conditions and chronic disease prevention. Evaluating the process through the result Celebrating growth with others Rewarding instead of highlighting characteristics Growth Overspeed Recognizing improvements even when goals are not achieved Putting effort before talent Learning from mistakes Setting new goals for each goal achieved

The design thinking approach we describe below incorporates many of the principles mentioned above. So, as you embrace health behavior change, you are simultaneously developing a growth mindset.

Health behavior

To understand health behavior change, you must understand what constitutes a health behavior.

Experts Define health behaviors as actions or activities that individuals undertake to maintain or improve their health, prevent health problems, slow the progression or regression of disease, or achieve what they perceive as positive body image.

Health behaviors are not entirely individual decisions. They are influenced by social determinants such as ideologies, discrimination, inequality and freedom of choice. Environmental factors such as access to safe sidewalks and a variety of inexpensive foods; and psychological determinants such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders and addictions.

Remember that health professionals should not separate health behaviors from health outcomes. When a person seeks health behavior change, either in themselves, in a patient, or in a person they are training, they aim to change or replace the current behavior with that which is considered to provide better health outcomes.

Some health consequences may be easily measurable, such as weight gain or weight loss and triglyceride or cholesterol levels. Other outcomes, such as motivation and well-being, may be more difficult to measure but are equally important.

The connection between health behavior and mindset

The following diagram summarizes the relationship between mindset, health behavior, health determinants, and health outcomes.

AFPA published an article on the topicBehavior change scienceWe encourage you to read this information to gain a better understanding of health behavior and the theories behind long-term health behavior change.

Looking in the Mirror: Coach Mindset

Healthcare professionals often think about their clients' mindsets and how these influence their clients' healthcare journeys. However, as a coach, your mindset is of utmost importance before thinking about the potential impact you can have on your clients. How your customers view their health and well-being is largely influenced by your mindset and understanding of everything from health behavior implications to “ideal” behaviors.

To illustrate the influence a trainer's mindset can have on the mindset of their clients and therefore on client behavior, let's look at some theoretical examples.

Example 1: The Bootstrap Health Coach

A certified health and nutrition coach has been working with clients for over ten years. She developed her practice based on the belief that each individual is solely responsible for their health, and external factors are simply “excuses” for not being able to follow their meal and exercise plans.

In this case, the trainer's mindset prevents him from seeing the other factors that influence health behavior and are not under his clients' control. Maybe a customer lives in a food desert and has limited access to fresh food, or her income cannot cover the cost of the food on the menu she left them, or a lifetime of pressure from her family to feed herself Trauma response to food restrictions.

Example 2: The fitness coach “Skinny Is Healthy”

A fitness trainer was inspired to become certified in fitness coaching after loving the physiques of professional bodybuilders. He always saw her as the “ideal” body type and equated her low body fat with health.

After getting his certification, he opened a fitness coaching business for people who want to get fit in the gym. His methods are based on the belief that a person must have a low body fat percentage in order to be healthy or achieve an “ideal” physique.

While this coach's mindset can help bodybuilding athletes achieve competitive body composition standards, he believes that body composition is the best way to measure health status. This assumption could affect its ability to identify health problems in people with high muscle and low body fat because it assumes their body composition corresponds to health. However, in reality, people with low-fat, high-muscle body compositions can also battle chronic illness, eating disorders, and nutrient imbalances.

Additionally, this attitude negatively impacts the trainer's relationship with clients whose body types have higher body fat percentages, even if it does not affect their strength, health, or ability to perform challenging exercises. This mindset can also be incredibly harmful for individuals who have a positive body image, regardless of their body composition, and who want to exercise for health reasons without achieving a specific body type.

Over time, the coach's mindset, which influences what the coach says and how he treats his clients, could negatively impact his clients' mental health.

The mindsets of trainers influence the mindsets of clients

One important thing to remember is that trainers are viewed as experts and teachers by their clients. They believe that their trainers know how to assess a person's health status and that they are experts in helping their clients achieve realistic lifestyle changes.

In other words, the mindset of trainers will impact the mindset of their clients. The position of a coach is ultimately one of power but also responsibility.

Therefore, trainers need to educate themselves and become more aware of the complex factors that influence health behavior, including environmental and social aspects.

An Innovative Solution to Achieving Behavior Change: A Design Mindset in Health Coaching

Health behavior theories are changing, such as the Health Belief Model and the Transtheoretical Modeldescribed in detail hereare effective methods for understanding what factors can influence a person's actions, affecting their health and well-being in the short and long term. They are also helpful in understanding where a person may be on the continuum of adopting healthy habits.

However, health behavior change theories offer limited concrete tools to help coaches work with clients to take actions that support their long-term health while being sensitive to differences in experience, such as: B. in relation to race, culture, trauma, discrimination and socioeconomic status, gender and others.

One approach to promoting healthy behavior is to apply a concept called “design thinking” to health coaching. Note that this is only one approach to practically achieving health behavior change in health settings.

From theory to action with design thinking

Several research groups, including one in the USA and another in Brazil have proposed using design thinking in healthcare to improve healthcare quality, patient outcomes and overall Patient experience.

Design thinking is an approach that is applied to many fields, from engineering to entrepreneurship to Healthcare, which prioritizes a deep sense of empathy for the wants, needs and challenges of end users. This approach allows healthcare providers such as health coaches to fully understand a problem to develop a comprehensive and effective solution that meets a client's needs.

With the growing interest in Application of design thinking in healthcare Health authorities decided to evaluate the potential of design thinking in healthcare.

The CDC released a systematic review of studies on the application of design thinking in healthcare. The study found that design thinking can be used in different environments and circumstances. Compared to traditional interventions, the developed healthcare solutions generally demonstrated better usability, effectiveness and patient satisfaction than traditional approaches.

Effectively applied design thinking is therefore likely to be a useful approach to achieving health behavior change in a health coaching environment.

Here we summarize the principles of design thinking, based on four pillars that directly influence a health coach's mindset when working with clients: empathy, integrative communication, collaboration and experimentation. Note that the number and distribution of pillars may vary slightly between thinkers as you delve deeper into design thinking.

empathy

Empathy, in its simplest sense, involves the human ability to understand another person Feelings and perspectives and why they can perform certain actions. The first step in design thinking in healthcare, including health coaching, is to put people first to truly understand why a person thinks, makes decisions, and takes actions that impact their health.

Effective interview techniques are essential to taking the first steps toward developing empathy. Still, healthcare professionals need to keep lines of communication open and check in with patients and clients regularly throughout the intervention process.

Including communication

Once you have listened to your customer and identified issues that you perceive as barriers to their health and well-being, it is important to share these insights using visual communication tools and be open to changing these perceptions.

Let's take a theoretical...

... more about that in the next part.
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