C4W is a theoretically grounded, evidence-based* approach to helping other people achieve optimal levels of happiness, success, health, longevity and wellbeing.
The C4W approach is grounded in sound academic knowledge from a variety of fields including health psychology, clinical psychology, sports psychology, coaching psychology, business psychology and positive psychology.
It is designed to help professionals become more effective and more skilled at helping other people – regardless of whether these other people are clients, patients, colleagues, students, prisoners or friends.
It is also designed to improve an individual’s psychological health by helping them develop an increased sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness (as suggested by Self-Determination Theory), as well as by helping them change their thinking styles, behaviours and environment in helpful ways.
Our goal is to evolve C4W into a leading, evidence-based approach to helping other people reach their full potential, with evidence coming from properly conducted studies not the self-congratulatory opinions of self-help experts and guru’s. We want C4W practitioners to be rightly sceptical about all claims of efficacy as good evidence-based practitioners should be – weighing evidence from different sources combined with their own best judgement about what is likely to prove most helpful with the person in front of them.
C4W places heavy emphasis on building and maintaining empathy, avoiding argumentation, rolling with resistance, building confidence or self-efficacy, emphasising options and ways forward and developing personal improvement plans with optimal involvement and engagement from the client. Our 4 day course helps attendees develop and improve their skills in all these areas.
C4W does not assume that clients do not have significant health problems. Indeed, it includes a number of strategies, tools and techniques designed to help people with chronic health concerns and illness - whether they be physical, mental or a combination of both. It is thus different from “life coaching” - where the assumption is that people either do not have, or the coach does not work with, health problems. C4W is designed, in part, for health professionals to help them become more effective in helping their patients improve their health and wellbeing. Because some of the things which help healthy people further improve their health and wellbeing are equally applicable to people with health problems.
* The phrase “evidence based coaching” helps distinguish between professional coaching that is explicitly grounded in the broader empirical and theoretical knowledge base and coaching that was developed from the “pop psychology” personal development genre. (Evidence Based Coaching Handbook. page 4. Stober D and Grant A. Eds. Wiley. 2006)
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