Empowered Coaching: Motivational Interviewing for Nutrition Conversations
Description
Motivational Interviewing for Nutrition Conversations is a focused, 35-minute short course designed to help coaches, trainers, and nutrition professionals elevate how they talk about food. Built around the core principles of Motivational Interviewing (MI), this session teaches you how to create more client-centered, empathetic conversations that support real behavior change. You’ll learn how to guide discussions with effective MI tools like open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening, and goal-setting. Whether you’re new to MI or looking to sharpen your skills, this course will strengthen your ability to navigate nutrition conversations with confidence and compassion—while staying within your professional scope.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Define the core principles and spirit of Motivational Interviewing and explain their relevance to nutrition coaching.
Use OARS (Open-ended questions, Affirmations, Reflective listening, and Summarizing) to guide open, client-centered conversations.
Apply MI strategies to real-life nutrition scenarios to build trust and support sustainable behavior change.
Set S.M.A.R.T. goals that reflect the client’s motivation, readiness, and personal priorities.
Course Content
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Motivational Interviewing for Nutrition Conversations provides sports performance coaches, personal trainers, and wellness professionals with a practical toolkit to approach dietary discussions with greater empathy, structure, and impact.
This course explores how Motivational Interviewing (MI)—a client-centered, collaborative communication style—can help unlock a client’s internal motivation to change. You’ll learn to recognize the “spirit” of MI (partnership, acceptance, compassion, and evocation) and how to apply core skills like OARS to foster trust and create space for honest, productive conversations.
The course also outlines a clear step-by-step framework for integrating MI into nutrition coaching: building trust, identifying motivations, gathering insights, educating without judgment, and driving actionable change with SMART goals. Through real-world examples, reflective exercises, and scope-of-practice guidelines, this session ensures you can confidently use MI strategies to support clients—without overstepping professional boundaries.
Whether you’re working with athletes or general population clients, this short course empowers you to handle nutrition conversations with greater clarity, empathy, and effectiveness.
This course is taught by Caroline Feenstra, a board-certified specialist in sports dietetics with over seven years of experience in performance nutrition and virtual wellness. She earned her Master’s in Medical Dietetics with a focus in Sports Nutrition from The Ohio State University and has worked with Division I athletes at both Ohio State and the University of Kansas. Now with Exos, Caroline supports corporate accounts like Johnson & Johnson through one-on-one nutrition coaching and engaging education sessions. She also works as a Performance Dietitian at Juilliard in New York City, helping performing artists fuel both their bodies and their creativity. Whether she's working with dancers, athletes, or busy professionals, Caroline loves making nutrition feel approachable, empowering, and aligned with real life.
Who Should Take This Course:
Sports coaches, personal trainers, fitness instructors, group trainers, wellness coaches, physical therapists and other practitioners serving youth, high school, and adult clients and athletes.
Subtitles Available
English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and German.
*Translated subtitles are auto-generated.
