Some aspects of coaching are intuitive (like, be friendly), and some aspects are paradoxical and upside-down.
For example, in Motivational Interviewing, an effective communication style used in coaching and counseling, there is something called the “righting reflex.”
The righting reflex is the instinct to help or “fix” a client, as well as give them directions on how best to change. Often, the righting reflex is particularly strong in people who really, really care.
Sounds like a great instinct to follow if you’re a coach, right?
WRONG.
We are now entering upside-down-land.
Motivational Interviewing describes how this (beautiful, well-intentioned) instinct to help can actually hinder a client’s progress.
That’s because when we swoop in to fix, correct, or steer, clients often do the exact opposite of what we’re hoping for: They dig in and get defensive.
Push someone the “right” way and, paradoxically, they’ll start advocating for the very habits they came to you to change. You end up being the one arguing for change—which leaves them to argue against it. Everyone walks away a little more frustrated, and the client feels more stuck than ever.
Instead, great, experienced coaches learn to get curious instead of corrective. (They might even encourage the client to explore not changing!)
That’s just one example of an upside-down skill that separates a good coach from a masterful one. But it’s certainly not the only example.
Which brings us here.
We asked some of Precision Nutrition’s most seasoned PN Level 2 Master Health Coach Certified coaches a simple question:
What’s something you were sure about early in your career that you later had to unlearn?
Their (honest, and sometimes humbling) answers are below, plus the wiser way forward they adopted, and are now sharing with you.
Lesson to unlearn #1: Going into robot-detective mode before getting to know a client
Our first lesson to unlearn comes from PN in-house coach Jeremy Fernandes, PN2-MHC.
With over 14 years of coaching experience, Coach Jeremy is known for his friendly, comfortable, “talk to me like I’m your buddy” coaching style. Which is ironic, because as you’ll see, he started off his career leaning heavily on a rigid structure that was actually pushing clients away.
Here’s what Coach Jeremy has to say:
“I used to think being a coach meant I had all this information and I was just meant to spew it at someone.”
At the beginning of my career, when I’d been a personal trainer for a year or two, I had a friend ask if I offered nutrition coaching. And my first move was: Here are all of the forms. And when I say “all of the forms,” I mean all of them—I probably sent this person 20 pages to fill out.
They didn’t.
Three weeks later I had to hunt them down, and we ended up filling them out together—which took two and a half grueling hours.
If not for those forms, we could have started actually coaching, like, 20 days earlier.
Not long after, another friend showed up at my door with this white-hot intensity: “Tell me what to do, I’m ready,” they said. And I immediately dumped a metaphorical bucket of ice water on them with those darn forms. It was radio silence after that.
The problem was that I was operating like my sole job was to extract information from a person and then solve the mystery—as if I had some advanced pattern recognition about you that you didn’t have about yourself.
And unfortunately, I kept on that terrible path for a while.
What finally prompted a change was going through the Level 2 Master Health Coaching Certification.
Going through that course, I saw there was a better framework—one that doesn’t rely on me robotically extracting information.
I learned to let the client take the lead, and then just listen and maybe ask a few good questions. And it works so much better—for everyone.
Now I work from the assumption that my client knows themselves better than anyone. One of my most valuable questions is simply:
“What have you tried before, what did you like about it, and what didn’t you like?”
When I let people take the floor, they nail the really big stuff more often than not—in a way my paperwork and my detective work never facilitated.
Honestly, the forms were me projecting professionalism, because back then I didn’t feel like a professional. My identity as a coach never felt natural until after L2. Now, just letting someone talk feels like coaching. We start with a connection, and then I just let them fill in the gaps.
Lesson to unlearn #2: Treating a health goal like a destination you arrive at
The next lesson to unlearn comes from PN Director of Community Engagement and in-house coach Kate Solovieva, PN2-MHC.
With over 16 years of coaching experience, Coach Kate is known for her honesty and incisiveness. She has a way of dropping realness on her clients that may first feel like a shock, but ultimately ends up getting her clients to the heart of the matter much faster. But one hard truth she had to face was her own.
Here’s what Coach Kate has to say:
“I used to think that a goal is a destination. You pick a timeline, you do all the things, you arrive, and then it all becomes effortless.”
You know the story: You reach the healthy weight, the habits lock in, and the weight just stays stable on its own. You hit “save” and move on with your happily ever after.
And that is not the case at all.
At least most of the time. It’s true, some goals really are like that. If you want to run a marathon, you can pick a race date, follow a training program, show up to the start line, run it—and then you never have to run again and you will still have achieved that goal. That’s a real destination; you cross the finish line once and check the goal off.
But weight loss, muscle gain, body recomposition, building a habit of movement or eating well—those aren’t like that. Especially when the goal means working against a chronic tendency, like a predisposition to high blood pressure, or to hating exercise, or to living in a larger body than you’d prefer.
Those goals come with a pretty good amount of ongoing and intentional maintenance—daily, weekly, monthly. There’s no save button.
This realization didn’t come from one single client or one moment for me. It came through a collection of observations, including observations of myself. But once I saw it, it changed how I coach.
I realized that if there’s no real finish line, then my job is to manufacture finish lines along the way. That way, my clients continually feel like they’re accomplishing something satisfying.
I take the big goal and break it into something specific and daily—and then I insert smaller outcome goals into the journey.
For instance, someone going from sedentary to wanting to lose 100 pounds is facing a huge goal, full of behaviors and identities they’ll have to grow into. So along the way, we might set a goal of running a single mile without stopping. Strictly speaking, that doesn’t have much to do with the bigger goal—but it also has everything to do with it. It’s checkable. Achievable. Ideally it’s also something they’re a little excited about: fun, interesting, maybe even a little scary, but still within reach.
Because here’s the thing: It’s very hard to motivate the human brain to work out three times a week for the rest of their life to “get healthier.” “Being healthy” isn’t tangible, it’s not immediate—you can’t feel that far-off outcome in your body.
But striving towards a fun, achievable goal in the next three to six months? That’s real. It also builds in structure, and provides those little spikes of motivation—the hit of dopamine you get from working hard at something and actually accomplishing it.
Health isn’t something we ever fully “accomplish” or check off. So we have to give ourselves these little concrete goals along the way that we can feel and see and be delighted by.
Lesson to unlearn #3: Applying more structure and discipline when clients aren’t compliant
The next lesson to unlearn comes from PN content creator Azul Corajoria, CPT, PN2-MHC.
With over nine years of coaching experience, Coach Azul’s coaching fingerprint is empathetic, relatable, and endlessly encouraging.
While these traits always came naturally to her, for a long time, she thought she had to adopt an opposite style to help certain clients (and herself) to “get back in line” when habits didn’t go as planned.
Here’s what Coach Azul has to say:
“Most people don’t need more discipline; they need more self-compassion.”
Early in my coaching career, I thought that if someone wasn’t following through on what they said they would do, it’s because they needed more structure or just to get their “head in the game.”
I couldn’t understand why someone would invest in coaching and then not do the things we planned.
It was especially confusing because most of my clients had “discipline.” They were successful, responsible, hardworking people who showed up for their jobs, families, and everyone else in their lives.
Meanwhile, I was also “disciplined” in many areas of my life—yet I also struggled with eating well and exercising consistently.
At this time, I felt this lack of consistency was my fault, and went straight to being really angry at myself. I thought I was just missing the “perfect something” (the perfect workout, the perfect diet) to help me change, so I’d just move from thing to thing, but each one would bring fresh disappointment.
I was incredibly frustrated by this cycle, and my response was to get stricter and harsher with myself.
It’s hard to say when it all changed. It wasn’t an overnight epiphany; it was a culmination of years of getting curious, being open to different methods, like the Body Positivity Movement and Intuitive Eating. I dove into self-compassion and positive psychology research, and I went through the PN Level 2 Master Health Coaching Certification.
I applied everything I learned, and I noticed that the more open and curious I was, the better my clients responded. Slowly, that turned into the realization that the more open and curious I was with myself, the better I would respond.
It changed my world.
I stopped binge eating. I started enjoying exercise more. I took more career risks.
I learned that when we can respond to a setback with curiosity instead of punishment, we’re much more likely to stay engaged. When I allow myself to be disappointed by an action, take responsibility for it, and remain on my own side, I feel safer reflecting and taking risks. The more I do that, the more likely I am to achieve the things I want.
Sometimes the most helpful thing we can teach a client (and ourselves) is not how to push harder or “just be more disciplined.” It’s how to make a mistake, remain on our own side, and keep going.
Because self-compassion is not the opposite of accountability; it’s often what makes accountability possible. (I call it “compassionate accountability.”)
None of us will ever be the “perfect” coach, and we don’t have to be. The more human I’ve allowed myself to be, the better relationships I’ve had with my clients. My biggest goal as a coach is to create an environment my client feels safe to come back to with not only their wins, but their losses. The safer they feel being honest and open with me, the safer they’ll feel to try new things—and over time they’ll build the confidence to do it themselves.
Lesson to unlearn #4: Thinking I get to define a client’s “progress”
The next lesson to unlearn comes from PN in-house coach and Level 2 Master Health Coaching Certification instructor Dom Matteo, PN2-MHC, NBC-HWC.
With over 16 years of coaching experience, Coach Dom stands out for his non-judgemental attitude and excellent listening skills. For Dom, these traits are relatively inherent, but they’ve also been carefully developed and honed, in part by letting go of what he calls the “coach’s ego”—the assumption that he already knew what a client’s success should look like, and that he was the one who got to keep score.
Here’s what Coach Dom has to say:
“I used to think the client’s ultimate goal was the one they named—’lose 50 pounds’, ‘lose 20 pounds.’”
I took that stated goal at face value, and treated whatever number they gave me as the measuring stick, as the most important thing to work towards.
But then, I’d see a client struggling to do their actions even 50 percent of the time, and I’d think: ‘This person is never going to be happy, because this won’t get them to the goal weight they told me they wanted.’
Remember, I assumed the number was the real goal.
However, again and again, those same clients would turn out to be genuinely happy with their progress, not because they hit their exact goal, but because they felt so much better about themselves and their lives.
What I learned is that the stated outcome was almost never the true goal for many of them. When they said ‘lose 50 pounds,’ what they really meant was: I want to feel better. And being consistent even half the time, over a year, netted results they were thrilled with. Because they felt better. They felt different.
So the thing I had to let go of was my own scorecard. Who am I to tell a client that what they’re doing isn’t good enough, if they’re happy with how things are going?
My new definition of progress became less about approaching a specific final number and more about another question: “Am I a little better today than I was yesterday?”
These days, I spend time up front helping a client build what we call a “wellness vision.” We clarify their values, and what success actually looks and feels like to them.
Then, instead of assuming I know how to measure their progress, I’ll ask: “How will you know if this is helping? How do you want to measure success?”
The result is that even a client who’s fixated on the scale can see other signs of progress long before the scale actually changes. And often, those other signs are the things they really wanted to change in the first place.
It turns out the most useful thing I can provide isn’t a judgement about whether a client is succeeding. Instead, it’s to help them determine and notice their own success, by their own measures.
Lesson to unlearn #5: Focusing on client results instead of the whole person
The next lesson to unlearn comes from PN in-house coach and Level 2 Master Health Coaching Certification instructor Jason Bonn, PN2-MHC, NBC-HWC.
With over 18 years of coaching experience, Coach Jason’s clients describe him as patient, observant, and deeply dedicated. He has a knack for spotting a client’s potential—though as you’ll read in this story, Coach Jason learned that getting too focused on a specific version of that potential sometimes kept him from seeing other ways his clients could grow and thrive.
Here’s what Coach Jason has to say:
“I used to believe that if we kept tweaking exercise or nutrition, we’d eventually find the combination that’d get a stalled client moving.”
For me, progress felt like a puzzle to solve: I’d play with adjustments to exercise volume or intensity, calorie or protein intake, eating more slowly, eating to 80 percent fullness, all the fundamental stuff.
But then, because of one client I still think about, I began to shift how I thought about “progress.”
He was in our PN coaching program. He lost 40 to 50 pounds in his first six months—which was great—but then everything stalled.
We tried adjustment after adjustment for the next two and a half years. We added more protein, more cardio, and worked through his particular peccadillo, eating corn chips at night. But none of it moved his numbers.
What got me was that he kept showing up anyway: three straight years, re-enrolling each time, even though the scale had plateaued.
That told me something was working for him—it just wasn’t something I recognized yet.
In his third year, we stopped looking only at the gym and his diet, and started looking at his whole life. He was a landscape painter, so we built his practices around that instead: make a sketch or work on a painting daily, anything that sparked some joy or interest. Within a couple of weeks, he was getting on his bike and riding out to further places for different scenery to paint.
In part because of this client, I’m now a lot more cognizant of coaching the whole person, and considering their Deep Health. Weight and performance numbers are just one piece of a much bigger picture that includes relationships, emotional wellbeing, and what someone finds meaningful.
I’ve also stopped zeroing in on “problem” behavior.
I try to understand a person’s life overall—not just the behavior I’ve been hired to help with—because there’s a connectedness to it all, and behavior tends to emerge within the context of someone’s life.
I’ve also stopped treating the coaching relationship as a means to an outcome and started treating it as the main thing—the sun that everything orbits, the glue that holds it all together.
That client kept coming back for three years because the relationship mattered to him. By the end, I’d stopped thinking I was failing him. The weight loss was such a small part of the success. The relationship was the bigger piece.
Becoming an excellent coach isn’t about having all the “right” answers.
Coaching mastery isn’t about stockpiling more information. (Your clients can Google information or ask a chatbot, and so can you.)
It’s about developing the judgment to know when to use what you know, when to set it aside, and when the most helpful thing you can do is nothing at all, except be there.
But that kind of judgment is hard to build alone; it takes practice, expert feedback, and a few humbling moments with real clients—which is exactly what the PN Level 2 Master Health Coach Certification is designed to offer.
With enough practice, self-awareness, and the right training, you can gain the wisdom and skill of the above coaches.
But the best coaches, it turns out, are defined less by what they know than by what they’ve been willing to unlearn.
Ready to move from competent to truly masterful—in 20 weeks?
The PN Level 2 Master Health Coaching Certification is an advanced, practice-based program designed for coaches who want to work at a deeper level—and do it sooner than the traditional 5–10 year path.
This is not a nutrition course.
It’s a mentored, small-group experience that prepares you to:
- Work confidently with complex client realities like stress, mental health, and emotional setbacks
- Apply behavior change principles that hold up when life gets messy
- Understand clients beyond food and fitness—so change actually lasts
You’ll learn directly from PN’s most experienced coaches through weekly live mentorship, structured self-study, and real-world coaching practice.
Why it matters
Level 2 is NBHWC-approved, making graduates eligible for:
- National Board Certification through the NBHWC
- Professional membership with the Health Coaches Alliance (HCA)
These credentials expand your career options and set you apart in an increasingly crowded field.
