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Coach Meg: Using brain biology to manage our minds

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Nearly everyone who hears about Margaret Moore’s upcoming book, Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (Harvard Health Publications, 2012), says the same thing. “People say, ‘I need that!’” says Moore, BSc’78, MBA’83, an entrepreneur who has been instrumental in building the profession of wellness coaching.

“I think that speaks to the distraction epidemic we have today; there’s a lot of external frenzy, because you have text messages, voice mails and e-mails coming at you all the time,” adds Moore, also known as Coach Meg. “When you’re in a state of frenzy, it’s very hard to focus and get things done.”

Organize Your Mind, which Moore co-authored with Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and ADHD researcher Dr. Paul Hammerness, is aimed at transforming psychic chaos into order, in part, by better understanding the biology of the brain.

The book is just the latest chapter in a career that’s bridged biology and behaviour, disciplines Moore now combines to help people live their healthiest lives.

After a brief stint in financial services, Moore decided to pursue her MBA, and upon graduating got into biotechnology just as the field was taking off. She began her career in Great Britain, where, on an international scholarship, she had completed her final term at the London Business School.

For the next 17 years,  Moore worked for several large and small biotechnology companies in four countries, eventually landing in Vancouver, where her life took an abrupt turn worthy of her late mother, Anne Dick, who also attended Western.

“My mother was constantly reinventing herself, from nurse to teacher, and eventually to number three in the Ontario government department of education,” Moore recalls.

As COO of the biotechnology venture NeuroVir Therapeutics Inc., Moore hired Paul Clark, a prominent U.S.-based biotech patent lawyer. Soon after, the couple decided to marry.

Passionate about wellness since she first began jogging around campus while living in Delaware Hall, Moore was ready for new challenges. She had come up with the idea for a brand new breed of health professional – an expert on adopting health-promoting lifestyle changes who would work with physicians.

“The majority of our future health costs are going to come from lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes. But we have not paid enough attention to helping people build the skills to take better care of themselves,” Moore notes. “Physicians can only go so far in helping people tackle their lifestyles.

She sees medicine as too siloed.

“You don’t sleep, so you don’t have the energy to exercise. Then you feel stressed out, so you overeat. Then you feel badly, so you don’t sleep. It’s all interconnected,” Moore says. “I thought, someone needs to look at this whole package.”

Moore decided to translate the basic biology and psychology behind human change into effective coaching practices, in much the same way she had explained the science behind biotech discoveries to non-scientist potential investors.

During a pre-wedding weekend getaway, Moore and her fiancé were lamenting having missed out on the dot-com boom, when Clark began casting about for innovative ways of using the Web. He hit on the concept of online coaching, and Wellcoaches Corporation was born.

Since, Moore has helped co-write the first coaching textbook in healthcare, create science-based curricula and establish certification standards for the profession. Along the way, she co-founded and co-directs the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and is a founding advisor to the Harvard-affiliated Institute of Lifestyle Medicine.

She also coaches executive clients, teaches and mentors other coaches, blogs for Psychology Today and The Huffington Post, and has co-authored a Harvard Medical School continuing medical education program on coaching for physicians. Recently, her vision was affirmed when health and wellness coaching was included in U.S. health care reform.

“Wellcoaches is as much a social venture as a business because it really is about changing the world,” she says.

To read more about Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life, including an excerpt, click here.

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