Health Coaching

Are you happy with how you are or would you like to improve some areas of your health and achieve lasting, positive change? Perhaps you’re interested in improving your diet but are confused and overwhelmed by all the different diets out there. Maybe you aren’t sleeping well, are overly stressed or not moving or exercising much. Maybe you would just like to feel better than you do and don’t know where to start. Health Coaching is an excellent way to clarify your goals and to help you make better informed decisions about your diet and lifestyle behaviour patterns.

HEALTH COACHING CAN HELP

A health coach works with someone, like you, from where they are. They will help you to really clarify what it is you would like to change. This may involve seeking permission to delve deeper and push you further, whilst treating you with respect and compassion, but whilst also challenging you to be your best. They may well offer appropriate information or help to identify resources to support your decision making. It may also require you to look at yourself, acknowledge your strengths, and build upon these. A health coach will support your decision making and help with behavior change by co-creating a plan, whilst supporting and encouraging you on your journey of change.

Most people would like to improve their health and wellbeing in some way but find it hard to know the right way to go about it, often making a start only to find themselves hitting a brick wall and giving up.

HEALTH COACHING IS MORE THAN JUST “HEALTH EDUCATION”

There are times in all our lives when we really need some focused support to help us achieve our goals and, with the mountain of information available these days, it can be difficult to identify the specific areas that are important to you.

There is a growing awareness that people benefit from having an ally to work with, much like someone may work with a personal trainer to help them work out, be more effective in the gym and help support their motivation. Health coaching can be viewed in a similar way.

A health coach can help find the motivation that exists within you to initiate, sustain and maintain change as well as being there to celebrate your successes along the way. Health coaching is not about telling you what to do – it’s about listening to you, identifying your goals, and supporting you through the various stages of behavior change.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Before your consultation, you will be asked to carefully consider what you need and want from health coaching. The initial consultation lasts approximately 60 minutes, during which time your coach will help clarify your goals with you and support you in your steps to achieving them.

In order to get the most out of your health coaching programme, a minimum of 3 sessions is recommended, with 5 sessions having been found to be very beneficial for creating a good foundation for behaviour change. Although a single session may be sufficient for some people, behaviour change, by its nature, requires time and support to become more sustainable and longer lasting and results benefit from a commitment to a number of sessions.

IS HEALTH COACHING FOR YOU?

Health coaching is not a substitute for counselling, or treatment for medical health problems. A health coach is not a psychological or medical professional and is unable to provide the specific personalised diet or supplemental advice as that which may be provided by a nutritional therapist or other appropriate professional practitioner. However, health coaching can provide generalised advice that supports educated and empowered decision making with your choices of diet approaches and lifestyle choices and practices.

Being an integrative complementary therapy, health coaching works well alongside other complementary therapies as well as conventional medicine.