Thinking about Behavior and Dr. Oz

One of my favorite television personalities is Dr. Oz. He covers so many important topics for women, not only about health care but life balance which is so important in today’s world. His personality, demeanor and approach to health care is absolutely fantastic. My goal is to share with Dr. Oz the work I do around leveraging behavior to improve one’s health of mind.

Recently, they aired a topic around a 38 year old woman named Rosemary, a health care nurse who was dealing with relatives with diabetes & Alzheimer’s, etc. and the stresses of having such a job. Additionally, her husband was out of work, therefore, requiring Rosemary to not only deal with the stresses of her job but also having to work 16 hours a day to keep food on the table.

What caught my interest in this particular episode was that Dr. Oz had a guest, Dr. Martha Beck, who is a very well known life coach. She began sharing and talking with Rosemary about her actions that are positioned by her “mental hygiene” and the fact that she was really a “care taker” at heart and that she needed to focus on rewarding herself from time to time. Now, I think that’s great but what jumped out to me is that no one was coaching Rosemary or talking about her behavior and how to leverage that. They all talked to her symptoms and not the root cause which really is “who am I” and what behavior is driving what I do.

My approach to coaching someone like this would be to have her take a behavioral assessment like our ProScan survey which would give Rosemary objective data about her natural behaviors. This would help her to ‘validate’ who she is and begin to recognize why she takes care of everyone else first before she takes care of herself. The information would help her realize that she is exactly who she is supposed to be and to maximize her great talents within, not think that something is wrong with her.

More than likely, this behavior trait that we are referencing also means that Rosemary never wants to say ‘no’ to people when asked to do things. Here again, she just adds more to her plate because she won’t want to turn anyone down and fall out of favor of someone. Recognizing how to find her own ‘voice’ and motivators would help her begin to take of herself and aligning that time of taking care of herself while taking care of others. Accepting and validating her own natural behaviors would be a fantastic first step to lessening an energy drain that she feels daily!