What is Health Coaching, really?
Coaching is a conversational process for creating change. Coaching has blossomed in popularity over the past few years in areas specific to various areas of life, including executive, career, entrepreneurship, finances, dating, relationships, and of course, health. Since I’m a health coach, what follows is a closer look at why health coaching it’s so transformative.
Coaching brings big goals into focus.
How it works…
Coaching principles of curiousity and non-judgement strip away the noise and shame around an issue we are struggling with. The practice of asking simple and important questions calls forth your wisdom and experience. A coach listens deeply to your process, makes sure you are hearing and seeing yourself clearly, and provides insights you may be unable to see for yourself. Taken together, these various aspects of the coaching speaking to creates an open, nuturing, and supportive environment that speaks to some of our deepest human needs. These include the need to be heard and seen, understand ourselves better, feel supported, use creative agency, sometimes the opportunity to sit in silent reflection can yield profound insights. Many people do not experience these dynamics in their daily lives but they have significant therapeutic value to the overall process. A coach will help you find a level of challenge that is appropriate and productive, infuse quality information when needed, co-create with you a realistic plan to mmove forward, and support you in honoring those plans and continuing to learn and make progress - ven when the plans fall apart. When plans fall apart, many people put that experience in “failure” bucket and become quickly too demoralized to take strides. A coach will make sure you are alway learning and growing and continuing to progress. Over time, this process drives a creative reorganization in many areas of life.
This description of coaching may sound warm and fuzzy, but the coaching process is not for sissies. You'll come face to face with yourself and have to reckon with patterns you may have been avoiding or aren't particularly fond of, but doing so fosters a sense of accomplishment and confidence. This process changes your vision of yourself, the world around you, and your perception of what’s possible.
“Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting, before becoming.”
Your role…
Being a good coaching client takes some practice. The client’s role in the coaching relationship is to be entirely honest and engage the work between sessions. Learning to hone in on what you most need from the time you have with your coach is a skill in itself. Health coaching offers an unusually broad range of possible areas to address from week to week. You might talk about optimizing your food and nutrition one week, and the next two weeks might be more emotional – getting support to sit with and grow through difficult emotions. The week after that could be planning to upgrade your home workouts. One of the most valuable lessons is in learning to be peaceful exactly where you are - fully present and accepting of the challenge at hand.
“The main block to transformation is the thought that shouldn’t be where we are, that we should already be further along in our growth than we perceive ourselves to be. ”