Here you'll find projects I'm working on to bring my work to a broader audience, as well as some interesting developments. Also, I am available as a diabetes patient-expert and advisor.
Next Phase for Improved Diabetes Self-Management: Solution Focused Coaching
As part of my work to help people with diabetes create their best lives, I am working with an international consultant in solution-focused coaching, Eileen Murphy of Eileen Murphy Consultants in the UK.
Solution focused coaching is a collaborative process that regards individuals as the expert on what works in their lives, complete with a set of skills, resources and past successes. Solution focused coaching can help individuals with diabetes think in a solution framework and see what steps they can take to improve their management. Simultaneously, devising one's own solutions ignites confidence, enthusiasm, a sense of ownership and hope. Solution focused coaching can be an extremely valuable methodology for patients and health-care providers to co-create workable treatment plans.
My work helping patients improve their management began by interviewing people with diabetes. I have conducted more than 130 interviews to date and continue to interview fellow patients. Then, followed in 2007, the publication of my book,“The ABCs of Loving Yourself with Diabetes,” a guide for building emotional resilience. This month my second diabetes book, "50 Diabetes Myths That Can Ruin Your Life and the 50 Diabetes Truths That Can Save It," a practicum of medical information necessary to manage diabetes, will be published. Both books form a firm foundation for management excellence. Solution focused coaching is the third leg in this management stool. You can read some of the theoretical underpinnings of this approach in, "Why patients have to be doctors today."
Stay tuned for more about upcoming plans, programs, training materials for health care providers and peer mentors and workshops for patients and professionals that draw on the principles of solution focused coaching.
DiabetesbyDesign - The name of my new web site coming in the next few months. Diabetes by design is a philosophy that one can use diabetes as a stimulus to create a healthier and happier life; you can create your best life -- not despite having diabetes -- but because of it.
Eli Lilly/IDF 2008 "Inspired by Diabetes Competition" - 1st Place winner for the visual, 'Living Proud' and accompanying narrative, 'The Antidote to Diabetes,' putting forth the notion that pride is an essential component to excellent diabetes management. "Inspired by Diabetes" is a global campaign sponsored by Eli Lilly and the International Diabetes Federation (IDF). All winners have donations given in their name to the American Diabetes Association to provide scholarships for children from low-income families to attend diabetes camps and donations to IDF's Life for a Child Program which provides supplies to children with diabetes in developing nations. I am honored to be among the winners and contribute to such a worthy cause.