Benefits and Potential Challenges of Stages of Change

The benefits of using the Stages of Change model are many:

• You can design a climate where realistic, positive change can occur, instead of setting yourself (and your program participating members) up for failure and disappointment.
• Especially for addictive or otherwise compelling behaviors, you can turn relapses and setbacks into learning opportunities — which will translate into more lasting progress down the road.
• You can assist program participating members stay motivated and watch them make new, healthy habits a permanent part of their daily lives.

However, incorporating Stages of Change into a health education or other type of program requires some investments of time and other resources. Potential Challenges include:

• figuring out instruments and other tools that accurately assess participating members' stages of change
• adapting programs to incorporate the Stages of Change model in appropriate and beneficial ways, and
• evaluating and assessing these new efforts

Gold's Gym Wellness Coach

In today's fast paced world our hectic lives leave little time, energy, or motivation for individuals to emphasis on their own needs.

Those that do seek to improve their Wellness traditionally turn to friends, family, professionals and published materials for support and information. All too often those support structures fail to make a lasting difference. This happens for a number of reasons. Friends and family may not be capable of assisting. Working with professionals is time consuming and expensive and very few of us are effective at taking published, generic information and applying it to our own lives.

Gold’s Gym Winston-Salem has developed a new web-based program that expands the range of support available to those wishing to make healthy lifestyle changes. The program, Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach, focuses on the everyday challenges of making positive lifestyle changes and has the advantages of being more personalized and efficient than generic, published information and less intense and expensive than professional face-to-face counseling.

Making use of a collaborative problem-solving model the goal is not to give advice, but rather to assist individuals think through the issues and come to their own conclusions. The coach offers ideas for consideration, assists the individual to generate their own ideas, assists the individual consider the various ideas, choose a direction, and then supports them in the implementation of their decision.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that relationship formation requires in-person interaction; Gold’s Gym has found that members and Wellness Coaches are able to build significant relationships via internet-based communication. Utilizing industry leading technology a Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach is able to offer individuals a secure, user-friendly personal website where they can access their coach in a real-time or via email with responses delivered in less than 24 hours.

The site allows Wellness Coaches to hand select relevant articles that are written on a consumer level and that are targeted to the issue at hand and add them to a individual’s web-based personal library. The site also contains various programs and tools which are designed to aid the coach and individual to set, implement and track personal goals.

The collaborative relationship formed between a individual and coach enhances the quality and efficiency of service. The familiarity that a coach designs with a individual’s circumstances and significant relationships allows them over time to more quickly offer useful ideas and assistance. With traditional call-in assistance lines, the time intensive exercise of getting background and contextual information is repeated each time. IN that scenario efficiency is lost.

Further, Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach has developed a protocol based on primary principals from the field of psychotherapy and behavior modification. The protocol is embedded within a proprietary problem-solving that is based on the concept that individuals often act without a good understanding of a problem. Their responses then complicate matters and often make matters worse.

Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach offers the opportunity to step back, take a second look at what’s going on, and quickly asses the factors influencing the situation. But, having an idea of “what” to do is very different than actually “doing” something about it.

People need assist with the follow-through. So, after figuring out “what” to do, Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach focuses on implementation. Here Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach builds on sound research and experience from the field of behavior modification that has to do with goal-setting and with implementation support.

The end result is a highly personalized, effective, user-friendly way of improving the Wellness of an individual. The efficient nature of the web-based relationship allows Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach to keep the price point within reach of virtually anyone.