The Coaching Lab: Health, Wellness & Performance! (Brad Cooper, PhD)
Welcome to The Coaching Lab podcast, your trusted source for engaging, evidence-based, thought-provoking health, wellness & high-performance insights for those looking to improve their lives (or coaches/clinicians looking to enhance client outcomes). The Coaching Lab is the evidence-based journey toward better! If you've been looking for a health & wellness podcast that avoids the fluff and the headline-chasing fads while providing practical, real-world guidance, you just found it. We bring together the world's foremost experts, from world-class researchers and best-selling authors to elite athletes and coaches, sharing their insights about how to make the most of your personal and professional life. If you're looking for an entertaining format to help optimize your own health, wellness and performance through such evidence-based practices, this is the place for you!
The Coaching Lab podcast is hosted by Dr. Brad Cooper, who brings a uniquely expansive background to the table. He has a PhD in performance psychology along with Masters degrees in both physical therapy (MSPT) and business (MBA) and a Bachelors degree in biology. He is CEO/Co-founder of Catalyst Coaching, an internationally recognized speaker, and elite masters endurance athlete (11 time Ironman, including 4 times at the Hawaii Ironman World Championship, winner of the 2-person 3,000 cycling Race Across America and 2:47 marathoner). Most importantly, he's husband to Suzanna (celebrating 30 years of marriage) and Dad to three amazing kids, now ages 30, 28 and 25. You can tap into Dr. Cooper's "NOT DONE YET!" (Fitness & Life After 50) publication free of charge at https://betterpath.substack.com/
The Coaching Lab: Health, Wellness & Performance! (Brad Cooper, PhD)
How to Embrace Discomfort and Challenges (roll of the aMCC)
Ice baths, 4 AM wake-up calls, fasts and more are garnering big-time attention on social media and elsewhere as paths to mental toughness, personal success and more. Beyond the 15 minutes of fame garnered by the post, is there any legitimate science behind these and other less dramatic ways to step into and through discomfort? And why, in the midst of the growing popularity of these strategies, do most of us often find it difficult – not to step into an ice bath - but to simply get off the couch and get moving?
What does the science – the evidence - tell us? Is an ability to do hard things due to genetics? Habit? A combination of the two? Are there ways to enhance our ability to step into challenges with purpose? Or are we just stuck with the way we are, with no practical ways in which to enhance our skill set in this realm? In this episode, we’ll dig into these questions and more as we explore the part of the brain that appears to play a significant role in the process of moving outside our veritable comfort zones, and why it’s so important to both our current and future lives.
Bibliography
Feldman Barrett, Lisa. How Emotions Are Made. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Baumeister, Roy F., Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice. “Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (1998): 1252–65. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252.
Chen, Ying‐Chun, Yun‐Hsin Huang, and Nai‐Shing Yen. “Role of Anterior Midcingulate Cortex in Representation and Reward Allocation Judgments within Social Context.” Human Brain Mapping 43, no. 7 (May 2022): 2377–90. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25793.
Touroutoglou, Alexandra, Joseph Andreano, Bradford C. Dickerson, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. “The Tenacious Brain: How the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Contributes to Achieving Goals.” Cortex 123 (February 2020): 12–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2019.09.011.
Info re earning your health & wellness coaching certification, annual Rocky Mountain Coaching Retreat & Symposium & more via https://www.catalystcoachinginstitute.com/
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Tap into the home of the (freely available) Not Done Yet! articles on unlocking life's 2nd half here.
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If you are a current or future health & wellness coach, please check out our Health & Wellness Coaching Community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/278207545599218. This is a wonderful group if you are looking for encouragement, ideas, resources and more.
