437-How to Onboard and Assess New Clients Without Diet Culture

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to It’s Beyond The Food Podcast. I’m your host, Stephanie Dodier, and today is a special podcast episode.

[00:00:07] We’re actually gonna do a mini training on how to use the non-diet client assessment tool where you download our assessment, and I’m gonna give all the instruction right now and it’s totally free. The training is free. The assessment tool is free, and I’m gonna walk you through step by step on how to assess a new client.

[00:00:29] And I’m also gonna talk about the onboarding process, where we start from where we find a client. To how we get started with a client, and this is gonna help all of you clear the confusion that you may have at the start of a coaching relationship with a client where you may be thinking, I don’t know how to start with a new client, or I often hear.

[00:00:57] I feel a lack of structure when using the non-diet approach, specifically for new coaches who are transitioning to from a diet culture model of care, a model of coaching, which your client to a weight neutral approach, this feeling that. You don’t know exactly how to address the structure in your coaching relationship.

[00:01:24] This tool will provide you with exactly where to start with each client and which priority to put into your coaching structure so you can help your client achieve their result that they desire as quickly as possible. So here’s what we’re gonna do in this episode. I’m gonna walk you through the goal in assessing a client and I’m gonna walk you through the eating assessment, the body image assessment, and also the mindset assessment that you can go download for free.

[00:02:00] And I’m gonna give you the URL right now. You can also access the link to download your free non-diet assessment coaching tool in the show note, wherever platform you’re listening right now, we have embedded the link where you simply gonna give us your first name and your email address and I’m gonna ship the PDF to you.

[00:02:22] So here’s, if you’re listening live, you want the URL www.stephaniedodier.com/clientassessment. Now I also want to acknowledge perhaps a group of you who are getting the link to listen to this mini training and it’s the first time listening to our podcast. So if that’s you, welcome. It is Beyond the Food Podcast.

[00:02:55] I’ve been hosting this podcast now for almost nine years. We have over, as you can tell, 436 episode. You take your time scrolling through all the other episode to help you understand the non-diet coaching certification, the weight neutral approach to health, body image, and also a little bit of business.

[00:03:21] And we’re gonna deliver the mini training starting now. Now, if you’re listening to the podcast for a very long time, for you, it’s perhaps to go get the free version of the Non Diet Coaching Assessment Tool so you can follow along this Surprise mini training that I’m giving you today.

[00:03:41] Let’s get started. I wanna recognize one important component of onboarding and assessing client because we have a wide spectrum of people listening to this podcast. You perhaps are a non-diet professional already, or perhaps you’re brand new. Perhaps you’re a dietician, perhaps you are a therapist your work with your client goes beyond health and eating. This tool that I’m gonna share with you today will give you the baseline assessment for eating body image and mindset, and you are welcome to embed all the other tool that you have for your own practice. If you are a health coach and perhaps you were giving.

[00:04:33] Other assessment tool, particularly around health promoting behavior in eating. I encourage you to consider, at least for the eating behavior, to switching to our assessment tool because it is based on eating behavior that are not influenced from diet culture. No matter where you are in the spectrum of profession or coaching specialty, I guarantee you that you will benefit from integrating one, two, or the three part of this assessment in your onboarding process.

[00:05:15] When we teach assessment and onboarding inside the non diet coaching certification, we believe that that’s how we set the relationship with our coaching client. In my experience in the one of my students, it established a strong foundation of trust. When you assess your client specifically on the element that will influence their goal in working with you, because you will ask very specific question.

[00:05:54] There’s 20 question per assessment, we have three assessment, 20 question. Your client will feel heard, your client will begin also understanding what gets in the way of them achieving their goal through the assessment process. So for me, it’s a win-win on both sides. It’s a clear return on investment of the time involved in assessing both on eating body image and mindset.

[00:06:30] It also set a very professional first impression when you come to the table, structured and organized on your very first session with your client with a clear detail process to make sure you understand them, their problem and their goal in depth, and that also helped build that trust with your client.

[00:07:02] You’ll see in the assessment. We ask very specific question related obviously to a weight neutral approach to health, and what is mostly present in clients that prevents them from achieving. A normal relationship to food normal. I’m using air quotes. If you’re listening to me on the podcast, I’m using the air quote.

[00:07:30] If you’re watching the video, which by the way, if you rather receive this mini training in a video, in the show note, you will see also a link to our YouTube channel to watch me live. So the assessment help you identify the triggers that prevents your client from having a normal relationship to food to their body, and also the mindset blocks that are in the way of them being able to create new behavior and also resistance.

[00:08:02] Now, I wanna mention very quickly here, we recommend doing the assessment live with your client. Now, I know some training and some certification recommend to send the assessment to your client before the first session and have them do it on their own. I don’t recommend that, and I’ll tell you why.

[00:08:27] Because when you can watch your client, when you can watch the body language of your client, as you move through question by question, it gives you an insight in their nervous system because the way that the nervous system externalize is through body language, right? It externalize through behavior.

[00:08:54] We’ll get to this in the assessment, but the way your, your client expression faces smile. Even in sometime tears, I have seen some profound radical shift on the first session with client who realized right away what had been missing. This whole time, all the things that they’d done, the books, the podcasts that they listened to, the prior coaches, they worked through, nobody had asked them those question.

[00:09:25] And as I asked the question, and I remember vividly a client, the tears started to flow. Would I have done these assessments, send it to them, and had them done on their own, I would’ve missed all this information. So for me and my student, we do these assessment live and we pay attention. They’re trained to pay attention to body language.

[00:09:51] And also when you do this live with a client and they feel heard, they feel seen it creates an open environment, and it’s very relevant for us when we do cognitive behavior coaching that somatically inform. We have an environment where the client can feel safe, having emotion, can feel safe talking about their emotion, and they know that you will hold a safe space for them and that.

[00:10:24] Start from session number one and when we can do these very in depth assessment with them, being able to identify those, trigger those releases, it set that beautiful, open and honest environment for them. And the last part for me that is critical in doing assessment is help define success. When we do these assessment, I recommend we do them on session one, halfway through the coaching package, the coaching relationship, and at the end.

[00:10:57] Now I wanna caveat here. We train folks to do health promoting behavior change, and we recommend a minimum of three months working with clients, and up to six months the average. Behavior change is done over a period of six to 12 months when we’re talking about lifelong sustainable behavior that have a three phase approach, learn, build, and have the length of the package increase.

[00:11:29] So when we are talking about defining success and being able to reevaluate halfway through a six month package, it motivates your client by showing them all the progress that they’ve done. Because human being are not great. Like this is not an innate scale that I have found in most of the individual I work with.

[00:11:51] People that tend to come to dieting, recovery, weight neutral approach to health are very good at self criticism. They’re not very good at recognizing their own success and win. So when we evaluate halfway through, we redo the assessment halfway through and we see all these points, an element that have changed.

[00:12:17] It motivates your client to keep going. Now, using the assessment at the end of the package helps your clients see the value in your coaching and also set you up for outstanding testimonial that you can use on your website, you can use in your webinar, you can use in social media to help you build trust with your next client.

[00:12:44] Okay. Without any further ado, let’s get started with the non diet coaching assessment tool, I’ve mentioned a number of time now. It is three section, so if you have the PDF and you will help, you will hear me. Can you hear rustling of paper right now? ’cause I have the PDF printout in front of me. You don’t have to print it, you can use it digitally.

[00:13:08] Mind you, if you’re going to do it live with the client, you perhaps want it printed, but up to you. It’s set up both way. I’m gonna flip to page five. Page five is your mindset assessment. You’ll see on page six there is the scoring and there’s also a brief text about why we’re evaluating mindset and how does that play in your relationship to food and also to health behavior.

[00:13:41] And then we carry on, on page seven with eating and on page nine with the body image assessment, their place in this order very specifically because again, based on what we teach inside the non diet coaching certification, that’s the best way for us to introduce each element of a non diet coaching structure or package that your client is working with by starting with mindset eating.

[00:14:12] And for most people, body image is kind of a surprise. They’re like, oh, really? Why are we talking about body image? So we put that at the end. So let’s start with the first one, mindset assessment. The mindset assessment is there to help you understand how your client think, not just what they do.

[00:14:35] Because very often when people come to behavior coaching, they wanna jump in right away to getting the plan to change their behavior. Because it’s not their job to understand cognitive behavior coaching. They come to you to solve a problem, a behavioral problem that they have. They just wanna see the result.

[00:14:55] Now it’s up to you as the leader of the relationship, the professional, to understand and to also make clear to your client that we’re gonna dig into your thoughts, your belief system, and your emotions. This is where we’re gonna introduce this topic and evaluate how people relate to their thoughts, to their emotion, their ability to regulate their emotion, their emotional intelligence, their ability also to be flexible in their thoughts.

[00:15:27] Cognitive flexibility and tapping in a little bit, also into self-belief and self-esteem. And again, when we’re talking about lifelong sustainable behavior change, particularly using cognitive behavior coaching, the ability for us as a professional to understand where they are in their mindset is critical.

[00:15:50] This will also help you identify patterns of perfectionism, all or nothing thinking, imposter syndrome, fear of getting it wrong. All the cognitive distortion that are particular to the client in front of you. Now I wanna make a little kind of, a side note here. It is assume if you’re performing this assessment that you are trained and capable of delivering mindset coaching.

[00:16:23] So if you do not have the training that will enable you to deliver mindset coaching, I would skip it. ’cause the last thing you want is position yourself in a place where you are talking about mindset and you’re showing your client all these cognitive distortion, these mindset challenges that they have, and never talk about it again because that’s not part of your coaching system.

[00:16:50] So this assume that you have mindset coaching. And again, this is based on our framework. We teach cognitive behavior coaching. Now if you flip to page six, you will see that we have an assessment, a grading system that I have created because I’m the author of those assessments. Now, the other piece I wanna mention, I wanna make clear, these assessment are simplified version of much more complex assessment that exists. So for an example, the next assessment we’ll talk about the eating assessment is based on the research and the work of Tilka and the Intuitive Eating Assessment Scale. Now, I took the Intuitive Eating Assessment Scale, simplified it to make it really easy to use.

[00:17:43] And the same thing with the body image assessment. I simplified the body image assessment from Thomas Cash, which is very complex for all the good reason, but it’s 32 pages long, which wasn’t viable in a coaching environment. These assessment are created based on academic, evident based standard, and to be delivered in measurable research.

[00:18:13] That’s why those assessments were created. So the viability of them in a coaching environment was very difficult. So I simplified them, put them together, and recreated a grading system that is aligned to the type of coaching that we’re doing. I’m gonna move on to the next one. The eating assessment.

[00:18:33] This one looks at the overall relationship that your client has to food and eating. Again, simplified version of the intuitive eating assessment and it’s formatted to go in alignment to the five step process that we teach on how to deliver intuitive eating in our certification. The tool will allow you to measure your client’s awareness and attunement to hunger full and satisfaction.

[00:19:07] Eating cue it will help you evaluate their relationship with nutrition, particularly gentle nutrition. It will help you evaluate if and when they are using food to cope with their emotion, and also identified food rules, restrictive behavior, the overall spectrum of rebellious eating. This is really important.

[00:19:36] It’s gonna help you craft an individual approach based on the result that your client has and the conversation you’re gonna find yourself having with your client as you do. This will be phenomenal. That’s the best word I can use with it, because so many people I’ve put through these assessments think that a normal eating behavior is one that is restrictive.

[00:20:07] People do not have an understanding of what a intuitive relationship to food, a normal relationship to food can look like, and this is the gateway for you to start having the discussion with your client around quote, normal eating behavior. Now, as you learn how to coach behavior, you will understand that the most important element of a behavioral change is establishing why.

[00:20:40] Your client has the current behavior and what the why that will motivate the next transformative behavior they want to achieve. The why is the biggest piece. This assessment will help you dig into the why it is not focused on what people specifically are eating. It’s not focused on when, on how, where people are eating.

[00:21:05] That is not the focus of this assessment. So if you’re a dietician and you’re doing specific nutritional assessment, you want to keep that in because this is not the assessment for this. This is really about the element that drives the eating behavior, and you will see that the assessment is focused on the end goal of intuitive eating.

[00:21:28] Behavioral changes. So you’ll see that the grading is around this. Moving on to the last assessment, the body image assessment it is based on the body neutrality framework that I created and teach inside of my program. It is unique to us. The assessment will help you evaluate, determine and identify the thoughts, the assumption, the beliefs, even the protective strategy, protective behavior that your client in front of you deploys in response, their current body image.

[00:22:18] It will help you understand where they are on the spectrum of healing their relationship to their body. And I wanna be clear that for many clients, this is the last assessment. It’s for us set up in that order because they will come to you with goals around eating. I’m thinking of all the fitness professional where kind will come to you for health promoting behavior, fitness, or even eating, but they do not know that their body image is the driving force behind their eating behavior, their health.

[00:23:01] Promoting behavior that they have that they want help working with you. This is going to be the introduction of how body image plays a role in what they’re challenged with right now, and they’re coming to you for help and I share this because just on Thursday, I’m recording this podcast on a Sunday, but on Thursday we had our weekly office hours for the current court to the certification and I was talking to two dietician that were taking the training and.

[00:23:39] Since they have introduced this assessment in their onboarding of all their client, it has fast track their client’s results. Because when a client comes to you with fitness or eating problems that they want you to help them with and they’re not aware of body image and you start seeing it come to play, perhaps in session two, session three.

[00:24:05] There’s always this awkward moment to say, okay, it’s clear. This is you, the coach. It’s clear in my head that their body image is the root cause of all their problem, but they have no idea and have not talked about it up to now. Because it wasn’t part of your onboarding, it wasn’t part of your assessment, and you gotta introduce this topic into the conversation, and your client feels a bit.

[00:24:32] Surprise. Surprise is the best word. So by introducing this on session number one, it allows you to open up the conversation, not only get an assessment, but open up the conversation on session one, two, and three on how perhaps the body image is playing a role into their current challenge. The other element I wanna mention for your benefit as the person who will lead this assessment with other human being.

[00:25:05] This is again, based on the framework of body neutrality and it’s going to help you move your client from body neutrality to body respect. So we have a body image healing roadmap where we move people from, people enter the world typically on a body dissatisfaction. So if you flip to page 10. You will see that in the grading system from nine to 12, which is conflicted body image, five to eight, which is negative body image and zero to four, which is violent body image people.

[00:25:40] Most clients will come in, in this stages of express body dissatisfaction. The next stages, the baseline of the body image work is changing the belief system, which is body neutrality. And then reintroducing health, promoting behavior from a place of respect instead of control, because that’s what diet culture teaches us, right?

[00:26:06] That we should be able to control our body, and that tool is. One of the thing we need to use is controlling our eating behavior to control our body. So body respect shift the motivator of the behavior change from body control, AKA weight loss to health promoting behavior from a long-term perspective.

[00:26:36] So that is the third and last assessment included in the non diet coaching assessment tool. Now I wanna talk about the onboarding process. I’m gonna be very brief on this because again, there’s a wide spectrum of professional here. But I wanna say this. So typically people will come to you already knowing of a problem, a challenge they have.

[00:27:05] They met you somewhere in marketing land, social media, networking event, recommendation, referral with a problem that they want to be solved. We recommend that you set up a consultation with all your clients. So we teach a consultation process called Ethical consultation, which shifts the purpose of the consultation from sell script pressure, coercion to.

[00:27:35] Starting to set up a specific goal, understanding when we do a consultation, an ethical consultation, it’s about getting to know the person in front of us, getting to know the struggle that they’re experiencing and where they want to go. So that is even before your first session. Because very often people are like, well, can I set up goals and do the assessment?

[00:28:02] In the very first session? I’m like, eh, if it’s the first time you’re meeting the person, you probably can’t do it all. Your onboarding process typically will start with a consultation where you get to know each other. Clear up what they wanna work on and the desired outcome they’re chasing that they want to create for themselves.

[00:28:27] Then we bring in the assessment. Once that goal setting is done, however you’re doing it, then the assessment can come in and you very specifically hold the space where each assessment is to help them achieve their desired outcome and helping them identify what’s in the way of achieving their desired outcome.

[00:28:54] So typically onboarding process will go from marketing, however, marketing is for you, consultation, goal setting, and then assessment. Now, before I let you go in this training, here’s what I’m gonna make a big statement here. I demand from you is that you actually put yourself through these assessment first.

[00:29:23] Now we teach and we live through a place of embodiment. In my world, we embody what we teach, coach, and recommend that other do, including our assessments. I would love for you to do these assessments, and if you have any question, please reach out to me. Where you can find me is on Instagram. You can DM me @stephdodier.

[00:29:50] I would love to hear from you, and then if it’s clear on how you can use and what kind of results you can get, then you can start integrating them in your practice and assessing your client based on your coaching skillset for each of the three elements. If you want more training on how to coach mindset, how to coach body image, how to coach, eating behavior, health behavior, that’s what we do inside the non-direct coaching certification, where we teach you the coaching skill, the application, and the embodiment for you as the professional. The certification opens two to three times a year if you’re listening to this in a timely fashion. The next one, the next cohort will be in October, 2025.

[00:30:46] If not, join the wait list, stephaniedodier.com/waitlist and you will be notified when the next cohort open. So there we go. That was your mini training on how to onboard and assess client using a non diet coaching approach. I know this is gonna change not only your life as a professional, but your clients. Ease and speed to get the outcome that they desire. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast episode.

[00:31:27] Wanna coach behaviors, not bodies. Learn the mindset tool and the method that create real changes.

[00:31:35] Join the wait list for the next cohort of the non diet coaching certification at stephaniedodier.com/waitlist. That’s where the real training begins, and I’ll see you on the other side, my sisters.