Marina Kogan is one of the co-authors of research into the Salutogenic Coaching model and its real-life applications, published in the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring in 2014. Researched through a triangulated study, which gathered data through multiple coaching methods, this approach is proven to help reduce stress, find meaning, and encourage positive mental and emotional well-being.

What is the Salutogenic Coaching Model?

Diagnosing strengths and finding ways to measure and assess positive changes helps life-coaching clients move forwards. People who use their own strengths and understand them are more likely to achieve their goals over both the long and short term – that’s why identifying each client’s values and beliefs is such a crucial part of life coaching.

Salutogenic coaching involves improving well-being by focusing on positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive environments. The original Salutogenic approach focused on creating a Sense of Coherence, made up of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. Creating a SoC helps coaching clients identify and manage their stress factors – part of the model is ensuring that everything about the process is easy to understand and applicable to each client’s situation.

The model can be applied to individuals, business owners, and SMEs to achieve specific desired outcomes on an individual and organisational level.

Will the Salutogenic Model Work for Me?

Marina has used the Salutogenic Model during workshops on Resistance and Stress Management and achieved excellent results.

The workshops involve analysing the nature of stress as a response to a chain of events, dissecting that information in smaller chunks, and creating methods to solve each problem – this all starts with awareness of the stress factors themselves and what tools each client has to overcome them. This observational approach empowers participants to reflect on their situation in a constructive way when they feel a situation has soured or become unmanageable.

Workshop participants and individual coaching clients talk about their Generalised Resistance Resources to look at the advantages of a situation, analyse their personal circumstances, and look at the resources at their disposal – many are surprised by just how many resources and strengths they have them looking at their problem using this approach.

The next stage of using the Salutogenic Model helps each participant feel supported, authentic, and validated to start a deeper evaluation of their lives and how they can apply their newly-realised skills.

What Does the Salutogenic Model Achieve?

Meaningfulness  – a belief that things in life are interesting and satisfactory, that events in life are really worth it and that there is good reason or purpose to care about what happens (Antonovsky, 1979; Steger, 2009)

Talking about their own lives, highlighting the most valuable parts of it, describing their values and checking the congruence with their actions makes participants more objective observers of their own situations, enabling them to implement the desirable changes. Rather than being overwhelmed by stress, they can deal with the root problems and know exactly what they need to do to eradicate those feelings from their lives.

Comprehensibility – a belief that you can understand events in your life and reasonably predict some outcomes in the future (Cilliars and Ngokha, 2006; Steger, 2009)

Moving to this stage with the participants is always enjoyable since they feel the heavy weight of stress being lifted and find meaning in their current circumstances.

Manageability – a belief that you have the skills, ability, support and resources necessary to manage events and take care of things within your control (Evered, and Selman, 1989 Cilliars and Ngokha, 2006)

Thus going methodically through stages allows every participant to identify their locus of personal control and support systems, to create a long-term manageability system that applies to their specific situation and world value system.

Using the Salutogenic Coaching Model allows each participant to create his or her personal strategy for reducing stress generally or managing stressful situations.

The Coaching Salutogenic Model empowers the participants, puts them in control and motivates them to implement positive changes.

 

“I take a coaching philosophy in most things that happen on a daily basis so I think some of the disciplines are ingrained in my thinking now and have started to become second nature.” – David Bannister, the Salutogenic Coaching Course graduate.

“Really good. It was brilliant seeing people’s demeanour changing as the course went on”. – Victoria Milner, AVOW Wrexham manager