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Written by Dr Steve Barlow

You might be wondering what’s different about change fitness coaching. Is it what you’re already doing, or is it something different?

Let’s explore this idea.

Tradition

Innovation is always informed by ideas that already exist. In other words, it flows out of some sort of tradition.

New approaches to coaching also flow out of some tradition. For example, neuroscience coaching is a relatively new perspective, but it comes out of the ‘hard sciences’ tradition.

Change fitness coaching also comes from a tradition. The tradition is evidence-based psychology, particularly positive psychology. Change fitness coaching is concerned with the psychological factors (the internal landscape of our minds) that enable us to be successful at the change process.

The change process

Change fitness is fitness for a specific thing – the change process. There are many different expressions of change (change projects). These projects might be improving your diet, going to the gym, reading more, making a career move, – whatever. But these different projects all have some fundamental things in common. If you get better at those fundamental things, you become more successful at the different projects.

A new perspective

Change fitness coaching offers a unique perspective of those fundamental things. This perspective is born out of academic research into why some people handle change well and others don’t.

There is a set of psychological resources that help people succeed at the change process. The more of these resources you have, the better. Change fitness coaching is about helping clients get more of them.

These resources also affect a person’s leadership capacity. Leadership is not about managing the status quo. It’s about moving forward to achieve valued goals and a shared vision. It’s fundamentally about leading people through change. Leadership and change fitness are intimately connected.

A coaching framework

What we offer coaches is much more than information about change fitness. We offer a fully-functional framework to guide coaching practice. This framework guides what to do, why to do it, when to do it, how to do it, and tools to do it with. Coaches undergoing our training end up with unique skills and knowledge, and a host of resources and programs that are easily executable in their practice.

The programs we offer form an ecosystem that extends from the individual and their personal change fitness, to change fitness and leadership and connections between them, and finally to the change fitness of the group and the change readiness of an entire organisation.

Steve Barlow
Author: Steve Barlow

Steve heads up The Change Gym. He is a change readiness specialist. You can contact him at steve@thechangegym.com.