Transcription
Hey everyone, how you doing? I'm Erin Power. I'm your Coaching and Curriculum Director for Primal Health Coach Institute, and I'm excited to be here with you to talk about one of my favorite things, which is Master Coach.
And I've got a few people on the attendees list watching live. You might be watching this live or on the replay. Uh, I'm going to be here with you for the next just shy of an hour to talk Master Coach with you. I'm actually going to put this live on Facebook just because we can. We have the technology. No, I'm not. It won't let me. So we're not going to. We're going to continue on.
I have a lot to share with you. Uh, really unscripted, but a lot. Because first of all, on a personal note, teaching the Master Coach course, which I teach live, is one of my favorite things to do. One of my absolute favorite things to do in my life. It brings me incredible amounts of joy. Uh, it excites me to work alongside our students and to watch the exponential growth that happens in the 12 weeks we spend together. It's astronomical. Coaches get exponentially better week over week over week. Better at what, you're wondering? I'm going to explain that to you.
I want to talk about what is learned in Master Coach, very specifically what we teach you. I'm going to give you a quick tour through the curriculum. And I want to talk also more generally about what you learn and how it benefits you. These benefit you in many, many ways. Potentially, you might be thinking about this from the perspective of helping people, which I really hope you are. I think that's why we're all here, is to help people. And being able to masterfully coach enables you to actually help people in a way, first of all, that they've probably never really been helped before, and in a way that lasts and makes sense because it was because it was driven by the client. It was their idea.
Coaching enables the client to be empowered and enlightened. We deliver the client to self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief, the trust, the knowledge that they have the skills, the resources, the tools, and the know-how to carry on on their own. And that's what we want. That's what we want.
Um, so I'm going to start by sharing an anecdote. This literally just happened today, and I thought I should tell the Master Coach students about this. I want to get into this anecdote. Um, and then I want to take you through a little bit of an agenda here today. I'm going to talk about why we created the Master Coach course, what you'll learn in it, how you'll learn, and why it's such a wonderful learning experience that you won't want to miss. Okay, that's what the agenda is for today. Pretty quick.
I have some questions that were pre-submitted by you. I also have just generally some frequently asked questions that I'll quickly answer. Um, and as a just a little finale, I have, um, about a hundred testimonials. I'll share a few of them with you from past Master Coach students. Okay, so that's what we're in for today.
Okay, if you're watching live and you have questions on the go, feel free to type them into the chat, and I'll check on those periodically. Uh, little tech disclaimer: I am getting over a chest cold, so I'm quite, uh, raspy. So I hope you'll be patient with me.
Okay, today I had a discovery call with a prospective client. Discovery call, consultation, enrollment call, whatever you're calling it in your business. This is when somebody finds you. You have the solution to their problem, or they think you might have it because you've been out there marketing yourself, which I'll talk about in one second. And the client has booked a call with you. It's free. It's a free call. There's no air, no barrier to entry. The client books the call with you, gets to get to know you, and for you to get to know them. That's the spirit behind the discovery call. We're getting to know each other. I, as the coach, have a very specific solution for a very specific problem for a very specific person. Are you that person? Are we a good match?
The discovery call is, in some ways, an interview, but in almost every way, it's a coaching conversation. Just so you know, a discovery call is a coaching conversation. So right out the gate, if you get better at coaching, you're gonna get better at sales and enrollment.
So this client, um, was an ideal client for me. She was a really perfect client for me in, in my sort of area of specialty. The thing I like to work on. She was it. She was all it. She was able to articulate many pains, the pains of staying stuck where she is. And I was able to coax that out of her through asking open-ended questions furiously, right? So I'm in the conversation with this person. I don't know. She's not a paying client yet, but I'm deeply and genuinely curious to get to know her.
Curiosity is the foundational quality that we want to nurture as a coach in ourselves. Nurturing ourselves as a coach, when we ask questions and guide conversations from a place of true curiosity, um, it enables it creates space for the client to explore elements of their health and their state of being and mindset that they've never explored before because nobody asked them to do that. Nobody really curiously proceeded with them in these conversations. It's, it's awe-inspiring to be on the receiving end of a really well-constructed coaching conversation, and people feel it.
What this woman said to me within the first five minutes of our conversation, for five, six minutes, very early in the conversation, she said, "I can't believe I'm bearing my soul to you. I just met you." But we created that container. I created that container for her by non-judgmentally holding space with curiosity, asking open-ended questions, seeking to explore her thoughts, feelings, her values. "Why are you on this call today, right now? Why is this important to you? Um, where do you want to go? Where are you now? What's that space in between?" Just with absolute curiosity.
So we get to the end of the call, and she's a 10 out of 10. She wants to do it. She sees the importance in it. But then her doubt creeps in. If we can all relate to this, her doubt creeps in. That happens a lot. And she says, "Ah, I just, I've tried everything. How do I know this will work?" And that's where I got really excited to tell her that the reason why this will work is because I'm a person. You're with me. If I was your coach, I wouldn't let you quit. She's already experienced this in this call. I'm not her coach, but I didn't back down. Didn't let her quit. Asked for more, asked for more, asked for more, and she gave more, and she gave more, and she wanted to give more. She got a taste of what it felt like to be coached and the relentlessness with which I'm going to put her in the leadership role, and so she can recognize her own strengths, her own skills, the values of things that are important to her, that why she's here, what she wants, what she wants in life, her vision for her life. She already knows I'm relentlessly insisting on putting her in the driver's seat, and I won't let her quit.
I think this is exciting because anybody who's been coached, you know, coaching or in business for a while, depending on what market you're in, what you're going to hear a lot on discovery calls is, "I've tried. I've tried a lot of programs. None of them were sustainable." People say that all the time. "I tried fasting, it wasn't sustainable. I tried keto, it wasn't sustainable. I tried Weight Watchers, it wasn't sustainable. I tried tracking macros, it wasn't sustainable." It wasn't sustainable. Do you think it's true that every program on planet Earth is unsustainable because some people sustain it? I've been sustaining Primal for 15 years without a break. Sustainability is in the sustainability is in the coaching relationship. The sustainability is, I'm not letting you quit. We're in a relationship together. We are working together closely together to get to your goal. I'm not letting you quit.
What's unsustainable is a program that doesn't teach the client to sustain. And the health coaching relationship is 100% about empowering and and teaching the client to sustain the changes that they want to make in a way they want to make them. It is client-led. When it's client-led, it's sustainable. If I'm a macro coach and I hand you your Macros, those are your Macros. You got to follow those. And if you decide not to, there's no plan B. You're off the wagon. It wasn't sustainable. But we're co-creating a program with the client. It's the client's bespoke program because it was built with a human coach. It's sustainable, right out the gate, because we built it together for you, and we're going to be in a coaching relationship, frequently engaged in in curiosity-oriented conversations, just like this one. You can't fail. You can't quit.
So I wanted to put that forward because she ended up signing up. So because I was, I, I was able to, um, lead, lead a masterful coaching conversation today, I acquired a new client for me. That lights me up because my number one driving force in my life is impact. Impact is what gets me out of bed in the morning. How can I help more people? That's why I love teaching Master, Master Coach, because if I can help impact you, you can impact more people. We are exponentially impacting, right? I, I, I get so excited about impact. I'm so excited I can help her because she's perfect. She's going to do so well in this program, and I knew it. She just didn't know it. I had to kind of guide her down there to to let her see that this is different. A coaching relationship is far, far different than anything else you've tried.
Now, a second ago, I described myself as having led her through this conversation. I want you to know, as the health coach, you are in a leadership role in that relationship. You probably assumed that, but it's a partner-style leadership. It's leadership from the side, not a boss-subordinate relationship. You're not the boss of the client. You're not the teacher of the client. You're a partner of the client. You have the expertise in whatever your expertise is in. Whatever your expertise is, that might be, for me, it's like insulin resistance. It might be autoimmunity. It might be a specific autoimmune disease. It might be, um, athletic performance. It might be, um, it might be menopause. It could be anything. You have a point of view, at least I hope you do, and you're the expert in that, right? You're the expert. You're the Primal expert. Your client is also an expert. They're the expert in their life, their schedule, what they like and don't like, what they will and won't do. They're the expert in what kind of energy they've woken up with this morning, what they're willing to try. We dance with the partner with our partner client, and we are in a leadership role, but we're holding partner space.
I want you to really let that sink in because I think a lot of people that jump into Master Coach or come to health coaching generally, I think come in falsely with the assumption that we're prescriptive. We tell, we teach, we talk at the client. The client just accepts what we ask them to do, and that's that's not how we're doing it. That's not the modern era of health coaching. That's not, that's not, uh, it's not a suitable path to behavior change. Telling people what to do. They already know what to do. There's a billion books in the bookstore and a trillion websites online at this point. The information, as you know, is readily available. If one wanted to take control of their health in any way, shape, or form, they could. But people just aren't good at sustaining behavior change because nobody helped them. Nobody helped them to do that.
In my, uh, my health coaching program, I refer to this as learning how to fail better, frankly. I know my clients are going to slip up, and that's what sends them down this unsustainable path. Well, that wasn't sustainable. Couldn't couldn't succeed at that one either. Now they're getting into this tailspin of the identity of being a self-saboteur, and there's a whole other thing. We want them to have success. Tiny, tiny success that moves them forward. This is the power of the coaching relationship. This is what you learn in Master Coach, and not only do you learn it, you physically embody it.
Okay, I think it's really important to consider health coaching, uh, an embodiment practice, like dancing or playing a sport or playing an instrument or anything like that, that you have to physically practice it. One time, I tried to teach myself how to swim by reading a book. You know, you can't bring the book to the pool. So you have to read the book and then go to the pool. It wasn't really a great way to learn how to swim, I'm not gonna lie. What works better for swimming? Well, somebody getting in the pool, showing you how to move kinesthetically, move through the water. Where kinesthetically moving our clients through change. We're moving them through change. I want you to actually visualize a client moving through change like a swimmer moving through a pool. It's the same. So you need to physically practice coaching. We, we encourage this. This is a non-negotiable part of our curriculum.
In the main Primal Health Coach certification course, when you take the main Primal Health Coach certification course, you're a certified health coach, congratulations. And one of the assignments we have you do before you graduate is the three-way coaching role play, where you get with a partner and you just work out a coaching conversation and, um, get one rep under your belt. Well, we do that times a million in Master Coach. It's the best way to learn.
Okay, so let's get into some of the agenda items for today. Why did we create the Master Coach certification program? For that reason I just mentioned. You can learn coaching, how to coach, to a certain extent, by book learning, right? You can. So we have a fully robust coaching curriculum in Ms, in the main Primal Health Coach certification course, and you can learn it to a certain point. And if you play your cards right and do a ton of practicing, you can figure out an approach, an amount, a health coaching approach, a coaching conversation approach that works, really works. But to escalate this to, in, to, sort of hurry this along, to get there faster and better, we do it together. We do it with a group of peers, with an expert teacher, and we do it with a high degree of frequency. Uh, the doses and the frequency, I find when you're trying to get better at something, the more frequently you can practice it, the quicker you'll get along. So we have a very tight, very fast-moving schedule in Master Coach. It is a 12-week curriculum, but you get, you get access to the curriculum for about, I think, about five months, somewhere around there, four or five months. You have, so you have time to spend in the online curriculum. There's an online curriculum which you have to complete, same as any other of our courses, whether you're reading, you're writing exams. You must attend two live sessions a week. One of them is a lecture where we talk about the lesson of the week, and one of them is a practice session where we practice a skill derived from the lesson of the week. So every week for 90 minutes, you're in coaching practice mode. 90 minutes of coaching practice at a minimum, and even more if you want to go do more on your own, which we strongly encourage.
So why did we create Master Coach? To, to create master coaches so we could have a bigger impact as an organization. So Mark Sisson can have a bigger impact as a thought leader. That's his goal. Is, is to impact the lives of 100 million people worldwide. He's probably increased that goal since then, but that's what we're doing. That's our kind of our, that's one of our jobs, right? Is to go out there like our little Primal foot soldiers and really impact the lives of people, going deeper than just issuing meal plans or recipe guides, encouraging true lifelong change from within. This is what the health and wellness industry needs, by the way. And I'll say that as an industry veteran, 30-year fitness industry veteran. Look around. It's not going very well. It's not going very well. The prescriptive model isn't working for most people. Most people need to understand how to, um, weave change into their lives. That's the hard part. So the world needs health coaches, not just any health coach, a health coach that knows how to make a difference, and a health coach that knows how to encourage and nurture change. We need to change the world. No big deal.
I'll tell you something really important. I think this is crucial to know, and I'm just saying this as an insider in the industry. Um, the health consumer, the health consumer, who we kind of just globally refer to, these are the prospective clients out there in the world. The health consumer is becoming incredibly much more savvy to the power of coaching. Incredibly much more savvy. I've had clients say to me verbatim, "I'm on this call right now with you because I need a coach. Programs have stopped working. I need a coach." People know they need a coach. This is a great time to be a coach. And if you're a good coach, watch out.
I, I truly believe, and I want to get into this a little bit later, that your coaching mastery is one of your most critical business development skills, right? So you might be watching this and like, you're excited to be a health coach, and there's so many moving parts to this. We have to understand health, we have to understand coaching. Oh, and then we have to kind of like get a job or start a practice, start a business. We have to, we somehow create a career out of this. You don't have to, by the way. You don't have to do the private practice entrepreneur thing like I do. There's jobs, jobs, and jobs and jobs for health coaches. Good health coaches. Most of these jobs require you to be a graduate of a, um, a school that's approved by the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches, which we are. So, you know, completing this Master Coach course gives you that sort of cachet on your resume. "I completed a course that is approved by the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches." Becoming board certified, yet another check mark on your resume. If you're looking to grab one of these health coaching jobs, you're going to need to be board certified, quite frankly. So just another reason to take Master Coach, because it qualifies you just at that exam. But if you are a coach that makes change possible for people, and you have a proven track record of this, you will have, you will have a business lined up out the door, the proverbial door. Coaching mastery is one of the most incredible business growing tools that there is.
Okay, so why did we create Master Coach? The world needs masterful health coaches, period. Point blank. The whole world needs masterful coaches, and the world is wisening up to it. Lions know it. Organizations know it. Doctors know it. Everyone knows it now. So you got to get in on it. You got to get in on it. This is the time to get in on this, right? This is the time.
So what do we learn in Master Coach? I think the easiest way to show you what you learn is to show you what you learn. I'm going to actually just quickly click you through the curriculum at a very, very high level, because it's a very robust curriculum, but I'd like you to see it. So I'm going to just share a screen here and walk you through a little bit of Master Coach. Okay, give me one sec. It's gonna be so fast. Getting your fat, world's fastest curriculum tour. Here we go.
So, you know, just like, uh, your, your regular Primal Health Coach course, we built this course in the same platform. You already know it works exactly the same way. Every week, there's a new chapter dripped. So we drip one chapter a week. Drip means we release one chapter a week. This is really, um, intentional because we are moving through this curriculum together. So we're all starting on the same day, we're all ending on the same day, we're all moving through the chapters at the same time, you and all your peers, moving through this curriculum together. Okay, we have to get it done by the end of December. So we're starting in early September, we're done by the end of December. We're off and on, on the way to the board exam. Okay, so we're moving quick, but it's totally doable. This curriculum is very, very robust, but you can do it.
Okay, my encouragement for some of you who are considering doing Master Coach and maybe you're still in the midst of your Primal Health Coach certification course, I think the best course of action is to just press pause on Primal Health Coach certification, double down on Master Coach, because you only have a finite length of time in this course. Go back to Primal Health Coach when, uh, you're done. When you're done Master Coach, okay? Because Primal Health Coach for us is really self-paced. Master Coach is not. Okay, so that's an FAQ that comes up a lot.
But here, we run through in, in our, um, in our curriculum from session one through session 10. We run through the coaching relationship from start to finish in a very logical order. We start with goal setting, implementing action. Goal setting. We start with it. Goal setting is the nugget that lives inside every coaching conversation. Every time you have a coaching conversation, fam, get to a goal. You got to get to a goal for that week, whatever interval of time you spend with your clients, usually it's kind of weekly. There has to be a goal in play. Implementing action is, and how are you going to execute the goal? Aha, here's the coaching piece, the sustainability piece. It's one thing to have the client come to a goal, by the way, the goal is the client's idea, spoiler alert. But how are they going to do it? Now, this is the most fun part. This is the part I love to teach. This is the part I love to do as a health coach. This is where you get into the weeds, into the weeds of why or why they can't achieve this goal. What barriers could possibly get in the way? You want to assess their confidence. You want to want them to feel very, very confident they can achieve this goal. Was their idea, so hopefully they feel confident about it. You've gotten very specific about the goal, so the parameters are well established. The client knows what they need to do. You establish, try to understand what the barriers could be, and ask for all the barriers, and then you solve for those barriers systematically. The client is now fully empowered with a goal of their own making, 10 out of 10 confidence that they can do it. How good does that feel? And we've solved for, we've preemptively solved for all the barriers, teaching them to fail better, in a manner of speaking. Now, we do this every time. The goal setting, influencing action is a part of every coaching conversation. So after a while, after a while, and a coach has been in your care, they start to pick it up. They get it. They start to learn how to goal set. They start to learn how to implement action. They know their coach is always going to ask them to do this. They're going to pick it up. Every single time we have a conversation, the coach is getting me to a goal. They're making me get very specific on this goal. We're untangling the potential barriers. We're assessing how confident I am. The client learns how to self-goal set, how to self-coach through barriers. There is self-efficacy. I mentioned self-efficacy a while ago. That's the desired outcome of every coaching relationship. If you have any hesitation as to whether your clients really know what they're doing, like if, if the relationship ended, would they be okay without you? If you have any hesitancy about that, then it really behooves you to learn how to deliver your client to self-efficacy. That's what you need to learn how to do.
So, we, anyways, we talk about goal setting, influencing action, right up front, very first chapter, because it happens in every coaching conversation, including discovery. So when I talk to my client today, I need to get clear on her goals. I need to get clear on why those were important to her. I need to get clear on what's been in her way so far. It starts right from, right from conversation one. We need to get very good at understanding client goals. So we start with that in session one.
In session two, we go through Discovery and Enrollment. Now, caveat, Master Coach is not a business course at all. We are not talking about business. We're not, we're not talking about sales. We're not talking about marketing or programming. We don't have time, quite frankly. We're here just to talk about coaching and learn how to coach. However, as I shared in my anecdote at the start of this call, a discovery call is a coaching call. It's the first one. So we need to talk about why that coaching container is a little different. This person is ultimately a stranger. You don't really know them. They don't really know you. They haven't necessarily bought into you yet. How to construct a discovery call in the coaching framework that helps the client see the value in entering into the coaching relationship, really, really useful. So a lot of people, I think, worry about their sales skills. I've never worked in sales. I don't have sales skills, but I believe I can change people's lives. And I enter the discovery call with that energy, and then the coaching conversation takes care of the rest, and the client can't wait to get into a relationship with me because it's never, they've never felt that before. I said that before, they've never felt that before, that care and attention.
Three, we go through Intake. In session one, again, we're not talking about your health coaching programming here, but once a client has engaged with you in a discovery call, we want to get them into, uh, sort of up and running, right? So there is an element to getting the client onboarded into your care that we do talk about, and what session one is like. We know, we really do start with what's the very first coaching session. And we work through, let's say, for example, your coaching relationship is 12 weeks long. That's a good, that's a good length of time. Some people do six months, and they'll do a year. Eight weeks doesn't matter. But let's just say, for giggles, it's 12 weeks. A month, session one is a very different session than session 11 or 10 or nine or B12, for that matter. 12 is our graduation session. Session one is our first session. As we get longer and later in the coaching relationship, the client has more self-determination, they have more self-efficacy, they have more knowledge, they're more confident. But in the early stages, they're not. So the coaching conversation you have in, in the fledgling stage of your coaching relationship is very different than the one you have later. And we specifically work on that in the practice sessions.
So I've developed the pr, the practice sessions are quite interesting. They're, they're really intentional. I've developed a series of drills. When you get into the practice sessions on Thursdays, uh, Thursday nights, I'll get into the logistics later, but for now, Thursday nights are when we're doing our coaching practice. And I have a very deliberate trajectory of coaching drills that we do from week one to week two to week three to week four, so you can practice the skills that you'll need to know depending on where in the coaching relationship you are. As in the early stages, the coaching relationship sounds different than does in the later stages.
Okay, session four is the client-centered relationship. Now we're talking. This is kind of what I kicked off the anecdote with, which is how do we, how do we show the client that we are curious and non-judgmental? That we are a partner to them, not a boss. This is the client-led, uh, client-centered relationship. So in this in this lesson, for example, we talk about allowing the client to lead the language of the coaching conversation. It has a very specific sort of cadence and vernacular. A coaching conversation, by the way, doesn't have a script, but it does have a framework. Okay, anybody who's watching this who's been through the Master Coach course knows this framework like the back of their hand. There is an order of events that we go through. It's not scripted because it has to be client-led. You don't know what the client's going to say. The beautiful thing about this is you can have a coaching conversation with anyone on planet Earth. You don't need an intake form. You don't need a check-in form. You don't need to know anything about a person, and you can enter into a productive coaching conversation with them if you know how to lay out a client-led coaching conversation. So we teach you this framework, and we practice the framework. It is an incredibly valuable tool. I find myself using this framework when I communicate with literally anyone. I'm asking open-ended questions, I'm reflecting back to them, I'm getting clear on why they've, you know, why this conversation is important to them, wrapping it up. Like it, most conversations really thrive in the, in the coaching framework.
Okay, so we have session five, the coaching, coaching presence and active listening. So we're getting even deeper into some of the, the really important sort of, again, embodied skills of health coaching. So coaching presence, your presence with the person, active listening skills, open-ended questioning, affirming, reflective listen, uh, reflections, summarizing. This is the active listening sort of one-on-one. Active listening is, um, one of the components of what you might have heard of, which is called motivational interviewing, which is what we're ultimately doing here. This course is based on motivational interviewing. Um, active listening is a skill that you will benefit from in every element of your life. I'll just say that one more time.
Then we get to session six, client emotion, energy, and reflection. This is interesting because now we're kind of, you know, we're kind of midway through the coaching relationship. Now, what's interesting is I found this, uh, time and time again, when I'm in a relationship with my clients, in the early days, we're talking a lot about food and exercise and sleep and stress. And then right around week three or four, we stop talking about that, and we barely ever talk about it again. Instead, we're talking about how it feels, how they behaved, how they're identifying, um, what they're saying about themselves, the, the structural supports in their life that are helping or hindering them, right? We're getting into the granularities of their life and their feelings. We're, food and exercise is the easy part. Quiet emotion is the hard part. So we would learn how to handle this nicely.
Session seven is expand the conversation and shift client awareness. So we are now in shift mode because we, we have brought the client along a journey. Now we're getting ready to hand them off to themselves. Did you know that a client is actually not really accountable to you, kind of in the beginning? You're their accountability buddy, but we want to shift the accountability to themselves. That's the benefit because they're going to be with themselves forever. You're kind of a stranger, in a manner of speaking. So we need this sort of shifting and handing over accountability to the client. So we start doing that around here. Motivational interviewing, the art of asking questions. This really gets the client thinking and knowing themselves. Client perception, how do they identify truly? You'll witness this when you get into a very good coaching relationship, coaching conversation. As we move through the trajectory, a client starts to identify differently. It's an identity shift. No big deal. Reframing, right? So a lot of clients come with this failure language, self-sabotage language. We need to, we need to help them sort of reframe. Well, literally reframe that so they can feel confident and confident as they go forward without you.
We get client empowerment. The client now really, kind of, they're kind of getting to this sort of conscious confidence, like they now know what they know. They know some things about themselves. Let's talk about self-determination theory. That's what that is, right? Fostering autonomy. Autonomy is, "I got this. I can do it myself. Thank you, coach." They're intrinsic motivators. Why this has been so important to them, why it will continue to be important to them. Like the coaching relationship and the change they had with you in the coaching relationship is not important because, um, the doctor said I gotta check, you know, keep my cholesterol in check, or I'm more, I want to look hot in my bikini. Those are not intrinsic motivations. There's something deeper inside that we need to help them connect to. And we do that throughout the coaching conversation. If we can keep them connected to what's really important to them at a values level, the whole way through and beyond, I just feel like they could never, they can never, they never fall down because we've connected to something truly important to them.
We talk about self-efficacy, which I've mentioned a few times. Client enlightenment is our sort of penultimate lesson here, which is helping the client learn how to self-coach. So when they're in the moment, and they're kind of, they're, they're free of your care, they're not in your relationship, relationship with you anymore, how can they run experiments, you know, non-judgmentally with curiosity on themselves? Decisional balance is a really cool tool that we can help teach our clients to help them make better decisions in the moment. Uh, self-discovery, growth versus fixed mindset, understanding support systems and their social support networks, their structural supports, their internal resources, all the things that we want to give the client and let the client know that they already have in their world to help support them as they keep going.
And then session 10, we release the client. So releasing the client. Now, sessions 11 and 12 are health topics. And this is just a little sidebar. So hang with me for just a quick second here. We are obligated to teach some health topics as per the requirements of the board approval, um, process. So to be board approved through the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches, we had to shore up some of our health lessons. Obviously, the Primal Health Coach certification course is chock full of health information. However, we do have to teach some of what we might know as the conventional wisdom around health. We just, we do have to. And I think there's tons of value in this. I, uh, I say this all the time, there's value in us knowing some of the parameters, like some of the parameters around cholesterol and BMI and healthy diets and things that conventionally understood, um, points of view. There, it's important for us to know that because that's what our clients know. Our clients don't come to us knowing Primal. They don't know anything about Primal, probably. So we have to kind of, we have to be able to meet them where they are. They're here worried about their cholesterol, and they're worried about, you know, getting their eight to ten servings of grains every day because the food pyramid or whatever told them to. We need to know this stuff. So we do have a couple health education sessions here. They're pretty fun, actually.
That's the bulk of the curriculum. Um, this outline is available for you to see on our website. So when you go to primalhealthcoach.com forward slash Master Coach certification, there's hyphens in there. I'm going to show you the screen here so you can see it for sure. Master Health Coach Certification. I'll put that in the chat just in case it's helpful for anybody. This is the most robust information page you could ever have. This information page is basically telling you everything that I'm telling you. Um, we have the, we have all the, all the FAQs in here, okay? Including buttons to enroll. Start date is September 7th. We're coming right up on it here. We are almost full. We have a few spots left. We cap this class in at a few dozen participants so we can have really meaningful breakout sessions for the coaching role play.
So I'll talk about the logistics of that in a second. I want to get through my, uh, my agenda items here, which brings me to my next agenda item, which is how you'll learn. Or right on time. So I mentioned that we have a live component. It's critically important. The live component, in fact, is compulsory. So attendance is compulsory at the live sessions. These are going to be happening on Monday and Thursday at 5 o'clock P.M. Mountain Time. Monday and Thursday, 5 PM Mountain Time. Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But I don't live in Mountain Time." I know you don't, but I do. Uh, and the reality is, there's just no way to make a course that satisfies all time zones. We've tried. It doesn't, it's not possible. So we're going with Mountain Time. That might be perfectly convenient for you, or terribly inconvenient for you. Don't worry. We just know, we just know that we can't create a live course schedule that will satisfy everybody. So we have a very, very simple, uh, equivalency path built in. If you have to miss a session, you have to miss a live session, you still have to do the session because they're all compulsory. But we have an equivalency exercise that you'll do. So all you'll do if you have to miss a session, watch the video replay of the session and complete a one-page assignment and submit it. Okay, watch it, submit to, submit an equivalency exercise assignment, and you're good. We can't do as having attended that session. We have had entire students do the entire course via the equivalency stream. Client coaches, students who lived in far away time zones and far away lands who could never attend a live session, not one, and they were able to do the whole thing via equivalency, including the coaching role play.
Now, hear me out. For the coaching role plays, these happen on Thursdays, right? So the Monday is the lecture, Thursday is the coaching role play. These are 90-minute sessions, 5 PM Mountain Time. The Thursday session is the coaching role play. We practice coaching. Even if you do the equivalency for the coaching role play, you'll still learn because the power of observational learning is enormous. Book learning is a way of learning. Kinesthetic learning, actually embodying, is the best way to learn this. But the second best way to learn it is observational, watching others do it. You will learn a lot from that. Plus, you can get together with some of your peers who maybe live in the same time zone as you and practice on your own, right? You always have that opportunity. So don't let the time zone be too much of a deterrent for you. Okay, there's this very simple way to work around that.
So we meet Mondays and Thursdays, 5 PM Mountain Time, for 90 minutes. Monday is a lecture, Thursday is a coaching practice. Lecture and coaching practice. In the coaching practice, what we do is we split you into very small groups. So inside Zoom, we have a breakout room option. It's really nice. You get split into small groups of, let's say, three to five people. So you're gonna get to meet people and really know people. These are randomly assigned groups every time. So you're going to be in different rooms every time, and you'll be paired up with a Master Coach graduate. These are our Master Coach facilitators. They've graduated the course. Many of them are successful practicing health coaches. They are board-certified health coaches. They are good at this, and they'll be leading you through the coaching role play drill or assignment of the week, every single week. You have a different drill. You'll be doing some of them are very basic, like just guide a coach, sorry, just guide the client to a goal. That's maybe one drill. Another drill we have is, "I want you to ask 20 open-ended questions. Don't stop until you've asked 20 open-ended questions." Something like that, to practice some of these more skill-based things like open-ended questioning, which is something that people, most people really struggle with, actually. So they can be fun. There's some of them are challenging, and they'll stretch you. I will say, I've been delighted. I've taken several hundred students, probably, probably close to 300 students through Master Coach at this point, and the engagement on these coaching sessions is so high because people like it. It feels good to practice something. It feels good to watch yourself getting better. You know what else it feels good to feel uncomfortable and be learning something new? Learning a new skill, learning to play a new instrument, right? It's such an interesting, mind-bending, challenging, and exciting experience. If you're a growth-oriented person with a growth mindset, you will absolutely love being kind of pushed out of your comfort zone in such a caring and supportive environment. The environment in these breakout rooms is unbelievably caring and supportive. We encourage you to just try things on. We encourage you to stumble over your words, start again, pick it up. There's, you're not being graded, you're not being judged, you're being fully supported by your peers and by your facilitator and your faculty. We got you. Okay, it's amazing. It's the best part. And what I've seen is coaches from week one to week 10, again, exponentially improved week over week. At the end of your 10 weeks of health coaching practice in these Thursday sessions, you will have mastered the framework of the coaching conversation, and you are set. You are set to talk to anybody, to nail your discovery calls, to have great, meaningful conversations with loved ones in your life, to have transformational relationships with your clients. So you can, you can proudly present yourself as an effective and productive health coach that changes lives. That's what you'll get. That's what you get out of this course. It's incredible.
There's also an online curriculum, okay? So you saw that I took you through the online curriculum. You must finish all of that before the course expires on December 31st. So you have a finite deadline to get that done.
One more thing, you have to submit a coaching session for grading. This is called the Practical Skills Assessment. This is really important. At some point in your Master Coach journey, you will be tasked with going off, finding a client, whether it's one of your Master Coach peers, or a family member, or a friend, or a real actual client in real life, having a full coaching conversation within which you record. You're going to audio record this and submit it to me for grading. I grade it against our grading rubric, which I'd love to show you. It's awesome. One of my favorite, one of the most incredible parts of this course, truly, is this grading rubric. I'm just going to show it to you again, really quick, um, because it's just so good. One second. I think I'm showing the right screen here. Wait, try again. We'll try again. Here we are. Okay, so in the Practical Coaching Skills Evaluation lesson here, we have this rubric. This thing is awesome. Worth the price of admission. This is the thing that I'm grading the Practical Skills Assessment against. All of these line items is calm, present, emotionally available. I've shared this so many times. You've probably seen it before. All of these line items invites client at the intention, establishes rapport, energy and pace, the client feels like the leader, transitions feel natural, again and again, line item after line item, going through the framework of the coaching conversation. This might seem daunting to you, but when you get into the Master Coach curriculum, every single one of these line items, you're going to be mastering it. And most people who submit their Practical Skills Assessment check every single one of them off. Now, you don't have to check every single one of them off in your Practical Skills Assessment. You have to get at least, you demonstrate at least 20, so at least 20 of these 40 or so competencies, you must demonstrate, and you will. And of those 20 demonstrated, 80% of them, at least 16, must meet the satisfactory requirements. So that's me grading it. I'm grading this. You get a pass/fail grade. If you fail, you just do it again, okay? Don't worry. I give you tons of feedback on this. This is such a useful tool. You just try again. Um, when you pass your Practical Skills Assessment, the date, the date that you passed is really critically important. That's going to go on your Master Coach certification. If you do decide to sit the board exam, they need to know that date. So that's the one other compulsory element to this course is completing that recorded session. Most people wait until quite late in the course. They kind of come flooding in the last.
Few weeks of the course, which is completely fine as long as you have it, um, recorded and submitted well before the course expires on December 31st. You're good. And between our start date on September 7th and our end date on December 31st, you're going to find a sweet spot somewhere, and like, let's call it late October, early November, where you're starting to feel pretty confident in your coaching skills, and you're going to submit it and be ready to go. Okay, those are our compulsory elements: attendance at the live session, completing or the equivalency if you can't make it live, perfectly fine, completing all of the online curriculum, and submitting a practical skills assessment for pass/fail grade. Okay?
Okay, oh, this time is ticking by, and I want to be really respectful here and try to wrap this up in the next 15 minutes. So, here are the FAQs. My schedule is insane. Do I have to attend all live sessions? No, you don't. If you have to miss a session, we totally get it. Complete the equivalency exercise. No problem. Don't worry about it. Just, just skip your session if you have to do that equivalency. It couldn't be easier. Okay? Don't even have to ask permission. Just fill in the equivalency and send it on out. Okay?
What about my time zone? I already addressed that one. We, we really do struggle with time zones. You know, it's a big, big world. Try your best. Uh, we've, I've, like I said before, I've had, I've had students who were on the call at two o'clock in the morning in their time zone. If you want to do it, you're more than welcome to. You know, as a sleep nerd, I just would never do that, but you can if you want to. We try our best, but for right now, we're, we're hosting these calls at 5 PM Mountain Time. What our plan is, is in the next round of Master Coach, so the February 2024, which is crazy to think about, cohort a Master Coach, we're going to do a daytime one. That'll be more like 11, 10 or 11 or 12 Mountain Time, always in Mountain Time, always in Mountain Time because that's where I live. Um, but that might make it more feasible for people in very specifically far away time zones. But for now, we're going to be 5 PM Mountain Time.
I haven't completed my Primal Health Coach certification yet. Can I do Master Coach? Yes, you can. So, just so you know, in order to sit the board exam, you have to have the Primal Health Coach course and the Master Coach course. They, you have to have both of them. You can't sit the board exam until they're both done. You can't even apply to sit until they're both done. They have to go together. So, as I mentioned earlier, my encouragement is press pause on the Primal Health Coach course because you have all the time in the world to finish it. Double down on getting Master Coach done in the, in the specific length of time because it's a very specific length of time to finish this course, and then go back to Primal Health Coach when you're done Master Coach. You don't have to be done at all. You can, in fact, if you've never even, if you're watching this and you haven't even started Primal Health Coach certification course, you can do Master Coach first and then do Primal Health Coach second. There's no, you don't need to do this in any particular order.
What else? Um, I don't know if I want to be board certified. Will this course be worth it? I believe it's worth it from all the reasons I shared earlier, which is your ability to coach people is what's going to set you apart in this industry, period, end of story. As the industry grows, it's going to need more and more mastery. We need experts in this field now. That's where we're at. We're at the stage where we need expert coaches in the field. You need to step up and become an expert if you want to really own a space in this field. So, yes, it has nothing to do with board approval. Board approval is great if you plan to get a job, and there are tons of jobs. You probably will need to sit the board exam for that. If you want to work clinically, it's useful. Um, in private practice, which is what I work in, private practice, it doesn't come up. My clients don't necessarily need to know better care too much. I have that on my website, Hamboard approved. That might be an interesting little cachet point or point of interest for my clients. By the way, I'm, I live in Canada. I'm not American, but being nationally board certified tracks across other countries. So, even though it is an American organization, it's pretty recognized globally. I will say there are medical clinics in Canada that are asking for national board-certified health coaches. It's the one and only at this point, sort of governing body for our profession. So, it's very universally recognized, just for anybody there who's international.
I don't know what kind of health coach I want to be. I don't have any clients yet. I don't know what business I want to start. I don't know if I want a job. I don't know where to find clients, etc., etc., etc. If you're having a lack of confidence, a lack of clarity, I strenuously believe that mastering the ability to coach is going to deliver you to confidence and clarity. I've seen it time and again. Students who didn't know what they wanted to do, they knew they wanted to be a health coach, but they didn't know what that looked like. It became clear to them once they realized they could help people, then they could sort of open their mind to who they could help and how they could help them, and their whole business, their whole practice unfolded from their confidence and their ability to coach. I've seen it time and again. I think for any coach who's kind of stuck with what to do with their coaching certification, this is a really good little personal development journey to take for yourself because once you come through it, there will be nothing stopping you. You'll be so excited to get out and help people. That clarity will be delivered to you as to who you're helping and how and where and why.
Um, okay, that's my FAQs. A few more questions were submitted from you folks. I just want to run through really quick and see there's any that I haven't already addressed. Natalie asked, how will this help me be a better coach? I need all the help. First of all, I love this. I love that, you know, you need help. Of course, we need help. How are we going to learn this if we don't, um, make an intentional move to learn it, frankly? So, Natalie, and anybody else who can relate to Natalie's questions, like, I need help. I want to be a better coach. Help me. Will this help me? And how will it help me? It helps you by, by teaching you how to do it, then showing you how to do it, by embodying it, by physically practicing it. That's the only way I know how to get better at coaching. I mean, the coach I was 10 years ago is a far cry from the coach I am today, simply by the act of practicing with my clients and in teaching the Master Coach course. I've become a better health coach every year, truly, just engaging with this curriculum, learning from each other, practicing with each other. It's the one and only way I know to become a better health coach, frankly.
Natalie, to answer your question, um, how long is the course? Is it a study at your own pace course? It is 12 chapters long. You're, you have access to the course for four months. So, September, October, November, December. December 31st for, we gotta kick you out because we have to get the next ready for the next group to come in. So, you have four months in the online course. It is not self-paced. It is delivered one chapter a week. My encouragement, my strong encouragement is try to stay on pace. Devote, let's call it three to five hours a week to get the online chapter done. Get that done every week. It's the, the chapters are delivered on Tuesdays. So, every Tuesday, you could open it up, get the chapter done, call it good, do your practice session, move on. Right? Lecture, lecture, lesson, practice, go. Lecture, lesson, practice, go. Like, get that, get into that rhythm. And I would encourage you to stay up to pace with the course. It's not self-paced. It's a cohort type of course where we start and end at the same time.
Those are actually all the questions that I had that were kind of novel besides what I already answered. Since I have seven minutes left, uh, here are some testimonials from students. Because of the PHCI Master Coach course, I, that's this is the question these guys were answering. Because of the PHCI Level Master II course, I feel 10,000 times more confident in my coaching practice. That was J. I'm motivated and prepared to expand my practice. That was Dr. Gabrielle. I have more confidence in myself and my ability to be a great coach. That was Jen. I can begin to make a difference. That was from Pat. Dr. William Foxley says, I'll be better at improving my clients' health goals and it can get better. I can better help my clients achieve their goals. I love this coming from a doctor, by the way. And I remember grading Dr. Foxley's, um, practical skills assessment, and I was so excited because it was a doctor in a doctor's office having a coaching conversation with a patient, and I just was so excited about that. I feel much more confident in my professional approach. That was Wendy. David said, I'm preparing, I'm starting my, I'm starting my coaching business this year. Hannah said, I'm much more confident in my health coaching abilities. My, I'm motivated in growing my business and I look forward to taking the board exam. Oh, Amanda says, I feel confident that I can truly help people. That to me is a, I want to say that one again. I am confident that I feel confident that I can truly help people. Imagine if you could walk around feeling that confidence. Just imagine how that would take everything about your health coaching journey to another level. I feel confident that I can truly help people. And, and I'm just going to extrapolate from Amanda's comment here. I feel confident I could help anyone. Anyone. If somebody came to me with some health concern that I know almost nothing about, I could still coach them to some path, to some solution that would get them feeling, uh, like they were on track, even if I knew nothing about their health concern or their goals. I really believe that. It's pretty wild.
I will be a more effective and marketable health coach. This will result in more successful clients and career opportunities. More successful clients. Oh, there's a, there's a boon to your business. I will have more successful clients. Imagine if not only do you feel confident, but your clients are exuding confidence and that referral traffic from a confident client who's changed their life and feels evangelical about the change they had with you. It can't be overstated. I can't wait to start getting my business going and helping clients. That was Brian. I feel prepared to help clients achieve their health transformations. That was Ben. Kristen said, I'm much more confident about my one-to-one coaching skills, even though I've coached in a group setting for years. That's interesting. So, a lot of people come to the Master Coach course having coached before, but not this way. Maybe you've been a personal trainer before and you're kind of used to being in the prescriber role. Um, I was a nutritionist and I was very much in the prescribing nutrition role. I don't do that anymore. I literally don't prescribe nutrition to people. We have conversations about their food behaviors. Julian said, I'm very confident in my ability to be a non-judgmental supporter of my clients and their struggles. Lillian said, I feel really enthusiastic about my coaching process. Mathis says, I'm prepared to be the best coach I can be. Rainy said, I have a much better vision of how I can set people up for success and I'm more confident that I can help people make changes that will make lasting benefits for them. There's two exclamation points, which I feel, I feel confident and have shed my imposter syndrome. That's what Ryan said. The imposter syndrome, and everything is amazing, gang. Just as a closing comment, if imposter syndrome is what's holding you back from anything, anything, the way to solve imposter syndrome is to become a confident expert. And this is how you become a competent expert by practicing, by leaning in and deciding this is important enough to you to want to put yourself into a little bit of discomfort. I'm going to take good care of you. I love teaching Master Coach. I'm going to take good care of you. You're going to feel very, very supported by myself and the facilitators and your peers. It is fun. It is one of the most cool personal development journeys you'll go on. It will touch your lives in so many ways. You, you can't even quantify it. How, how mastering coaching conversations will change your life and the lives of people around you, and how you'll become a better communicator just globally.
So, Master Coach, we start on September 7th. That's our first live session. It's a, it's a welcome webinar. We're going to get to know each other, do some kind of fun, kooky Zoom getting acquainted game, and then we hit the ground running the following week with our first compulsory lessons. Okay? So, um, you have between now and then to think about it. You know, hit us up, admissions@primalhealthcoach.com. You can hit, you can chat with Laura. She'll walk you through the process to enroll and any payment plans you might have. The cost did come up, so that was another question. I'll just quickly pull this up. That was the final question that came up was cost. Let me just show you this really quick, gang. This, this is right on the website, um, right here, mastercoach.primalhealthcoach.com, forward slash master-health-coach-certification. Right? So, by the way, when you're on the website, if you go to programs, coach certifications, Master Coach, right there. Okay? So, very easy to navigate to. Uh, again, FAQs, everything you can need to know. But if you click the enroll now button, it's going to open up this enrollment page. If you're ready to go, you can just enroll right. So, you can do a single payment of $18.95 or three payments of $670.67. Fill it in, complete your registration. If you want to talk about it, uh, with somebody, you know, give Laura a call. Here's her number up here, and she can walk you through it as well. And I'm just an email away as well, mastercoach@primalhealthcoach.com. I created the course and teach the course, and I'm with you in the course. It's my baby, and I'd love to have you in there, and I'd love to answer any questions I can about the course.
Okay, thank you so much for your attention. I do want to nip this in the bud and, uh, help you let you carry on with your day, but I do appreciate your attention and I hope to see you in our September 2023 Master Coach cohort. Have a great day.