Coaching Clients When Stress Tanks Self-Control | EP 104

Your client checks in and says it was a stressful week, so they couldn't stay on track. Now what?

Dr. Kasey Jo Orvidas breaks down the neuroscience behind why stress and self-control are literally competing for the same mental resources, and what that means for how you coach through it. This isn't a stress management episode. It's a coaching skills episode.
 

She covers:

• Why stress and self-control are biologically at odds (not just emotionally)
• The "battery" analogy she uses with HMCC students to help clients audit their mental capacity
• The three most common coach responses to stress excuses and why two of them backfire
• How to reframe low-consistency weeks as a design problem, not a character flaw
• The language shifts that accidentally reinforce a fixed mindset about self-control
  
  

If you've ever validated a client's stressful week and immediately wondered if you just let them off the hook, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

0:00

when a client does say, "I was just too stressed to be able to stick to things this week," that's not an excuse. That is data, Hello my friends, and welcome back to not another Mindset show. I'm your host, Dr. Casey Joe. My goal with this podcast is to take the science of mindset and behavior change and distill it down into actionable takeaways for you. Together we're gonna unpack research around motivations, self-sabotage, willpower, and so much more, and we're going to take all of that and translate it into strategies you can immediately apply to your health. Fitness, relationships, business, marketing clients, all of the things. But just to be clear, it's not all serious and sciencey around here. We're gonna have a ton of fun too, and I'm so excited to share all of this with you. All right, let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hello, hello, and welcome back to Not Another Mindset Show. Today, I've got an episode about self-control. This is not a new topic for this show, or really ever. It'll never, it'll never go away when we're talking about coaching clients, especially in the health and fitness space. But the scenario I want to talk about today is specifically when stress impacts your clients to the point that that gets in the way of them seeing progress. It gets in the way of them being consistent. It affects their motivation. If you have a client who checks in and says, "It was a really stressful week and I just couldn't stay on track." I mean, I'm gonna go ahead and make a pretty educated guess that you have heard a client say something like that before. And then you get faced with a choice. Do you just validate that? Like, yeah, stress happens. No big deal. Let's just move on. Or do you actually push back on it? And it kinda feels like those are the two options, right? And most coaches do one of two things in these scenarios. They either dismiss it in a way and just kind of move right into fix it mode. Like, okay, that happened. How do we make sure it doesn't happen again? Or they validate it so hard that They accidentally kind of let their clients off the hook, that that's sort of the, uh, brush it under the rug tactic, and it's a new week, let's just start fresh. But today, I want to give you a third option, and something that is, honestly, in my humble opinion, far more effective. So one thing I do want you to know is that this is not going to be a stress management episode and just talking about different tactics to help your clients stress less. But instead, this is really like a coaching skills episode. So we're going to cover what's actually kind of happening in the brain when we're looking at stress and self-control together with our clients. We're going to talk about why this actually comes up, and then of course, get into some practical coaching tools that you could literally turn around and use in your check ins right now. So stress and self-control. They aren't just, like, emotionally at odds. And when I say emotionally at odds, like, I think, I think you can feel what I mean, right? Someone who is stressed out, they're experiencing stress, it's like the idea of self-control, like having control over a situation during a time where you maybe feel like you don't have a lot of control, that does feel like there's, there's some friction between those two things, right? But biologically, they're also competing. They're competing for the same mental resources, stress and self-control are. And once you understand that, literally an entire world opens up for you in the coaching space. And instead of responding to a client who says, "I was stressed, and that's why I couldn't stay on track this week," you now will have a very different understanding and approach it very differently. And I say this with full confidence because this is exactly what happens with my students inside the Health Mindset Coaching Certification. And obviously, I can't give you all of the things that you would get in the certification in this episode, but I am gonna give you a little bit. So starting with a little bit of neuroscience behind this, because we need to understand how the human brain works if we want to help our very human clients work through some of this stuff. And I like to sort of see it as it's one brain, but two minds in a way. And one is the self-control mind. This is really kind of the main area being your prefrontal cortex, which is that big lobe right behind your forehead. And this is where deliberate decision-making happens, forward thinking. It's very logical. And the second mind is your stress mind. And this is more so in like mid-brain regions. The amygdala is very much involved here. Reactive, impulsive, immediate relief-seeking. So you can see already deliberate decision-making versus like immediate relief-seeking, even if we just pulled out those two concepts They're gonna clash, right? So when stress activates, that's when the prefrontal cortex, that self-control area, can go a little bit offline because they're all competing for the same amount of resources in your brain. There's only so much to go around. And when we think about the prefrontal cortex, again, it's, yes, deliberate decision-making, planning. It's also responsible for long-term decision-making, and also kinda where the growth mindset lives. And I'm using words like kinda, sort of, it's like. I'm not a neuroscientist, okay? But, like, generally, we know that these are the regions responsible for these things. Obviously, your brain is working in tandem, and all of the different regions are doing something. Lots of connections going on up there. But for all intents and purposes, that's how we can kind of like split it up. And you likely are familiar, too, with the sympathetic response and the parasympathetic response. We're kind of talking about the same thing, and that framing fits here really well, because stress activates that fight or flight tendencies, and self-control, rather, requires the more parasympathetic pause, plan, rest and digest. And yeah, those systems just don't run super well simultaneously. So I actually taught an analogy. I have some bullet point notes here that I wanted to make sure I brought up for you guys. I taught this analogy literally on, oh, this was two weeks ago, inside the Health Mindset Coaching Certification for our module five call, and I used a battery and was like, "Man, this is good. I wanna bring this to, to the podcast." So you wanna think of your clients' mental resources as a battery, that they have 100% battery, and then somehow, somewhere, if we're talking from a stress perspective, the battery's getting lower and lower and lower. But it may depend on what's going on in their lives. If they have multiple things that are stressing them out, that doesn't mean that each multiple thing has 30% of the battery that it's taking exactly, right? Like, one thing may be responsible for draining 90% of the battery. So if we think about that, every stressor, work, relationships, sleep deprivation, decision-making throughout the day, all of that is impacting that, those battery levels, right? So self-control itself is a pretty expensive function that can take from the mental resources of that battery. So if the battery is already depleted- It's not It's not that your client doesn't want to follow through. It's not that they're making excuses. It's that they quite literally may only have 12% of their battery to actually be using towards these things, which is just tough luck, right? So we'll come back to this battery analogy and how you can actually, like, use it with your clients in more of, like, a, a coaching tool format. So first, I need to reference some of the self-control research that is out there, because the original findings described how self-control gets tired, it gets depleted, like a muscle would. So the more you use it, the more tired it gets, and the harder it becomes to exert self-control. However, more recent research suggests that this depletion effect is heavily moderated by your beliefs about it. So the biology is real. Those mental resources, you only have so much of them. You can't just all of a sudden have 100% battery after it's been, been worked and used all day. But the belief matters just as much. So although that muscle can get tired, the level of tired, the level of your inability to exert self-control even after you've exerted a lot of your battery's worth of self-control, that is ultimately up to you and your beliefs. Do you believe that your battery is getting depleted, or do you see yourself as, like, "I can continue to work through this, say no to things, say yes to the other thing, go to the gym even when I'm tired"? If you believe that you can do that, then you're not as impacted, which obviously I, I love to hear this research 'cause it really just means how much, how much mindset really matters. So coming back to what this means for you as a coach, when a client does say, "I was just too stressed to be able to stick to things this week," that's not an excuse. That is data, and that is an important reframe for you to have as the coach Your job is to sift through the data with anything, with everything in your coaching, this is your job, and try to better understand what this means for your client and where it was coming from, and help them become more aware. And with more awareness on their end, you get more awareness, and then you can actually coach them more effectively. So whether your client is using stress as an excuse to avoid taking action or following through, that doesn't actually make a difference, and it doesn't change the first move that you should take as a coach if your client is coming to you and saying, "I was stressed this last week because of X, Y, and Z, and that's why I couldn't follow through with everything." Your first move should always be to validate their experience and then get curious about that experience, not just validate it and let it go, brush it under the rug, dismiss it, or immediately go into fix it mode And this is an important distinction because validating that stress makes self-control harder is not the same as making it seem like it's this permanent, unchangeable issue that you just have to kinda like suck it up and deal with. So you're naming the reality that, yes, stress is going to make this more difficult. We just talked about the neuroscience behind that. And signaling that stress is something that is actually workable. It's something that doesn't necessarily need to mean inevitable failure, and just because this makes it harder means you're never gonna be able to follow through when you're stressed out. But we want to actually get curious and dive into what this means for our clients. So another quick research note here. This is something we do spend a lot of time on in HMCC, is Alia Crum's work around mindset and stress, because it's easy to default to language that may be pushing your clients into a mindset about their stress. And with Alia Crum's work, her findings indicate that how people perceive stress, and she sees it as, like, enhancing or debilitating, so those are, like, the two options. Sort of like growth being enhancing, debilitating be more like a fixed mindset lens. And her research shows how that belief, your mindset about stress, actually affects your physiological responses. So with that, what do we do with this? It's important that you pay attention to the language that you are using with your clients, because that will shape your client's mindset, and therefore shape the outcomes that actually come from everything So again, it's easy to default to language that might be doing more harm than good, and you may not even realize that you're doing it. It's not your fault, especially if you were never taught this stuff, which most health and fitness professionals are not, and that is why I am here speaking to you right now. So I'm gonna give you some examples that I wrote down here that will probably resonate you because I've literally heard almost exact verbatim versions of these responses from coaches about their clients. And then I'm gonna share an example of how that response itself can kind of be reworked to be more productive from a stress and self-control and mindset perspective. Okay. First one here is sort of like the dismissive fix it mode, and I would say that this one is probably, probably the most common of the ones that I'm going to share. So you might say something like,"Okay, so it was a tough week, but you knew this was the plan, so what can we do differently next week to make sure that the plan actually happens?" This, this one just skips past the validation part entirely. It implies that the client just didn't try hard enough, and they were aware of what they were supposed to do, and they just didn't get it done. And instead of spending time there, it's immediately trying to jump to fix-it mode and strategy. But if the client's depleted brain is not prepared to add more to that, use more energy, then they may not even be ready to engage with that yet. So it's gonna kinda fall on deaf ears because battery, battery level is low. So instead, we could say something like, " That sounds like it was a really full week for you. Before we talk about next steps, I want to understand what was actually pulling on you the most, because that's going to help us build a better plan." So this one, we are validating first. It frames the curiosity around what's going on with the stress, with what happened, as something that's actually useful that we can then use to develop a better plan, not just being nice, like,"Oh, I'm so sorry that this such a hard week for you," but actually talking about what, what can we get out of this? And that signals that we'll get into some strategy, but this is kinda like the first step. And it honestly just will allow your clients to feel like you actually care about what's going on with them instead of just trying to be like, "How do we fix you since this was bad?" You know? Okay, the next one. This one is a little bit more subtle and harder to catch, and what it does is really just reinforce a fixed mindset. So saying something like, "I totally get it. Some people just really struggle with consistency when life gets busy. Let's figure out what works for you instead." This sounds empathetic, but it's actually just labeling the client as someone who struggles. And that is going to be more likely to reinforce a fixed mindset around self-control rather than actually getting to that point of doing something with what happened in a productive manner. And instead of helping them see that this is something situational, it's not permanent, now you're kind of like, "Eh, some people just struggle with this stuff," and that is you. So instead, something you could say is, "It makes sense that consistency felt harder this week. That's not about who you are. It's actually just what your brain was working with. So let's take a look at what was actually going on, what was in the mix." This immediately separates identity from behavior. Good. We like that. And it reframes the low consistency week as something that was just situational. This, this thing just happened. Let's take a look at it. Has nothing to do with you, who you are, you know? Okay, the last one I have here is a very well-intentioned one, one, but can be very harmful. So saying something like, "I hear you, but honestly, stress is always going to be there. At some point, you have to decide how much you really do want this." Reading those words out loud actually kinda, like, hurts me a little bit. And I know, I know, me pointing at the camera right now, that many of you say this. Maybe not the second part, but definitely the first part, stress is always going to be there. That i- that is pretty dismissive language, and I know I've heard coaches say you need to just, like, decide how much you want this, but, like, ugh, that, that's the part that really pains me. So, it makes the sit- situation really seem like a motivation or commitment problem, and puts the client in p- in a position where they feel like they have to just, like, defend or justify what happened to them, where their stress came from, why it was so hindering to their past week. And that doesn't really put you in a position to be able to work with them on it. But, I mean, if you're saying this, I don't think that you're really trying to work on it with them in the first place. But instead, something so much more productive that you could say is,"Stress is always going to show up. You're right about that. So instead of pushing through it, let's figure out how to build a version of this that works even when life feels a little bit more heavy. Are you up for that?" So we did a little bit of, like, permission asking, get their buy-in, hear them, understand that this is the stuff that can happen. It acknowledges the reality that s- ongoing stress is going to happen. Like, that's unfortunately the human experience. But we don't need to weaponize it against our clients, right? And it shifts the framing from being a will problem, willpower problem, say that 10 times fast, and seeing it more as, like, um, a design problem, an environment problem, something that is workable, which is immediately more growth mindset oriented, and they're just so much more likely to actually want to talk to you about it, and work through it, and get something out of it So before we jump to any stress management strategies, well, like I said, we're not doing that here, but, like, in general when you're coaching, before you do that with your clients, we want to try to take one more step to see what's, like, actually going on here and where their mental energy, where the battery power is actually going. So this is where my little battery analogy comes back to play, and we can use it as an audit tool. How this works, you can describe the idea of their mental capacity like a battery, just like I explained it to you. You can totally steal that, use it with your clients. Please do, you have to let me know how it goes afterwards, okay? That's, that's the only caveat. I wanna hear from you. I wanna hear from you guys. So then have them list out the current active stressors that are going on, and assign a percentage of their battery that is going to each one of those things. So if they mention that they just had a really stressful week, you can start by asking if they're up for it, do some permission asking, some buy-in, all of that good stuff. Describe the battery analogy to them, and ask them to share if they were to reflect, or maybe they're still in it right now, like, what are you actively experiencing that is stressful? Or, what did the last week look like that… What were all the components of that stress? And then you can reflect back to the battery idea and say, "If you were to give a certain percentage of your mental capacity To each one of those stressors, how would that look? Which one gets 20%? Which one gets 50%? Are they all even? And that really presents an awesome reflective opportunity for them to become more aware, to help you better understand what's going on. And the goal with this isn't to fix the stressors, okay? The goal is to bring more awareness to what's really going on, and in general, just doing this can be a really grounding practice. In fact, I would encourage you listening right now to try something like this yourself and see how it feels for you, because it can even maybe provide some temporary stress relief because it feels like you're, you're taking this stuff out of your brain, out of your body, and putting it onto a piece of paper or sending it in a WhatsApp message if the client is talking to you that way, and removing it from being an internal process that just feels overwhelming to having a little bit more control over it and putting it into an external processing source, and being able to see it for what it is rather than just feeling, just feeling the overwhelm. So after that, you can try asking them what came up for them when they went through this exercise. What did they notice? Did anything surprise them? Is there any way to bring down the biggest battery drain that they're experiencing? Or are there any sources of battery drain that they may have more control over than maybe they realized before doing this exercise? So love this new little battery analogy and how it can be translated to a coaching tool. On the HMCC call, I even mentioned, I was like, "This could be, like, a coloring book activity." Like, fill in the battery with how much, different color for each stressor, how much it's taking up. Hey, coloring itself can be a stress reliever, so maybe we've got, like, a, a two-for-one deal going on here. So also on the note of your language that you use as a coach, one thing I want you to be really aware of is that you can accidentally reinforce a fixed mindset about self-control, about stress, without even realizing it, which I am thinking you maybe already picked up on as I've been talking about all of this. But for instance, praising self-control as a trait Like," You just have such great willpower," You're so good at that." It sounds like a compliment, but it communicates that it, it's an innate trait, and that's actually more of a harmful framing when it comes to mindset perspective specifically. Instead, we wanna focus on praising the strategy, praising the system, the effort, the dedication, not necessarily just the trait. And with that, we also wanna help clients build awareness around when, where, why, who was involved during these times where self-control felt hard. And when we're doing that, we're really, again, just focusing on… I'm saying so many of the same things over and over here again, which I hope you're picking up on because that means they're important.. So ultimately, with all of this, the goal is to help clients see that self-control is not a character flaw. It's a workable external design problem Okay. To wrap this all up, the next time you have a client who says, "I was really just stressed this week, and that's why I couldn't stay consistent," I want you to hear that as an invitation to get curious, not a reason to just immediately pivot to problem-solving mode, and, "Well, what happened, and how do we make sure it never happens again?" And ask about their battery, and remind them that all of this stuff is just simply a design problem, and we can absolutely work with a design problem. I hope all of this was helpful to you. I really do. And it's crazy to think about, because this is just, like, one small, tiny speck from the Health Mindset Coaching Certification out of an entire program. Like, I mean, the entire stress and self-control model, like, quite literally, this is a speck of that. So if you're interested in learning more about the full program, the full Mindset and Behavior Change Coaching certification program, HMCC, then definitely check out the link below the show notes. Got some five free lessons for you there. get more information about the certification next time we open for enrollment. But for now, I hope this is something that you can apply with your clients, that makes sense to you, helps you maybe reframe some stuff for yourself as well. And I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for being here And that's a wrap for today's episode of Not another Mindset show. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified of the next one. Because if you're anything like me, if the episodes aren't popping up for you automatically, you'll keep forgetting to come back to the show even if you really, really enjoyed it. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and make it super easy for you and of course. If you wanna see more episodes just like this one, I'd love for you to let me know by leaving a review. I know, I know it's super annoying to do, but the few seconds that it takes means the world to me and also ensures that I can keep providing free education and value to you. And just to sweeten the deal, I am going to be picking a random reviewer every single month to receive a free workshop or product from me. If you're looking for more free resources or just wanna connect, hang out, chat a little bit, come find me on Instagram. I'm Coach Casey, Joe over there. That is where I hang out the most in the land of social media. Alright, my friends, that is all I have for you this time. I so appreciate you being here and love to see you prioritizing your growth. I'll see you next time.