Identifying and Addressing Cognitive Distortions in Your Clients

For years, I thought my job was to write better programs, dial in macros more precisely, and find the perfect exercise progression for each client. I believed that if I could just make the plan good enough, detailed enough, foolproof enough, then my clients would succeed.

But they didn’t. At least, not consistently.

I’d watch clients flame out after a single missed workout. I’d see people abandon perfectly good nutrition plans because they ate one unplanned cookie. I’d get messages from clients who were ready to quit entirely because the scale went up two pounds overnight, or because they “failed” by having dessert at a family gathering.

And for a long time, I blamed myself. I thought I wasn’t explaining things clearly enough. I thought I needed better accountability systems, more check-ins, and stricter protocols.

Then I realised that the biggest obstacle to my clients’ success wasn’t their lack of knowledge or their lack of discipline. It was the way they thought about their choices.

The stories they told themselves, the interpretations they made, the meaning they attached to ordinary moments, these invisible narratives were sabotaging progress long before any actual behaviour happened. A single unplanned meal would trigger a cascade of thoughts that turned a neutral event into a full-blown crisis. And I was completely missing it because I was too focused on the meal itself, not on what was happening in my client’s head.

Here’s the paradox I’ve come to understand: real change happens when you stop fighting yourself. The more my clients tried to force perfection through sheer willpower, the more they struggled. But when they learned to notice their thinking patterns and respond with flexibility instead of rigidity, everything shifted. This is what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls psychological flexibility, the ability to be present with your experience, connected to your values, and capable of taking effective action even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings.

This is what I want to teach you today. Because if you can get good at identifying and addressing cognitive distortions in your clients, you’ll become a dramatically more effective coach. You’ll stop losing clients to preventable spirals. You’ll help people build sustainable habits instead of white-knuckling their way through rigid protocols. And you’ll finally understand why some clients succeed with even imperfect plans while others struggle with perfect ones.

Let’s start with the foundation.

TL;DR

Very often, the biggest obstacle to client success isn’t lack of knowledge or discipline, it’s cognitive distortions. These are the automatic thought patterns that turn neutral events into crises. When a client eats one unplanned meal and thinks “I’ve ruined everything,” that interpretation, not the meal itself, triggers the spiral. These distortions, like all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filters, moralising food, catastrophising, and others, are wired neural patterns strengthened by repetition and evolution’s negativity bias. 

Real behaviour change requires psychological flexibility: the ability to notice distorted thoughts, examine them without being controlled by them, and take value-aligned action anyway. 

As a coach, learn to identify these patterns in client language and behaviour, then use Socratic questioning to help clients separate thoughts from facts, feelings from evidence, and behaviour from identity. However, this isn’t therapy; it’s essential coaching that addresses the invisible game determining whether your clients succeed with even imperfect plans or struggle with perfect ones. 

Anyone can write a program, but coaches who teach clients to manage their thinking create transformations that last.

What Are Cognitive Distortions?

A cognitive distortion is a habitual, automatic way of thinking that feels completely true in the moment but doesn’t actually reflect reality. It’s not your client being dramatic or weak or self-sabotaging on purpose. It’s their brain running an old script, a mental shortcut that’s been practised so many times it feels like fact.

What makes this particularly insidious from a neuroscience perspective is that these thought patterns are literally etched into your client’s neural architecture. Neurons that fire together wire together, so every time your client has the thought “I ruined everything” after one unplanned meal, they’re strengthening that neural pathway. They’re making that distortion more automatic, more convincing, more likely to fire again next time.

Evolution has actually made this worse. Your client’s brain didn’t evolve to make them happy or successful at modern nutrition goals. It evolved to keep them alive in an ancestral environment where threats were immediate and physical. This is why we have a negativity bias, which is the brain’s tendency to pay more attention to negative information than positive. In the savanna, the cost of missing a threat (death) was much higher than the cost of missing an opportunity (a meal you could catch tomorrow). So our brains became threat-detection machines.

But in the modern context of health and fitness, that same negativity bias means one “bad” food choice feels enormously bigger than a dozen good ones. The mental filter that helped your ancestors survive is now the thing keeping your clients stuck.

Think about it this way. Someone has an unplanned meal at a work lunch. That’s just an event, neutral in itself. But immediately, their brain assigns meaning to it. For one person, it might just be “I ate lunch.” For another, it becomes “I have no discipline. I always mess up. I might as well give up for the rest of the day.” Same event. Completely different story. And that story determines what happens next.

This is where the pragmatist philosopher William James offers us a crucial insight. James argued that truth isn’t some abstract, perfect correspondence to reality. Truth is what works. An idea is “true” if it helps us live better, if it produces useful outcomes in our actual lives. So when your client has the thought “I ruined everything,” the question isn’t just “is this accurate?” The question is: does this thought help you or hurt you? Does it move you toward your goals or away from them?

Unfortunately, a lot of people are running scripts that actually hurt them, rather than help them.

This is why cognitive distortions matter so much in coaching. They don’t just affect how your clients think, they directly influence behaviour. This is where understanding what psychologist Albert Ellis called the ABC model from Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy is super helpful. A is the Activating event (eating an unplanned meal), B is the Belief about that event (the cognitive distortion: “I’ve ruined everything”), and C is the emotional and behavioural Consequence (guilt, shame, giving up for the day, binge eating).

Most people think A causes C. The event causes the consequence. But Ellis showed us that it’s B that creates C. It’s not the meal that causes the spiral, it’s what your client tells themselves about the meal.

A distorted thought creates an emotional response, and that emotional response drives action or inaction. The client who thinks “I ruined everything” is far more likely to actually ruin the rest of their day than the client who thinks “that was just lunch.”

I see this constantly in client check-ins. Someone will tell me they “failed” this week, and when I dig into the details, I find out they followed their plan six out of seven days, hit their protein target most days, got in four workouts, and slept well. But they’re fixated entirely on the one day that didn’t go perfectly. That’s not an accurate assessment of their week; it’s a cognitive distortion called a mental filter, and it’s destroying their motivation.

The crucial insight here, and this is something I wish someone had told me years ago, is that thoughts are not facts. They’re interpretations. They’re stories your brain tells to make sense of what’s happening, and those stories are shaped by past experiences, cultural messages, perfectionism, fear, and dozens of other factors that have nothing to do with what’s actually true.

The map is not the territory. Your client’s thoughts about reality are not reality itself. They’re a map, and like all maps, they can be inaccurate, outdated, or completely wrong. Your job as a coach isn’t just to give people workout plans and meal templates. It’s to help them see when their map is warping the territory, and to give them better, more accurate maps to work with.

Because before someone can build new habits, they often have to build a new narrative about what their actions mean. This connects directly to Carol Dweck’s groundbreaking work on mindset. People with a fixed mindset see their abilities and outcomes as permanent and unchangeable. One failure is proof of who they are. But people with a growth mindset see abilities as trainable and setbacks as information. The same event, interpreted through different lenses, creates completely different trajectories.

Once you stop taking every thought as gospel, you stop being pushed around by mental scripts that don’t serve you. And from there, real behaviour change gets a whole lot easier.

So let’s talk about what these distortions actually look like in practice, because you need to be able to recognise them in real time if you’re going to help your clients work through them.

The Main Cognitive Distortions You’ll See in Clients

When I’m reviewing client check-ins or talking to someone in a session, I’m listening for specific patterns in how they describe their experience. These patterns show up again and again across different clients, different situations, and different contexts. Once you know what to listen for, you’ll start hearing them everywhere.

What we’re really talking about here is what Aaron Beck, the founder of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, called the cognitive triad: negative views of the self, the world, and the future. When someone is stuck in distorted thinking, all three of these dimensions get warped. They see themselves as inadequate, the world as unfairly demanding, and the future as hopeless. These aren’t three separate problems, they’re a self-reinforcing system, a feedback loop that spirals downward unless you interrupt it.

I’ve organised these distortions into four categories based on where they show up: how clients interpret their actions, how they talk to themselves, how they relate to others, and how they predict the future. But before we dive in, I want you to understand something about how these patterns form.

From a systems thinking perspective, cognitive distortions are what we call attractor states. Your client’s mind has settled into particular patterns of thinking because those patterns have been reinforced over time. In complex systems theory, we talk about how systems naturally evolve toward certain stable configurations. Your client’s thinking patterns are stable because they’re habitual, not because they’re helpful. The neural pathways are well-worn. The system has found an equilibrium, even if it’s a destructive one.

Breaking out of an attractor state requires what Donella Meadows, the systems thinking pioneer, called a leverage point, a place in a system where a small shift can produce large changes. Identifying and addressing cognitive distortions is exactly that: a high-leverage intervention in the system of your client’s behaviour.

Let’s walk through each category.

How Clients Interpret Their Actions

This is the internal commentary that runs after a choice is made. It’s what your client tells themselves about what just happened, and it can turn neutral moments into catastrophes.

All-or-nothing thinking is probably the most common distortion I see in health coaching. This is the classic “I messed up once, so the day is ruined” trap. Your client plans to eat a balanced breakfast, something comes up at lunch and they grab fast food, and suddenly, they’re telling themselves there’s no point trying for the rest of the day. The weekend becomes a write-off. They’ll “start over Monday.”

This is a perfect example of what philosophers call a false dilemma, the logical fallacy that presents only two options when many exist. But it’s also something deeper. Aristotle taught us that virtue lies in the mean between extremes, what he called the golden mean. Courage, for instance, is the middle ground between cowardice and recklessness. Temperance is the balance between deprivation and excess.

All-or-nothing thinking rejects the mean entirely. It says you’re either perfect or you’ve failed. But health and fitness, like virtue, isn’t found at the extremes. It’s found in the middle, in the flexible, sustainable space where normal human life happens.

This kind of black-and-white logic makes every small deviation feel like total failure. But your client’s health isn’t determined by a single meal or a single day, it’s shaped by patterns over time. One meal is like one event. What matters is the aggregate, the pattern, the direction of travel over months and years. Small, consistent actions compound into extraordinary results. But you can’t compound anything if you keep resetting to zero every time you’re not perfect.

Listen for language like “ruined,” “blown,” “completely failed,” or “might as well.” Those are your clues that all-or-nothing thinking is running the show.

Overgeneralisation takes a single event and turns it into a sweeping, permanent statement. “I ate too much at dinner last night” becomes “I always overeat. I can never stick to anything. I’m just not disciplined enough for this.”

One missed workout becomes proof that they “can’t” maintain consistency. One social event where they ate off-plan becomes evidence that they “always” fail in those situations. This distortion is particularly destructive because it attacks self-efficacy, the belief that you can influence outcomes. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy shows us that this belief is one of the most powerful predictors of behaviour change. When someone believes they can succeed, they’re far more likely to persist through challenges. When they believe they can’t, they give up before they even start.

Overgeneralisation also reveals what psychologist Martin Seligman calls an explanatory style. People with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative events as permanent (“I always fail”), pervasive (“I can’t do anything right”), and personal (“It’s because of who I am”). People with an optimistic explanatory style see setbacks as temporary, specific, and external. Same event, completely different interpretation, completely different outcome.

You’ll hear words like “always,” “never,” “every time,” and “I just can’t.” Those absolutes are red flags.

Mental filter is when your client’s brain zooms in on the one thing that didn’t go perfectly and ignores everything else. Imagine their week had ten neutral or positive moments and one less-than-ideal choice. If they’re only focusing on that single misstep, you’re seeing a mental filter in action.

This is negativity bias on steroids. In neuroscience, we know that the brain has what’s called the reticular activating system, or RAS. This is essentially a filter that determines what information gets your conscious attention and what gets ignored. Your RAS is tuned by what you focus on. If you’re constantly looking for what’s wrong, your RAS will show you what’s wrong. If you train yourself to notice what’s working, your RAS will show you that instead.

The mental filter also connects to what Daniel Kahneman calls availability bias in his work on judgment and decision-making. We overestimate the importance of information that’s easily available in our memory. A vivid negative event (eating off-plan) becomes more mentally available than multiple positive events (following the plan), so we overweight its importance.

I’ll get check-ins from clients who hit every target, followed their plan beautifully, and made real progress, but all they want to talk about is the one meal that didn’t go as planned or the one workout they skipped.

Discounting the positive is related but slightly different. This is when your client actively dismisses their wins. “Yeah, I prepped lunch this week, but it doesn’t really count because I should have been doing that all along.” Or “I went for a walk, but it wasn’t a real workout, so it doesn’t matter.”

This distortion whispers that nothing they do is ever good enough. And when you discount the positive, you’re essentially emptying your own tank halfway through the journey. In behavioural psychology, we know that reinforcement shapes behaviour. When you acknowledge progress, you reinforce the behaviours that created it. When you dismiss progress, you extinguish those behaviours.

James Clear talks about this in terms of the aggregation of marginal gains, a concept borrowed from British Cycling coach Dave Brailsford. Small improvements, compounded over time, create remarkable results. But only if you acknowledge them. Only if you let them count.

Then there’s moralising food, which is so deeply embedded in our culture that most people don’t even recognise it as a distortion. “I was good today.” “I was bad today.” “I cheated this weekend.” When your client makes food moral, every choice starts to feel like a test of character. A cookie isn’t just a cookie, it’s a moral failure. A salad isn’t just lunch, it’s virtue. This creates an incredibly heavy way to live, where eating becomes loaded with shame and guilt instead of just being a normal part of taking care of yourself.

Jean-Paul Sartre (the existentialist philosopher) offers a powerful reframe, as he argued that we are “condemned to be free,” that existence precedes essence. Meaning isn’t inherent in things, we create it through our choices and interpretations. A cookie doesn’t come pre-loaded with moral meaning. You assign that meaning. And you can choose to assign different meaning, or no moral meaning at all.

Related to this, the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about how we perform social roles, how we present ourselves to others based on scripts we’ve internalised. When your client says “I was bad today,” they’re not describing objective reality. They’re performing a script they learned from diet culture, from childhood messages about food, from a society that has medicalised normal eating and turned every meal into a moral referendum.

So, you must listen for any language that assigns moral value to food or eating choices. “Good,” “bad,” “clean,” “cheat,” “naughty,” “guilt-free,” these words reveal that your client has internalised the idea that food is a referendum on who they are as a person.

How Clients Talk to Themselves

The way your clients talk to themselves shapes their entire experience of change. Even with a great plan, if the voice in their head is harsh, rigid, or unforgiving, every action feels heavier than it needs to be.

“Should” statements sneak in everywhere. “I should be better by now.” “I should have more discipline.” “I should know better than to eat that.”

Now, “should” sounds like accountability, but in practice, it usually creates guilt and pressure instead of growth. It focuses on what your client isn’t, rather than what’s possible. And it denies their own agency. Albert Ellis called this “musturbation,” the toxic habit of turning preferences into absolute demands. When you tell yourself you must, should, or ought to do something, you’re creating an internal tyranny that drains motivation rather than building it.

Sartre would say that “should” is a form of bad faith, a denial of your freedom and responsibility. When you say “I should,” you’re pretending that the obligation comes from outside, that you’re being acted upon rather than choosing. But you are always choosing, whether you acknowledge it or not. The question is whether you’ll own that choice or hide from it behind “should.”

A powerful shift here is helping clients replace “should” with “could” or “choose to.” “I should work out” becomes “I could work out” or “I choose to work out because it serves my goals.” That subtle change puts the agency back where it belongs. It’s the difference between feeling obligated and feeling empowered.

Labelling is when your client takes a single action and turns it into a permanent identity. “I’m lazy.” “I’m weak.” “I’m undisciplined.”

But behaviour is not identity. Missing a workout doesn’t make someone lazy any more than eating dessert makes them bad. It just means they made a choice, one of thousands over a lifetime. When clients label themselves, they’re collapsing who they are into what they did in one moment, and that makes change feel impossible. After all, if you are lazy, how can you become disciplined? But if you just acted in a way that doesn’t align with your goals, well, you can make a different choice next time.

Aristotle’s virtue ethics gives us a way out of this trap. For Aristotle, character isn’t fixed. It’s formed through repeated action. As Will Durant famously paraphrased, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” You don’t become disciplined by being disciplined; you become disciplined by doing disciplined things, repeatedly, over time. One choice doesn’t define you. The pattern of choices does.

This also connects to what psychologists call entity theory (fixed mindset) versus incremental theory (growth mindset). People with entity theory believe traits are fixed. People with incremental theory believe traits can be developed. Your client who labels themselves as “lazy” is operating from entity theory. Your job is to help them shift to incremental theory, to see that discipline is a skill they can build, not an essence they either have or don’t have.

Emotional reasoning confuses feelings with facts. “I feel hopeless, so it must be hopeless.” When emotions run high, with frustration, guilt, shame, and overwhelm, the brain can start treating those feelings as evidence of reality.

But feelings are not evidence. They’re signals, like weather patterns passing through. Just because your client feels stuck doesn’t mean they are stuck. Just because they feel like they can’t do this doesn’t mean they can’t.

From a neuroscience perspective, this is about understanding the difference between your emotional brain (the limbic system, particularly the amygdala) and your rational brain (the prefrontal cortex). When you’re in the grip of a strong emotion, the amygdala is essentially hijacking your cognition. Blood flow shifts away from the prefrontal cortex. You literally have less access to your reasoning capacity. This is why it feels so convincing in the moment. Your emotional brain is louder than your rational brain.

But the crucial point here is that emotions pass. Neurobiologically, an emotion, if you don’t feed it with rumination, typically lasts about 90 seconds. That’s it. The wave rises, peaks, and falls. The problem is that we don’t let emotions pass. We grab onto them, we think about them, we turn them into stories, and we keep the wave going indefinitely.

I see this constantly when clients are in the middle of a hard week. They feel discouraged, and from that feeling, they conclude that their entire approach is wrong, that they’re not making progress, that nothing is working. But when we actually look at the data, progress is happening. The feeling was real, but the conclusion drawn from it wasn’t accurate.

How Clients Relate to Others

Your client’s internal dialogue isn’t just about them, it often involves what they think other people are thinking. And this can shape behaviour in surprisingly powerful ways.

Mind-reading sounds like this: “Everyone at the gym thinks I don’t belong here.” “They’re all judging what’s on my plate.”

The problem is, we don’t actually know what other people are thinking. But our brains are wired for social comparison and projection, so we fill in the blanks with our own insecurities. This is an evolutionary feature, not a bug. In our ancestral environment, being attuned to social hierarchies and what others thought of us was crucial for survival. Ostracism from the tribe meant death. So we evolved to be hypervigilant about social threat.

But in the modern gym or restaurant? That same vigilance becomes a source of unnecessary suffering. Your client is essentially running a constant background program scanning for social threat, and when the scan doesn’t return clear data, the brain fills in the gaps, usually with the worst-case scenario.

I’ve worked with clients who avoided social gatherings entirely because their mind constructed an entire imagined narrative about what everyone else must be thinking about their food choices. The irony is that most people are far too preoccupied with their own concerns to spend much time thinking about yours. This is sometimes called the spotlight effect, the tendency to overestimate how much others are noticing and evaluating us.

Personalisation is when your client takes blame for things far outside their control. They order dessert at a restaurant with friends, someone makes a passing comment about “being good” or “indulging,” and instead of recognising that as the other person’s story, your client twists it into “I made it weird for everyone” or “I shouldn’t have ordered that.”

A single personal action gets blown up into the idea that they’re responsible for the entire situation or everyone’s experience. But they’re not. Your client can control their own choices, not how others perceive them or how a moment unfolds for everyone else.

The Stoics give us a useful framework here. Epictetus taught the dichotomy of control: some things are within our control (our own thoughts, choices, and reactions) and some things are not (other people’s thoughts, the weather, the past). Suffering comes from trying to control what’s outside our control and failing to control what’s within it. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”

Personalisation is a violation of the dichotomy of control. Your client is taking responsibility for things that aren’t theirs to control, and that creates unnecessary suffering.

Comparison, or what some call the fallacy of fairness, sounds like: “It’s not fair that other people can eat anything and stay lean.”

This distortion compares your client’s journey to someone else’s and judges the fairness of reality itself. But fairness in health, body composition, and metabolism has never been evenly distributed. Genetics, lifestyle history, environment, stress, sleep, and countless invisible factors shape outcomes in ways we can’t always see.

From an evolutionary perspective, social comparison makes sense. In small tribal groups, relative status mattered for access to resources and mates. But we’re comparing ourselves to carefully curated highlight reels on Instagram, to people whose genetics, training history, and circumstances we know nothing about. We’re using a tool that evolved for comparing ourselves to twenty people we knew intimately and applying it to comparing ourselves to millions of strangers.

The Stoics, again, offer wisdom here. Life isn’t fair, and trying to make it fair in your head only adds suffering. The Stoic approach is to focus not on what’s “fair” but on what’s within your power: your habits, your values, and your response to circumstances.

Someone else’s plate, body, or metabolism is not your client’s measuring stick. And when they get stuck in comparison, they’re essentially wasting energy on a game that doesn’t exist instead of focusing on what’s actually within their control. This is what economists call opportunity cost. Every hour spent in envious comparison is an hour not spent on productive action.

How Clients Predict the Future

A lot of the tension people feel around nutrition doesn’t come from the present moment, it comes from the future they imagine. Our brains are storytellers. Long before anything happens, we predict it, rehearse it, and react emotionally as if it’s already real.

Fortune-telling is when your client treats a prediction as a fact. “I’ll mess up again.” “I know I won’t be able to stick to this.” They’re not actually in the future yet, but emotionally, they’re already living there, and that prediction shapes their behaviour today.

In neuroscience, this relates to what’s called prediction error. Your brain is constantly making predictions about what will happen next and comparing those predictions to reality. When there’s a mismatch, a prediction error, it’s a signal to learn and update your model. But when your predictions are consistently negative and self-fulfilling, you never get the error signal that tells you your model is wrong.

When someone expects failure, they act accordingly. They don’t invest fully in the process because they’re already bracing for disappointment. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is related to what psychologist Robert Rosenthal called the Pygmalion effect, the phenomenon where higher expectations lead to better performance and lower expectations lead to worse performance.

From a systems perspective, this is a reinforcing feedback loop, the kind that spirals. Negative prediction leads to half-hearted effort, which leads to poor results, which confirms the negative prediction, which strengthens it for next time. Breaking this loop requires interrupting it at any point, but the most powerful intervention is at the belief stage, before it shapes behaviour.

Catastrophising exaggerates the significance of setbacks. “One bad meal means I’ve failed completely.” A small event gets blown up into a disaster, like turning a speed bump into a mountain.

The reality is, a single deviation isn’t failure. It’s life. A bad day doesn’t define your client’s health trajectory any more than a single good day guarantees it. But when someone catastrophises, they lose perspective, and what could have been a small detour becomes a full downward spiral.

The Stoics practised something called premeditatio malorum (negative visualisation), where you imagine worst-case scenarios to prepare yourself emotionally. But notice the difference: the Stoic practice is deliberate, bounded, and used as preparation. Catastrophising is automatic, unbounded, and used as evidence. One is a tool for resilience. The other is a source of paralysis.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” The meal isn’t the catastrophe. The interpretation is.

Control fallacies come in two extremes. Either “it’s all my fault” (over-responsibility) or “I have no control” (powerlessness). Both are distortions.

In reality, some factors are within your client’s control, and some aren’t. When they believe they control everything, they take on crushing responsibility for outcomes shaped by dozens of variables they can’t influence. When they believe they control nothing, they become passive and stop trying. Psychologist Julian Rotter called this locus of control, whether you see outcomes as determined primarily by your own actions (internal locus) or by external forces (external locus). Both extremes are problematic.

The truth is in the middle. Your client may not control whether work gets stressful, but they can prep a balanced lunch in advance. They may not control their cravings, but they can shape their environment to make aligned choices easier.

This is where the field of choice architecture becomes relevant. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein showed us that the way choices are presented, the default options, the ease or difficulty of different paths, these design elements shape behaviour more than we realise. Your client can’t control their cravings, but they can control whether biscuits are on the counter or in the back of a high cabinet. They can’t control their motivation on a given day, but they can pre-commit to actions through implementation intentions, the “if-then” plans that research shows dramatically increase follow-through.

Now, I know that’s a lot of information. And honestly, when I first started learning about cognitive distortions, it felt overwhelming. But what I want you to understand is that you don’t need to memorise all of these or be able to perfectly categorise every distorted thought you hear.

What matters is that you start developing pattern recognition. The more you listen for these, the more you’ll hear them. And once you can name what’s happening, you can help your client see it too.

How to Identify Cognitive Distortions in Your Clients

Learning the list of distortions is one thing. Spotting them in real conversations with real clients is another skill entirely. And this is where a lot of newer coaches struggle, because distortions don’t usually announce themselves clearly. They slip into check-ins, session conversations, and text messages disguised as simple statements of fact.

But once you know what to listen for, they become obvious. Let me show you what I mean.

Reading Between the Lines: What to Listen For

The first place to look is in your client’s language. Certain words and phrases are like bright neon signs pointing directly at distorted thinking.

Absolutist language is a dead giveaway. Words like “always,” “never,” “completely,” “totally,” “ruined,” “destroyed,” “every time,” and “no matter what” signal overgeneralisation or all-or-nothing thinking. When your client says “I always mess up on weekends” or “I can never stick to anything,” they’re not giving you an accurate report, they’re giving you a distortion.

These are what we call universal quantifiers, words that claim to apply to all instances without exception. And they’re almost always false. The human brain loves shortcuts, and universal quantifiers are shortcuts. They let us avoid the nuance and complexity of reality. But they also warp our perception of that reality.

Moral language around food or exercise reveals moralising. “Good,” “bad,” “clean,” “dirty,” “cheat,” “naughty,” “guilt-free,” these words show that your client has attached moral meaning to neutral choices. When someone says “I was so bad this weekend,” they’re not talking about their food, they’re talking about their character.

This language also reveals what sociologists call the medicalisation of normal behaviour. We’ve taken the ordinary human activity of eating and turned it into a medical and moral concern, something requiring constant monitoring, judgment, and intervention. This is a relatively recent cultural development, and it’s created enormous psychological harm.

Predictive language often signals fortune-telling or catastrophising. “I’ll never be able to do this.” “I know I’m going to fail.” “It won’t work for me.” “I’m going to mess up.” These statements aren’t predictions based on evidence, they’re distortions masquerading as certainty.

What’s interesting is that these statements are presented as facts about the future, but the future doesn’t exist yet. They’re not describing reality, they’re constructing it. And by stating them as certainties, your client is constraining the possibility space, closing off options before they even try.

Emotional absolutes like “I’m hopeless,” “I’m a failure,” or “I’m completely lost” point to emotional reasoning or labelling. The client is collapsing a feeling or a moment into a permanent identity.

But language isn’t the only clue. Behavioural patterns tell you just as much, sometimes more.

Behavioural Red Flags

One of the clearest signs of distorted thinking is what I call Monday restart syndrome. This is when your client repeatedly “starts fresh” every Monday, because the weekend “doesn’t count” or because they “blew it” and need a clean slate. If you’re seeing this pattern week after week, you’re looking at all-or-nothing thinking in action.

This is related to what Dan Ariely calls the “what-the-hell effect.” Once you’ve violated a rule or goal, you feel you’ve already failed, so you might as well keep going (“I’ve messed up, so what the hell, I might as well go all in”). The perceived cost of additional violations feels zero once you’ve “ruined” things anyway. This is why people who have one chocolate often eat the entire box. The mental accounting treats the first violation as catastrophic, making subsequent violations feel free.

Avoidance of social eating situations often reveals mind-reading or personalisation. Your client starts declining invitations to restaurants, skipping family gatherings, or eating beforehand so they don’t have to make choices in front of others. That’s not about the food, it’s about what they imagine others are thinking.

This is social anxiety manifesting specifically around eating. And it’s a vicious cycle. The more they avoid these situations, the more anxiety builds around them, making future avoidance more likely. In behavioural psychology, this is called negative reinforcement, the removal of an aversive stimulus (social anxiety) reinforces the behaviour (avoidance). But it’s a trap, because avoidance prevents them from ever learning that the feared outcome (judgment) usually doesn’t happen.

Emotional volatility around single choices is another red flag. If a client’s mood swings dramatically based on whether they “stayed on track” or not, if one unplanned snack sends them into guilt and self-criticism, you’re seeing moralising and catastrophising at work.

This emotional volatility also has real physiological costs. Every spike of shame or guilt triggers a stress response, elevating cortisol. Chronic elevation of cortisol impairs recovery, interferes with sleep, promotes fat storage (particularly visceral fat), and suppresses protein synthesis. So the distortion isn’t just creating psychological suffering, it’s actively working against their physical goals. 

Abandoning plans after minor deviations is textbook all-or-nothing thinking. The plan was to work out four times this week, they missed Monday, so now they’re not going to bother with the rest of the week. One deviation becomes permission to abandon everything.

This is the sunk cost fallacy in reverse. In economics, the sunk cost fallacy is continuing to invest in something because you’ve already invested so much, even when continuing doesn’t make sense. But here, your client is treating a single “failed” investment as reason to abandon the entire project. Both are irrational, but in opposite directions.

Over-apologising in check-ins tells you a lot. When clients say “I’m so sorry, I know I messed up, I’m the worst, I’ll do better, I promise,” they’re not just being polite; they’re revealing shame, labelling, and often personalisation. They think they’ve let you down personally, not just made choices that didn’t align with their goals.

This also reveals something about the power dynamic in the coaching relationship. If your client sees you as an authority figure they’ve disappointed rather than a collaborator helping them navigate challenges, that’s a problem. It suggests they haven’t fully internalised that this is their journey, not yours. They’re performing for your approval rather than acting from their own values.

And finally, dismissing or minimising progress is one of the most heartbreaking patterns to watch. You’ll point out that they’ve been consistent for three weeks, they’ve lost body fat, they’re getting stronger, and they’ll respond with “Yeah, but I still have so far to go” or “It’s not enough” or “Anyone could do this.” That’s discounting the positive, and it’s robbing them of the motivation that comes from acknowledging real progress.

Psychologist Dan Sullivan calls this the gap versus the gain. Most people measure their progress against an ideal (the gap between where they are and where they want to be), which means they’re always falling short. But if you measure backwards (the gain, how far you’ve come from where you started), you create positive reinforcement and momentum.

The Check-In Audit

Your weekly check-ins are gold mines for identifying and addressing cognitive distortions if you know how to read them. Most coaches focus only on compliance data: what did you eat, did you work out, how much sleep did you get? And that’s important, but it’s only half the picture.

I try to structure my check-ins to surface how clients are thinking and feeling about their choices, not just what the choices were. I ask questions like “How did you feel about this week?” and “What was challenging?” and “What went through your mind when [X] happened?” Those questions invite reflection. They give your client space to tell you the story they’re telling themselves, and that’s where you’ll hear the distortions.

For example, if a client reports eating on plan six out of seven days and then writes “I feel like I failed this week,” you have a massive disconnect between the data and the interpretation. That’s a mental filter. They’re fixated on the one day that didn’t go perfectly and ignoring the six that did.

Or you might see someone report solid adherence and then say “But I should have done better.” That “should” statement reveals internal pressure, guilt, and probably perfectionism driving the bus.

The key is to read between the lines. Don’t just look at what happened. Look at what your client is making it mean. This is where identifying and addressing cognitive distortions becomes central to your coaching effectiveness. You’re not just tracking behaviour, you’re tracking the narrative around behaviour.

The Coaching Conversation: How to Surface Distortions

Sometimes distortions are right there in the check-in, clear as day. But sometimes they’re hiding under the surface, and you need to draw them out through conversation. The first rule here is to create psychological safety. Your client needs to trust that you’re not going to judge them, criticise them, or make them feel stupid for having these thoughts. If they think you’re going to respond to “I feel like a failure” with “that’s ridiculous, you’re doing great,” they’ll stop sharing what’s really going on.

From Self-Determination Theory, we know that humans have three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy (feeling in control of their own behaviour), competence (feeling capable and effective), and relatedness (feeling connected and understood). When you create a coaching relationship that supports all three of these needs, intrinsic motivation flourishes. But if you threaten any of them, particularly autonomy, motivation collapses.

So approach these moments with curiosity, not correction. You’re an investigator, not a critic. I use open-ended questions to help clients surface their own thinking. Questions like:

“What went through your mind right before you made that choice?”

“What does that mean to you?”

“If a friend told you that exact same thing, what would you say to them?”

“What’s the evidence for that thought?”

“Is there another way to look at this?”

These questions slow down the automatic reaction and invite reflection. This is crucial from a dual-process theory perspective. Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of thinking: System 1 (fast, automatic, emotional) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, rational). Cognitive distortions are System 1 processes. They fire automatically, before System 2 has a chance to evaluate them. Your questions create the pause that allows System 2 to come online.

And often, just asking the question is enough for the client to hear their own distortion.

When someone says “I always mess up,” and you ask “Always? Can you think of a time when you didn’t?” they’ll pause. Because of course they can. The word “always” was a distortion, not a fact, and now they’re seeing it.

This is the Socratic method in action. Socrates didn’t lecture people on the truth, he asked questions that helped them discover contradictions in their own thinking. And when they discovered it themselves, the insight was far more powerful than if he’d simply told them. You’re not telling them they’re wrong, you’re asking questions that help them discover the distortion themselves. And when they discover it, it sticks. When you tell them, it’s just your opinion.

Timing matters here too. If your client is in the middle of an emotional spiral, don’t interrupt it to teach them about cognitive distortions. Stabilise first. Validate the feeling, help them get grounded, and then, later, when things are calmer, you can come back and talk about the thinking pattern that triggered the spiral.

Real work happens in calm moments, not crisis moments. Early in a coaching relationship, you might let some distortions go because you’re still building trust. As the relationship deepens and trust solidifies, you’ll have more room to challenge thinking directly.

Identifying and Addressing Cognitive Distortions in Your Clients Practical Strategies: What to Do When You Spot a Distortion

Alright, so you’ve spotted a distortion. You can see it clearly in your client’s language or behaviour. Now what? This is where newer coaches often freeze up. They don’t want to sound condescending, they don’t want to invalidate their client’s feelings, and they definitely don’t want to turn the conversation into a debate. So they just… let it slide.

But the thing is, letting distortions go unchallenged is a disservice to your client. This is because these thought patterns are actively sabotaging their progress, and part of your job is to help them see that.

The key is in how you do it. You’re not attacking their thought. You’re helping them examine it.

Name It (Gently)

The first step is simply naming what you’re noticing. And I mean gently. Not “you’re catastrophising again,” but “I’m noticing some all-or-nothing thinking here, does that sound right?”

You’re offering an observation, not a diagnosis. You’re inviting them to look at the pattern with you, not telling them they’re wrong.

I’ll often add some psychoeducation in this moment too. “This is really common, and here’s why it happens. Your brain evolved to spot threats, so it’s naturally going to focus on what went wrong rather than what went right. That’s just negativity bias at work. It helped your ancestors survive, but it makes modern nutrition harder than it needs to be.”

When you normalise the distortion, you take the shame out of it. Your client isn’t broken or stupid for thinking this way, they’re human, and their brain is doing what brains do. This is crucial from a compassion-focused therapy perspective. When we understand that our struggles are part of shared human experience, not personal deficiency, we can meet them with kindness rather than criticism.

Validate the Feeling, Question the Thought

This is crucial. Validating someone’s emotion is not the same as validating their thought.

“It makes sense that you feel frustrated. I get it. You wanted this week to go differently, and it didn’t. That’s hard. AND let’s look at what’s actually true here.”

That “and” is important. Not “but,” which dismisses everything that came before it. “And,” which holds both things at once.

You’re saying, “Your feeling is valid AND your thought might not be accurate.” You’re creating space for both reality and compassion.

This is the essence of dialectical thinking, the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at once. Yes, you feel like a failure. Also yes, you followed your plan six out of seven days. Both can be true. The feeling doesn’t negate the fact.

Use Socratic Questions to Guide Reframing

Rather than giving your client the answer, help them find it.

“You said you ‘always’ mess up. Can you think of a time recently when you didn’t?”

“What’s the evidence for the thought that you’ve failed?”

“If your best friend told you they felt this way, what would you say to them?”

“Is there another way to look at what happened?”

These questions guide your client toward a more balanced perspective without you having to impose it. And when they arrive at the reframe themselves, it’s far more powerful than if you’d just handed it to them.

This also builds what psychologists call metacognition, which is the ability to think about your own thinking. Over time, as you repeatedly ask these questions, your client internalises them. They start asking themselves these questions. They develop the capacity to challenge their own distortions without needing you there to do it for them.

Offer a More Balanced Perspective

Sometimes Socratic questioning isn’t enough. Sometimes your client is so stuck in the distortion that they can’t see another angle. In those moments, you can offer the cognitive restructure yourself.

“I hear you saying you ‘blew it,’ and I want to offer another way to look at this. You followed your plan six out of seven days this week. You hit your protein target most days. You got in four workouts. One unplanned meal doesn’t erase all of that. It’s just one meal in a week of mostly aligned choices. Does that land differently?”

You’re not telling them they’re wrong. You’re offering a more accurate lens.

This is cognitive restructuring, the cornerstone of CBT. But notice the phrasing. “I want to offer another way to look at this” is collaborative. It positions you as a guide offering perspective, not an authority imposing truth. And ending with “Does that land differently?” invites them to evaluate the reframe themselves rather than accepting it passively.

Connect to Values and Long-Term Goals

One of the most powerful tools from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is values-based action. When your client is fused with a distorted thought, you can help them step back by connecting to what actually matters to them.

“I know part of your mind is saying you’ve failed. And I also know that one of your core values is taking care of your health so you can show up for your family. Does beating yourself up over one meal serve that value? Or does getting back on track at your next meal serve it better?”

This separates the thought from the commitment. The thought is just noise. The value is the compass.

In ACT, we talk about the choice point model. At any moment, you’re at a choice point. You can move toward your values or away from them. You can move toward what matters or away from discomfort. The distorted thought is pulling you away. Your values are pulling you toward. You get to choose which one wins.

This also connects to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, the therapeutic approach centred on meaning-making. Frankl survived Auschwitz and wrote about how those who found meaning in their suffering were more likely to survive. He argued that humans can endure any “how” if they have a strong enough “why.” When you connect your client’s choices to their deeper values and purpose, you give them a why that’s stronger than any distorted thought.

Advanced Techniques for Experienced Coaches

As you get more comfortable with this work, you can introduce some deeper tools.

Cognitive defusion from ACT is one of my favourites. Instead of “I am a failure,” you help your client say, “I’m having the thought that I’m a failure.” That small linguistic shift creates distance between the person and the thought. The thought is still there, but it’s no longer fused with their identity.

You can also use defusion techniques like:

• “I’m noticing I’m telling myself the story that I always fail.”
• Imagine the thought as text on a screen that you can observe rather than being inside.
• Say the distorted thought out loud repeatedly until it loses meaning and becomes just sounds.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the thought. The goal is to change your relationship with it, to see it as a mental event rather than truth.

Thought records are a classic CBT tool. You have your client track the situation, the automatic thought, the feeling it created, and the behaviour that followed. Then you work together to identify the distortion and come up with a more balanced thought. This builds awareness over time and helps clients catch patterns before they spiral.

The thought record format typically looks like this:

• Situation: What happened?
• Automatic thought: What went through your mind?
• Emotion: What did you feel? (and rate intensity 0-100)
• Behaviour: What did you do?
• Evidence for the thought: What supports this interpretation?
• Evidence against the thought: What doesn’t fit with this interpretation?
• Alternative thought: What’s a more balanced way to look at this?
• Outcome: How do you feel now? (rate 0-100)

Over time, this process becomes internalised. The external worksheet becomes an internal skill.

Externalising the distortion can be incredibly powerful. “What would your inner critic say right now? And what would your wise, compassionate self say?” You’re personifying the different voices so the client can see that they’re not one monolithic “I,” they’re a mix of perspectives, and they get to choose which one to listen to.

This technique comes from narrative therapy and Internal Family Systems therapy. The idea is that we contain multiple parts, and those parts can be in conflict. The harsh inner critic isn’t you, it’s a part of you, often a part that’s trying to protect you in a misguided way. When you externalise it, you can dialogue with it, understand its intention, and choose whether to follow its advice.

Behavioural experiments are great for testing fortune-telling or catastrophising. “You’re predicting that if you eat dessert, you’ll lose control and binge. Let’s test that. What if we plan for dessert this week and see what actually happens?” You’re using data to challenge the distortion instead of arguing with it.

This is pure scientific method. You have a hypothesis (eating dessert will lead to bingeing). You design an experiment (deliberately eat dessert in a controlled way). You collect data (what actually happened?). You evaluate the hypothesis (was the prediction accurate?). This approach respects your client’s intelligence and engages their curiosity rather than just telling them they’re wrong.

What Not to Do: Common Coaching Mistakes

Before we move on, I need to tell you what not to do, because I’ve made every one of these mistakes, and I’ve watched other coaches make them too.

Don’t dismiss or minimise. When your client says “I feel like a failure,” do not respond with “You’re overthinking it” or “Just don’t think that way.” That invalidates their real struggle and shuts down the conversation. It makes them feel unheard, and they’ll stop sharing what’s really going on.

This is sometimes called toxic positivity, the insistence on maintaining a positive outlook even when it denies legitimate struggle. It’s the “good vibes only” culture that says all negative emotions are problems to be fixed rather than information to be understood. But emotions aren’t good or bad, they’re just data. When you dismiss your client’s difficult emotions, you’re dismissing valuable data.

Don’t turn it into a debate. You’re not trying to win an argument. If you come at your client with logic and evidence trying to prove them wrong, you’ll just trigger defensiveness. Clients aren’t persuaded by logic alone when emotions are running high. You need to meet them where they are, validate the feeling, and then gently invite a different perspective.

This is the backfire effect in action. When people feel their identity or worldview is threatened, presenting them with contradictory evidence often makes them dig in harder rather than changing their mind. You have to create safety first. Only then can perspective shift happen.

Don’t play therapist. This is important. You’re a coach, not a mental health professional, and there’s a line. If you’re seeing persistent, severe distortions that don’t respond to coaching interventions, if your client is dealing with clinical depression, anxiety disorders, or an eating disorder, you need to recognise the limits of your scope and refer out.

Some red flags that indicate you’re beyond coaching territory:

• Suicidal ideation or self-harm
• Severe restriction or purging behaviours
• Panic attacks or debilitating anxiety
• Depression that interferes with basic functioning
• Trauma that needs processing
• Distortions that persist despite repeated intervention

Identifying and addressing cognitive distortions is absolutely part of coaching, but there’s a point where it crosses into therapy, and you need to know where that line is. And you need to have relationships with mental health professionals you can refer to.

Building a Coaching Practice Around Cognitive Clarity

Unfortunately, all of this work doesn’t happen in one conversation. You don’t identify a distortion, challenge it once, and then it’s fixed. These are deep patterns, and changing them takes time, repetition, and consistent reinforcement. So if you’re going to get good at this, you need to build it into the foundation of how you coach.

Think of it in terms of what James Clear calls atomic habits. You’re not trying to overhaul your client’s entire psychology in one grand intervention. You’re making tiny, consistent adjustments to how they relate to their thoughts. Over time, those adjustments compound. The aggregation of marginal gains applies to mindset work just as much as it applies to physical training.

Setting the Foundation Early

I introduce the concept of cognitive distortions in my onboarding process now. Not in a heavy, clinical way, but as part of setting expectations. I’ll say something like, “A big part of what we’ll work on together isn’t just what you eat or how you train. It’s how you think about your choices. Because the stories you tell yourself matter just as much as the plan.”

This does two things. First, it normalises the idea that mindset work is part of the process, not some extra thing we only talk about when someone’s struggling. Second, it gives you permission to address thinking patterns as they come up without it feeling out of left field.

I also introduce the basic framework of CBT: thoughts influence feelings, feelings influence behaviours. Most people have never thought about this connection explicitly. Once they understand that changing their thoughts can change their emotional experience and their behaviour, it opens up a whole new dimension of agency.

Creating a Shared Language

Over time, as you work with a client, you build a shared vocabulary. They start recognising their own patterns. They’ll send you a check-in that says, “I caught myself doing all-or-nothing thinking this week, but I stopped it before it derailed me.”

That’s the goal. Not that they never have distorted thoughts, but that they can name them, catch them, and choose a different response. When both you and your client can identify these patterns, the coaching relationship becomes so much more effective.

This is what Lev Vygotsky called internalisation in his sociocultural theory of learning. Skills that initially require external support (you pointing out the distortion) eventually become internalised (they point it out themselves). The external dialogue becomes internal dialogue. The coaching becomes self-coaching. This is the same as using scaffolding in your coaching. 

Integrating Mindset Work Into Every Check-In

I structure my weekly check-ins to surface both behaviour and thinking. I’m not just asking “what did you eat,” I’m asking “how did you feel about it?” I’m not just asking “did you work out,” I’m asking “what went through your mind when you decided to skip that session?”

This makes space for the mental game. And when I’m reviewing check-ins, I’m tracking thought pattern shifts just like I track body composition or strength gains.

I’ll celebrate cognitive wins just as much as physical ones. “This week, you caught the all-or-nothing thought before it derailed you. That’s huge progress.”

Because it is. In fact, from a long-term sustainability perspective, it might be more important than any physical metric. Strength and leanness come and go with life circumstances. But the skill of managing your thinking? That’s portable. That transfers to every domain of your life. That’s what creates lasting change.

When to Refer Out

I mentioned this earlier, but it’s worth repeating. There will be times when identifying and addressing cognitive distortions moves beyond your scope as a coach. If you’re seeing persistent, severe distortions that don’t respond to coaching, if your client is dealing with clinical depression or anxiety, or if there are signs of an eating disorder, you need to refer them to a mental health professional.

That doesn’t mean you stop coaching them. You can absolutely continue to work with someone who’s also in therapy. In fact, that collaborative care model often produces the best outcomes. But you need to recognise when someone needs more support than you can provide.

And you need to have that conversation with care. “I think you’d really benefit from working with a therapist alongside our coaching. This doesn’t mean you’re broken or that we can’t work together anymore. It just means you deserve support at a level I’m not trained to provide.”

Frame it as strength, not failure, as getting the right resources, not giving up, and make it clear that you’ll continue to be part of their support team, you’re just bringing in additional expertise. This is about building a comprehensive support network. You’re one layer. A therapist might be another. A physician might be another. Family and friends are another. The most successful clients usually have multiple layers of support, each serving a different function.

The Deeper Connection: Why This Work Matters Beyond the Gym

Now I want to zoom out for a moment and talk about why identifying and addressing cognitive distortions matters in ways that go far beyond body composition or athletic performance. Because when you help someone change how they think, you’re not just helping them lose weight or build muscle. You’re giving them access to a more fulfilling life.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this: eudaimonia. It’s often translated as “happiness,” but that’s misleading. Eudaimonia is closer to flourishing, to living well, to actualising your potential as a human being. Aristotle argued that eudaimonia comes from living according to virtue, from exercising your capacities in service of what’s meaningful and good.

But you can’t flourish when you’re trapped in distorted thinking. You can’t exercise virtue when all-or-nothing thinking keeps you in cycles of perfection and collapse. You can’t actualise your potential when you label yourself as fundamentally inadequate.

Cognitive distortions keep people small. They keep people reactive rather than purposeful. They drain energy that could be directed toward meaningful action and redirect it toward rumination, shame, and self-criticism.

When you help a client see through their distortions, you’re helping them reclaim that energy. You’re helping them move from what psychologists call hedonic wellbeing (pleasure and pain, feeling good in the moment) to eudaimonic wellbeing (meaning and purpose, living in alignment with your values).

This connects to the work of Self-Determination Theory. When people’s basic psychological needs are met, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they don’t just feel better; they develop what’s called autonomous motivation. They act from choice rather than coercion, from interest rather than obligation, from values rather than “shoulds.”

Distorted thinking undermines all three of these needs. “Should” statements attack autonomy. Labelling attacks competence. Mind-reading attacks relatedness. When you help someone work through these distortions, you’re not just improving their diet adherence, you’re restoring their psychological foundation for a meaningful life.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz and founded logotherapy, wrote that the primary human drive isn’t pleasure or power, it’s meaning. He observed that the prisoners who survived the concentration camps weren’t necessarily the strongest or healthiest, they were the ones who had found meaning in their suffering, who had a purpose beyond the immediate horror.

When your clients are trapped in distorted thinking, they lose touch with meaning. Health becomes about punishment and control rather than caring for the body that carries them through life. Exercise becomes penance rather than a celebration of what their body can do. Food becomes a moral test rather than nourishment and pleasure.

But when you help them see clearly, when you help them separate the distortion from reality, they can reconnect with the deeper why. Why do you want to be healthy? Not to look a certain way to please others or meet some external standard, but because you want energy to play with your kids. Because you want to feel strong and capable. Because you value the experience of being in a body that works well.

That shift, from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, from hedonic to eudaimonic, is transformative. And it doesn’t just affect nutrition and fitness. It ripples out into every area of life.

The person who learns to catch all-or-nothing thinking in their diet starts catching it in their relationships, their work, and their parenting. The person who learns to question “should” statements about exercise starts questioning all the other “shoulds” that keep them living someone else’s life instead of their own. The person who develops self-compassion around food choices starts extending that compassion to other areas where they’ve been harsh and unforgiving.

This is why I’m so passionate about teaching coaches to do this work. You’re not just helping people achieve aesthetic goals. You’re teaching psychological skills that create better lives. You’re helping people move from reaction to reflection, from self-judgment to self-understanding, from rigid perfectionism to flexible persistence.

You’re helping them flourish.

The Invisible Architecture of Change

There’s one more dimension I want to explore before we get practical again, and it’s the relationship between how we think and how we exist in the world. The existentialist philosophers, particularly Sartre and Heidegger, argued that existence precedes essence. We’re not born with a fixed nature that determines who we are. We create ourselves through our choices. We become who we are through how we act in the world.

But here’s the paradox: we often act based on who we think we are. And who we think we are is shaped by our distorted thoughts.

When someone labels themselves as “lazy” or “undisciplined,” they’re creating their own essence. They’re taking a philosophical position on what kind of being they are. And then they act in accordance with that position, which reinforces the label, which further solidifies the identity.

Sartre called this “bad faith,” living inauthentically by denying your freedom and treating yourself as a fixed object rather than a free subject. The person who says “I am lazy” is denying that they could choose differently. They’re hiding from their freedom behind a label.

But the existentialists also give us the way out. If existence precedes essence, if we create ourselves through our choices, then we can choose differently at any moment. The label isn’t truth, it’s a story. And stories can be rewritten.

When you help a client separate behaviour from identity, when you help them see that “I acted in a lazy way” is not the same as “I am lazy,” you’re giving them back their existential freedom. You’re reminding them that they are not a fixed thing, they’re a process of becoming.

This is where Nietzsche becomes relevant too. Nietzsche urged us to “become who you are,” which sounds paradoxical until you understand it. You’re not discovering some hidden, true self. You’re creating yourself through affirmation of your choices, through saying yes to your life even with all its difficulties.

Nietzsche also talked about amor fati, love of fate, the practice of embracing everything that happens as necessary and even desirable. Not passive acceptance, but active affirmation. When your client catastrophises one bad meal, they’re rejecting their fate, treating it as something that shouldn’t have happened. But what if they could practice amor fati? What if they could say “yes, I ate that meal” and move directly to “what’s my next aligned choice” without the detour through shame?

This isn’t about toxic positivity. It’s about radical acceptance. It’s about meeting reality as it is rather than how you wish it were.

From a Stoic perspective, Marcus Aurelius would say that the obstacle is the way. The challenge isn’t something to avoid or deny, it’s the material you work with. The unplanned meal isn’t a problem to be catastrophized; it’s an opportunity to practice flexibility, to practice self-compassion, to practice responding rather than reacting.

All of this philosophy, from Aristotle to the Stoics to the existentialists to Nietzsche, it’s not abstract theory. It’s the underlying architecture of how we live. And cognitive distortions are violations of this architecture. They’re ways of thinking that prevent flourishing, that deny freedom, that reject reality.

When you teach someone to identify and address their cognitive distortions, you’re not just teaching a psychological technique. You’re teaching a way of being in the world that’s more aligned with how reality actually works.

The Neuroscience of Transformation

Let’s bring this back to the brain for a moment, because understanding the neuroscience helps explain why this work is so powerful and why it takes time. Every thought you have is a pattern of neural firing. When you think the same thought repeatedly, you strengthen the connections between those neurons. This is Hebbian learning: neurons that fire together wire together. Over time, thoughts become automatic, requiring less and less conscious effort. They become what neuroscientists call proceduralised, like riding a bike or tying your shoes.

This is great when the thought is useful. But when it’s a cognitive distortion, you’ve essentially trained your brain to automatically generate suffering.

The good news is that neuroplasticity works in both directions. If neurons that fire together wire together, then neurons that stop firing together eventually disconnect. You can weaken old patterns and build new ones. But it takes time and repetition.

When you help a client challenge a distorted thought, you’re doing several things neurologically:

First, you’re interrupting the automatic pattern. This engages the prefrontal cortex, which can inhibit the automatic response from the limbic system. You’re literally activating different brain regions than the ones that generate the distorted thought.

Second, you’re creating a new neural pathway. The alternative thought, the reframe, is a new pattern. The first time you think it, the pathway is weak. But every time you repeat it, you strengthen it.

Third, you’re creating what neuroscientists call prediction error. The brain is a prediction machine, constantly anticipating what will happen next based on past patterns. When the prediction is wrong, when reality doesn’t match expectation, the brain updates its model. By challenging distortions with evidence, you’re creating prediction errors that force the brain to revise its automatic interpretations.

This is also where understanding the default mode network (DMN) becomes relevant too. The DMN is a network of brain regions that’s active when we’re not focused on the external world, when we’re mind-wandering or ruminating. Research shows that the DMN is hyperactive in depression and anxiety. It’s the network that generates those repetitive negative thoughts.

Practices like mindfulness meditation have been shown to reduce DMN activity and increase activity in networks associated with present-moment awareness and cognitive control. When you teach clients to notice their thoughts without being swept away by them, you’re training them to engage different neural networks.

There’s also emerging research on the concept of psychological flexibility and the brain. ACT-based interventions have been shown to increase activity in brain regions associated with value-based decision making and to decrease activity in regions associated with emotional reactivity. You’re literally reshaping the neural architecture that determines how someone responds to challenges. 

But the key is that this takes time. You can’t think your way out of a pattern that was built over years in a single conversation. Neuroplasticity requires repetition. You have to practice the new pattern many times before it becomes automatic. 

This is why identifying and addressing cognitive distortions isn’t a one-time intervention. It’s an ongoing practice, like resistance training for the brain. Every time you catch a distortion, you’re doing a rep. Every time you choose a more balanced thought, you’re building that pathway. Over time, the new pattern becomes stronger than the old one.

Putting It All Together: The Framework for World-Class Coaching

Alright, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, evolution, systems thinking, all of it pointing toward the same conclusion: identifying and addressing cognitive distortions is central to effective coaching.

But how do you actually operationalise all of this? How do you take this knowledge and turn it into a systematic approach?

Here’s the framework I use, and I want you to think of it as a loop, not a linear process.

Notice → Name → Pause → Examine → Reframe or Act by Values → Reinforce

Let me break down each step.

Notice: The first skill is simply awareness. Can you catch the distortion as it’s happening? This requires you to be attuned to your client’s language, their behavioural patterns, and their emotional responses. It also requires teaching your client to notice their own thoughts. This is where mindfulness practice becomes valuable. You don’t need to send your clients to meditation retreats, but teaching them to observe their thoughts rather than being consumed by them is foundational.

Name: Once you’ve noticed the pattern, name it. “That sounds like all-or-nothing thinking.” Giving it a label does two things. First, it creates distance. The thought isn’t you, it’s a pattern that has a name. Second, it activates the prefrontal cortex. There’s actually research showing that affect labelling, putting words to emotions, reduces amygdala activity. Naming calms the emotional response.

Pause: This is the space Viktor Frankl talked about, the space between stimulus and response where our power to choose lives. Before reacting to the distorted thought, pause. Take a breath. Create a moment of space. This is where you prevent the automatic cascade from thought to feeling to behaviour.

Examine: Now, with some space created, examine the thought. Is it accurate? What’s the evidence for it? What’s the evidence against it? Is it useful? Does it serve your values? This is where Socratic questioning comes in, where you help the client investigate the thought rather than accepting it at face value. 

Reframe or Act by Values: Based on the examination, either generate a more balanced thought (cognitive restructuring) or commit to an action that aligns with values regardless of the thought (ACT approach). Sometimes you need both. The reframe creates a different emotional experience, and the value-aligned action creates new evidence that updates future thoughts. (These articles can help if you want to explore this more: Triage Values Assessment Tool, Triage Goals-Values Congruency Tool, Triage Personal Values & Life Priorities Assessment, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Assessment).

Reinforce: This is crucial and often overlooked. Acknowledge the win. You caught the distortion. You paused. You chose differently. That’s progress. Celebrate it. This creates positive reinforcement for the meta-skill of managing distortions. Over time, this builds self-efficacy, specifically around thought management.

This loop happens at different timescales. In the moment, it might take thirty seconds. Over a week, you might revisit a pattern multiple times. Over months, you’re building the habit of this loop until it becomes automatic.

And here’s what’s beautiful about this framework: it’s not just about fixing distorted thoughts. It’s about building psychological flexibility, which is the ability to be present, open to experience, connected to values, and able to take effective action even when your mind is generating difficult content.

This is what creates lasting change. Not perfect thinking, flexible responding.

Ultimately, when you build a coaching practice that helps your clients with identifying and addressing cognitive distortions, here’s what changes:

Your clients become more resilient. They don’t collapse after setbacks because they don’t catastrophise them. They see challenges as information, not indictments.

Your clients become more consistent. They don’t abandon the plan after one deviation because they don’t engage in all-or-nothing thinking. They understand that the pattern matters more than any single moment.

Your clients become more autonomous. They internalise the skills of managing their thinking. They start self-coaching. They don’t need you to hold their hand through every decision because they’ve developed their own internal compass.

Your clients achieve better results. And here’s where we loop back to the physical. When the psychological barriers are addressed, when distorted thinking no longer sabotages adherence, the physical outcomes follow naturally. Consistency compounds. Habits stick. Results accumulate.

But here’s what I think matters most: your clients become more themselves. They stop living according to rigid rules and “shoulds” imposed from outside. They start making choices that align with their actual values and circumstances. They move from performance to authenticity.

And as a coach, when you can facilitate that, and when you can help someone move from self-judgment to self-understanding, from rigid perfectionism to flexible persistence, from reaction to conscious choice? That’s world-class coaching.

Because anyone can write a meal plan. Anyone can prescribe sets and reps. But helping someone transform their relationship with themselves, with their choices, with their life? That’s the work that actually matters.

That’s the work that changes lives, not just bodies.

So commit to becoming a student of the mind. Not just the body, the mind. Study how people think. Listen for patterns in how they talk about themselves. Practice identifying distortions in real time. Learn the frameworks from CBT, ACT, REBT. Read the philosophers who grappled with these same questions centuries ago. Understand the neuroscience. Recognise the systems at play.

And then practice. Every client conversation is an opportunity to sharpen your skills. Every check-in is a chance to read between the lines. Every spiral is a chance to guide someone back to solid ground.

Build this into your onboarding. Make it part of your check-ins. Celebrate cognitive wins alongside physical ones. Create a shared language with your clients. Normalise the work of examining thoughts. Make identifying and addressing cognitive distortions a core competency, not an advanced skill you get to later.

Because this is the work. Not the program. Not the macros. This.

The coaches who do this work, who really invest in understanding the psychological side of behaviour change, are the ones who create transformations that last. They’re the ones whose clients succeed long after the formal coaching relationship ends, because those clients have internalised the skills.

They’ve learned that thoughts are not facts. That feelings are not evidence. That one choice doesn’t define them. That they can pause, examine, and choose differently.

They’ve learned to respond rather than react. To act from values rather than from fear. To meet themselves with compassion rather than criticism.

They’ve learned, in other words, how to be psychologically flexible in the face of all the challenges that life and health change throw at them.

And they learned it from you. Because you took the time to understand not just what to eat or how to train, but how to think, how to relate to your own mind, how to navigate the invisible game that determines everything.

That’s what world-class coaching looks like. That’s the standard I want you to aim for.

As Milton wrote, the mind is its own place, and it can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. Your job is to help your clients see that they have power in that place. That they’re not at the mercy of every thought that floats through. That they can choose.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is the power to choose. In that choice lies growth, freedom, and the possibility of a life well lived.

Your job is to help your clients find that space. And in doing so, you become the kind of coach that doesn’t just change bodies. You change lives.

Having said all of that, you do still need a working model of physiology, nutrition and training to actually get results. So, for those of you ready to take the next step in professional development, we also offer advanced courses. Our Nutrition Coach Certification is designed to help you guide clients through sustainable, evidence-based nutrition change with confidence, while our Exercise Program Design Course focuses on building effective, individualised training plans that actually work in the real world. Beyond that, we’ve created specialised courses so you can grow in the exact areas that matter most for your journey as a coach.

If you want to keep sharpening your coaching craft, we’ve built a free Content Hub filled with resources just for coaches. Inside, you’ll find the Coaches Corner, which has a collection of tools, frameworks, and real-world insights you can start using right away. We also share regular tips and strategies on Instagram and YouTube, so you’ve always got fresh ideas and practical examples at your fingertips. And if you want everything delivered straight to you, the easiest way is to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss new material.