How to build trust and rapport with your health coaching clients

How to build trust and rapport with your health coaching clients

Imagine walking into the waiting room where you meet a new healthcare professional for the first time.

You are a little afraid of the appointment. Will you feel judged and guilty? Do you feel comfortable giving out personal information? Or will you leave with a feeling of relief and empowerment?

While you wait, you begin to think about two different scenarios as soon as you enter the health specialist's office. In the first scenario, the healthcare professional barely makes eye contact with you, seems rushed, and fires off seemingly a hundred questions in a row without giving you much of a chance to explain. They make judgmental faces when you respond or give a few “hmmms…” and eye rolls. Once the interview is over, they proceed to tell you how problematic your decisions and behaviors are, and then give you an endless list of instructions and regulations.

You go home feeling worse than when you went in, vulnerable, judged, guilty, and overwhelmed by a long list of tasks.

Now imagine a second scenario. You walk into the health specialist's office and are greeted with a smile and a genuine "How are you?" welcomed. You then continue to ask what brings you to the appointment. They ask if you feel comfortable answering some questions about your current and past health and well-being. They also let you know that if there's something you'd rather not address, you don't have to respond. You acknowledge your answers and how you may be feeling.

Refreshingly, it feels like they are making a real effort to get to know you. Once the question and answer portion is complete, the health professional asks permission to share what they think is going on and how to proceed. They pause periodically to see if you have any questions or need clarification. They also ask if you need additional support between appointments.

After this second scenario takes place, you will feel relieved, empowered, and more in control of your health.

There are numerous differences between healthcare professionals' approaches in each of these scenarios. One way to summarize the differences is to look at the health professional's interest in building a genuine relationship with you.

What exactly is rapport? While there is no definition of rapport In healthcare, relationship building is a process by which a healthcare provider, such as B. a health coach or doctor, maintains an environment in whicha relationship of trustopen communication and empathy is guaranteed.

This article discusses the benefits of building rapport, shares some of the characteristics of building rapport effectively, and discusses various ways you can build rapport with your customers.

The benefits of building a relationship with your coaching clients

Building a relationship with your coaching clients benefits you and your professional skills, your clients' results, and even your business.

Advantages for the customer

If the health coach is interested in building a relationship, the client can:

Feel empowered Trust their health coach Feel like their opinions and desires are important Feel like they play an active role in their health (known as self-efficacy) Have improved adherence to commitments Feel more likely to be motivated Have a safe space in which individual experiences can be shared, including past experiencesStrokes of fate and trauma in childhoodare recognized and taken into account throughout the entire support process

Ultimately, clients with whom health coaches and other health professionals have built relationships improved health outcomes.

Benefits for the health coach

Rapport is as beneficial to the health coach as it is to the client. Building rapport helps health coaches do their jobs better.

Some of the benefits of building a relationship with the health coach include:

Obtain detailed information about a person's health and wellness history, including items often overlooked on intake forms and questionnaires. Gaining insight into how a client really feels about a health coach's advice and suggestions. Receiving real feedback about the coaching process Customer realities Opportunities to improve people skills, including building empathy. Improved client retention rates, which is good for the coach, the client's bottom line, and the coach's business.

How to build a relationship with your coaching clients

There are several proposed models to build relationships in healthcare.

In general, most models suggest that in order to build a relationship, the health professional must take the first steps to create an environment in which the client feels valued, heard, cared for, and understood. One of the key unifying elements of the different models is the importance of demonstrating and maintaining genuine empathy during consultations.

If the client or patient perceives that the healthcare professional respects them as an individual and has a genuine interest in their well-being, the relationship will continue to develop through a dialogue between the healthcare professional and the client.

Below is a four-step framework for health coaches to build relationships with clients. It is based on the empathy framework for establishing rapport in healthcare consultations developed by Norfolk, Birdi and Walsh in 2007 but adapted to the coaching environment.

Note that these are not concrete steps, but phases that are essential to building empathy and rapport. The phases may overlap and it may be necessary to return to an earlier phase if something changes in the coaching-client relationship.

Commit to understanding the customer by engaging with their individual experience

To build a relationship, the health coach must begin with a desire to understand a client's individual perspectives and experiences. This is sometimes called empathic motivation.

Empathic motivation requires a sense of humility in knowing that while you are knowledgeable, you do not know what your customer is experiencing or how they are experiencing it. It also requires a sense of curiosity that shows in your questions and listening skills.

Some of the communication qualities that help strengthen this first phase are warmth, openness, and caring for your customer, which are expressed through your tone of voice, body language, eye contact, and the way you ask questions.

Note that this first element is primarily the responsibility of the health coach. If your customer resists, you are responsible Roll with resistance instead of challenging it.

Employing the skills necessary to demonstrate the willingness and ability to empathize

Norfolk and his research team make a clear distinction between a health professional's desire and their ability to understand their client. As a coach, you may feel motivated to understand and build empathy with your client, but when they share their experience and logic, you find it difficult to fully understand why they feel, act, or think a certain way.

This requires specific communication skills that encourage the client to disclose information and feelings. It involves verbal skills such as the appropriate use of open-ended questions such as those that might be used inmotivational interviewing, and non-verbal skills such as tone and warmth of voice, posture, silence where appropriate, smiling and nodding. While these skills often develop in one during the teenage yearsappropriate development environmentThese skills can also be specifically developed later in life.

Moving from a desire to understand to an ability to understand requires the development of multiple empathic skills. These include:

Clues about what your customer is thinking through what they say and their body language. For example, if your client hesitates after you ask him if he thinks it's realistic to eat breakfast soon after waking up, you can conclude that he thinks it's not possible but is unsure whether he should say so. Picking up on clues about how your customer is feeling. This includes listening to what they say and their body language. For example, if your client crosses their legs and arms and looks down, they may feel uncomfortable talking about a topic you've brought up. Building a non-judgmental perception of your thoughts and feelings. Processing what your client is thinking and feeling and understanding them and how they might think, feel, or act in a certain way reflects the extent to which the coach has empathy for the client.

During this process, the client determines whether or not they can trust the coach and feel a positive connection with them, which clears the way for a constructive relationship building process.

Create a space for dialogue at eye level with your customer

In healthcare, the healthcare professional is generally expected to be the “teacher” and the client or patient is expected to behave like the “student.” This traditional model leaves no room for building empathy, much less rapport. Instead, it assumes that the health professional knows everything and that the client just needs to do exactly what they are told to feel better.

From what you have read so far, the traditional model of healthcare described is not an effective way to build a relationship and as a result the benefits of relationship building for both the client and the coach are completely missed.

Asking questions, allowing and encouraging the client to tell their story, and listening actively and nonjudgmentally creates a space to build an empathetic understanding of the client's perspective.

Empathic understanding refers to the extent to which the coach is able to accurately identify the client's perspective. This might include reframing the client's statements and asking whether you have adequately captured their feelings, logic, or experiences. Throughout the coaching process, empathic understanding can be expressed in a variety of ways, including:

Rewording the customer's statements to ensure understanding
Mirroring the customer's language when you describe your experiences or offer advice or explanations. Verbalizing connections through observation and asking if your interpretation was correct. Modifying or personalizing the coaching process to meet individual needs and reinforce strengths

Main takeaways

Building a relationship is generally considered the first step in an effective coaching process. It ensures a strong foundation on which the coaching process can be built.

While relationship building occurs primarily in the early stages of the coaching process, remember that your relationship will strengthen or diminish with each interaction. Empathic motivation or your openness, warmth and professional commitment throughout all sessions helps to reinforce this Sense of empathic motivation and empathetic skills, such as active listening and your ability to understand their perspective, can be used throughout your interaction with your customer.

Building relationships provides benefits to both the coaching client and the health coach. Whether you think you currently have the skills needed to build a relationship or not, you can find out more about it and develop empathic skills at any stage of your life or career.

References

https://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/Fulltext/2011/10000/Rapport_and_Relationships_in_Clinical_Interactions.2.aspx
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738399121004018
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S174438810500071X
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10410236.2019.1567446
https://www.cairn.info/revue-management-et-avenir-2012-5-page-185.htm
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429437243-4/mirror-patient-language-build-rapport-jodi-zik
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4265&context=etd
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/nrec.2004.6.10.16017?journalCode=nrec
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/PSS0885-3134260206
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889490616300072
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/fbileb70&div=56&id=&page=
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2007.02789.x
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260999721_A_framework_for_finding_common_ground_with_substitute_decision-makers_to_achieve_a_patient%27s_good_death/figures?lo=1

... more about that in the next part.
Inspired by Afpafitness