The Power of Positive

Many times people think of affirmations as cheering your clients on,
sort of like becoming their own personal cheerleader.

In actuality, that is not what positive affirmations are. Sure, it is OK to say “great job” and “wow, you really did well by picking a healthy choice at that party.” However, affirmations are more of just affirming the good things that your clients do.

Affirm is defined as “to declare positively or firmly,” or another definition is “to maintain to be true.”

Examples of affirming responses include:
• “I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today.”
• “You are clearly a very resourceful person.”
• “You handled yourself really well in that situation.”
• “That is a good/great suggestion.”
• “If I were in your shoes, I do not know if I could have managed nearly as well.”
• “I have enjoyed talking with you today.”
• “Thank you for sharing all of that information.”
• “I am confident you can accomplish your goal, if you decide that is what you want to do.”
• “I know you can do this.”
• “I know you can do this because you were able to ____________ (mention past success in life).”

Using positive affirmations is a powerful tool that is used in motivational interviewing. Motivational interviewing is a counseling technique that is associated with health behavior change. William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick, authors of Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People for Change, describe four key components of motivational interviewing as OARS:
• Open ended questions
• Affirmations (positive)
• Reflecting
• Summarizing

The goal of health/wellness/nutrition coaching is to:
• Reinforce any positive actions your clients take
• Reinforce any positive ideas your clients have
• Reframe all negatives
• Remind the client about setting goals or help your clients revise their goals into ones they are confident they can accomplish

The following is a session flow example:
1. Ask participants how they feel about their program
2. Review goals and progress
3. Reinforce what is working
4. Reframe what is not working
5. Revise goals as needed
6. Set up rewards for achieving goals
7. Discuss relapse and getting back on track
8. Show appreciation
9. Reaffirm personal importance and self-efficacy
10. Establish accountability and follow-up plan

Positive thinking to achieve success

Coach your clients to use self-talk to recognize negative or irrational thoughts, stop the thought, and rewrite the thought in their mind in a positive way. Negative thoughts can get in the way of your clients accomplishing their goals. Thinking positively can affect their actions, mood, and feelings about their goal of a positive health change.
Thought-stopping is one technique that can help clients get rid of unwanted or negative thoughts. Your clients may dwell or obsess on thoughts that make them worry, feel sad, or feel bad about themselves. When they practice thought-stopping, these unwanted thoughts occur less often. Over time, the thoughts become easier to ignore or may not occur at all.
Here's an example of how thought-stopping might work. Pretend that you have limited your portions and are eating more vegetables and fruits. One night, you go to a birthday party and eat several slices of pizza and a big piece of cake. All the way home, you are mad at yourself for consuming so many calories. “I don't know why I bother trying to lose weight. I have no will power. I might as well forget about it.” You get home and continue to eat, even though you are not hungry. You eat because you feel you fell off the plan—so, now everything is over. This is not true!
When you start to think of yourself eating more or forgetting about the healthy eating plan all together, you say “stop” out loud or quietly in your mind. You get up and move around or find something else to do. Then you think of something pleasant to take your mind off of that thought, such as a trip you are planning to take, a movie you recently saw that made you laugh, or the positive changes that you did make, such as reducing the liquid calories you consumed.

According to Marianne Flagg, author of Positive Thinking Stopping Unwanted Thoughts, thought-stopping includes three parts:

1. Watch: Notice your thoughts, which are sometimes called “self-talk.” Some people do not pay much attention to what they tell themselves. If they happen to notice that they have just told themselves they are lazy or have no will power, they just accept that discouraging thought as fact.
2. Check: Look at your thoughts, and ask if they are completely true. Ask yourself if these thoughts are untrue or exaggerated. Maybe you are ignoring something positive.
3. Correct: Replace the negative thoughts with positive, helpful thoughts. This is the step where you can change the way you feel.

Check your thoughts. According to Flagg, several kinds of irrational thoughts exist, including:
• Focusing on the negative:
o Example: “I ruined my eating plan this week by having so much pizza tonight.”
o Reality: Did you stick to your eating plan most of the week? If you did, then you are not giving yourself credit for all the positive things you did that week.
• Should: People sometimes have set ideas about how they should act. If you hear yourself saying that you or other people should, ought to, or have to do something, then you are possibly setting yourself up to feel bad.
o Example: “I should never have pizza or dessert.”
o Reality: If you really never want to have pizza or dessert again, that is fine. However, many people find a way to work these foods into their eating plan and stay at a healthy weight. They try to have a flexible eating plan.
• Overgeneralizing: This is taking one example and saying it is true for everything. Look for words such as “never” and “always.”
o Example: “I can never stick with an exercise plan.”
o Reality: Have you ever made a vow to exercise and stuck to it? If you did it before, you can do it again. Even if you were not able to do it in the past that does not mean you can not stick to a plan in the future.
• All-or-nothing thinking: This also is called black-or-white thinking.
o Example: “If I can not stay on my eating plan all the time, I will just give up.”
o Reality: Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. One slipup does not mean you can not get back to your plan the next day.

Have your clients correct their thoughts. After they check the truth of the thought, the next step is to correct it and replace the unhelpful thought with a more positive, helpful one.

Keeping a journal of thoughts is one of the best ways to practice watching, checking, and correcting thoughts. It helps your clients become more aware of their self-talk. An example of a thought diary follows. By writing thoughts down every day, helpful thoughts will soon come naturally.

Thought diary

Remind your clients that what they think can affect their actions, mood, and feelings. Thought-stopping will help change how they think, so that they feel better. Changing thinking will take some time. They will need to practice thought-stopping every day. After a while, they will have the ability to stop those unwanted thoughts right away. Stress that they can do it!