? You can create a climate where realistic, positive change can occur, instead of setting yourself (and your program participants) 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 help program participants stay motivated and watch them make new, healthy habits a permanent part of their daily lives.

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

? figuring out instruments and other tools that accurately assess participants' 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 Health Coach

In today's busy 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 helping. 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 online program that expands the range of support available to those wishing to make healthy lifestyle changes. The program, Gold's Gym Health Coach, focuses on the everyday challenges of making positive lifestyle changes and has the advantages of being more customized 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 help individuals think through the issues and come to their own conclusions. The coach offers ideas for consideration, helps the person to generate their own ideas, helps the member 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 peoples and Health Coaches are able to build significant relationships via internet-based communication. Making use of industry leading technology a Gold's Gym Health Coach is able to offer members 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 Health 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 member's online personal library. The site also contains various programs and tools which are designed to aid the coach and member to set, implement and track personal goals.

The collaborative relationship formed between a member and coach enhances the quality and efficiency of service. The familiarity that a coach creates with a member'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 Health Coach has developed a protocol based on central 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 Health 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.

Individuals need help with the follow-through.