Wellness theory is a broad term that encompasses many alternative and nontraditional health practices that reject dualism. These have met with more widespread acceptance during the latter half of the 20’h century Bolstered by globalization and New Age philosophy, massage therapy, acupuncture, and naturopathy have become regulated professions in some jurisdictions. Herbal remedies are being taken seriously by pharmaceutical researchers and by regulators. Along with research showing connections between physical and mental health, these trends have made dualism, or separation of mind and body, less hegemonic. The ancient concept of holism has been reintroduced to medical and related practices.
Even when people and their coaches understand the mindbody connection and identify the changes that must be made to maintain or restore health, the problem remains: how do you put those changes into action? Solving this problem is made more difficult by a mechanistic bias that sees change as related to a single external cause that has a one-way effect. Fortunately, in some fields, such as athletics, the drive to perform better and better has led to techniques for integrating mind-body dynamics. The success of goal setting, visualization, and finding a “zone” or state of mind for peak performance have been verified by research (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991) and the experience of athletes (Gallwey, 1981, 1987, 1997).
Attempting to help people change their physical and mental health habits and to improve performance has also contributed more generally to understanding what prevents and accelerates change for individuals and organizations. This follows the dictum of Kurt Lewin (1974) that we understand a system when we try to change it. What kind of change is valued and what is seen as threatening shifted during the second half of the 20’h Century. Gradual, step by-step change that minimized conflict or disruption was the preferred model until the political upheavals of the I960’s, the postmodern challenges to power structures of the l 970’s, and the l 980’s discoveries of systems whose appearance of chaos belies underlying order. Newer models of change (Prochaska, Norcross & DiClemente, 1994; Senge, 1990) assume that conflict is inevitable and disruption is sometimes unavoidable. Understanding holism as an aspect of systems helps us to define positive change not as movement toward an immutable target, but as dynamic stability, or the ability to move within parameters of chaos and rigidity toward goals that are continually informed and reformed by feedback (Siegel, 1999).
Thus, Western medicine, physiology, wellness theory, stress research, sports psychology, and change theory, in addition to applications of systems theory to human beings, all provided theories and research to help coaching answer the question “How can we be truly healthy?” Each of these fields contributed to coaching through shifts during the 20′” century from dualism through holism to dynamic stability.
As part of a whole mind/body/ system process of change, it is natural to wonder about and attempt to explain human behavior. We now turn to this question.
Why do we do what we do? During the 20″‘ century in North America, people who wanted to understand human behavior typically looked to psychology, which became what one historian described as “the ‘master’ science of human affairs” (Prilleltensky, I994, p. 28). The price psychology paid for its position required not only elevating the individual above systemic influences, but also limiting itself to a mechanistic definition of scientists as objective onlookers who ignore the input of those who are being studied. Thus, John Watson (1913) induced what appeared to be a neurotic fear of fuzzy animals by sounding a loud bell to frighten a toddler known as Little Albert. After losing his position at Johns Hopkins Medical School (not because of what happened to Little Albert but as a result of his infidelity), Watson went on to apply psychology to advertising and marketing, pioneering many of the techniques still taught to coaches in practice-building books and seminars. Behaviorism was also applied to war propaganda, political campaigns, and even torture and intimidation.
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