What is health coaching, and is it for me?
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So you’ve heard about coaching, and you’ve got questions, starting with the basics: what is it, and who can benefit from coaching?
You may want to start by checking out a few of these resources with some deep dives on the benefits of health coaching:
Many people first learn about health coaching when they’re seeking extra support to manage a chronic health condition or a new diagnosis. Their primary care practitioner or a specialist in their condition gives them a treatment plan and may recommend that they partner with a health coach to help them implement key lifestyle and behavior changes to manage or reverse symptoms of their condition. In other cases, folks seek out a health coach because they don’t feel comfortable in their bodies, perhaps feeling fatigued and stressed, struggling to find the motivation to eat well, move their bodies, and create healthful routines that support the kind of life they want to be living or the kind of person they want to be.
Most of the time we get the same kind of rote advice to create a plan to meal prep, exercise daily, meditate, decrease screen time, and engage with a handful of hobbies to keep us healthy and sharp as we age. We read articles about the world’s most productive people and how to increase our will-power and discipline, and still we struggle to keep our hopeful new routines going after a few days or weeks. Most of that advice doesn’t come with a roadmap or strategies that actually address the challenges we experience in our daily lives, which may seem small at first, but which ultimately prevent us from making the long-term behavior changes we want to enact. A health and wellness coach is your partner to build strategies that work in the context of your life, meeting you where you are today in a non-judgmental way.
Your health coach will use guided inquiry and evidence-based strategies to help you explore approaches to behavior change that work for you, based on your expressed wishes, preferences, and needs. For example, if you are a busy working parent who wants to improve your nutrition, it doesn’t help to be given a pamphlet on meal planning and meal prep tips if you barely have time to get to the grocery store. You probably need strategies that first help you manage all of the responsibilities on your plate and build more space and ease into your schedule so that you actually have the time to focus on nutrition in the first place. Your health coach works with you to identify the challenges that are getting in your way and to design a plan to address and overcome them, in a way that actually works for you and your life.
And, health and well-being aren’t just about nutrition and exercise. Holistic coaching approaches understand that health and well-being are multi-dimensional. We can work with physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual, financial, and ecological aspects of wellness at different points throughout the coaching experience. Well-being is not a destination, but an evolving process.
Holistic Wellness Wheel
Together we’ll identify which areas of your wellness experience are out of balance, which are most urgent and important to you to address first, and then we’ll co-create a plan to experiment with new behaviors that will help you reach your health and wellness goals. In addition to working around challenges and obstacles, your coach helps you identify and draw on your existing resources and strengths throughout the process, building a sense of self-efficacy. In this way, you’ll begin to make small changes that compound over time and move you steadily towards short- and long-term goal attainment. If something doesn’t work right away, it’s not a failure, but an opportunity to gather insights and tweak your plan to be as effective as possible for YOU. Health and wellness coaching is tailored to your unique experience, working with our natural cycles of behavior change, meeting you where you are at each session.
Just as it is becoming more commonplace to hire a personal trainer to reach fitness goals, or a therapist to work on our every day mental health, you don’t have to be in a crisis to benefit from the supportive relationship provided by a holistic health and wellness coach. Coaching is for anyone experiencing a state of imbalance in one or more area of life. If you want to experience greater vitality, fulfillment, and ease, a health coach can help you chart the path and take the steps to achieve your vision for ideal health and well-being. And who doesn’t want that?!
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