Until my mid 20s I had only heard the word “coach” used in the context of sports coaching.
Now, the word “coach” has come very much into popular usage and not just sporting wise.
Life coach, health coach, relationship coach, business coach…
It seems there’s a coach for everything.
Which is why in today’s blog I’m going to answer two questions;
- What does it really mean to be a coach?
And
- Why would anyone choose to work with a coach?
I am going to use my experience working as a health coach for the past 4 years to answer these questions.
But first a little bit of context as to…
Why I Became a Health Coach
I had my first encounter with the other side of the hospital system when instead of being the patient I worked in a number of different hospitals whilst on placement during my nutrition and dietetics degree.
What I realised very quickly was that it often didn’t matter how thorough I understood and explained the physiology and the biochemistry behind each diet-disease relationship or how meticulously I calculated and created evidence-based meal plans for my patients they didn’t always follow them.
I became fascinated with what seemed like an absurd paradox.
That we, collectively as human beings, can know that all this smoking, drinking and poor eating habits (amongst a plethora of other seemingly bizarre behaviours we do) are harming our health immensely and, in many cases killing us and yet appear unable to change.
Having lived 15 years of my life with what may be one of the most stigmatised mental illness out there, anorexia nervosa, I knew painfully well what it was like to have access to the best health information on the planet and yet, somehow be incapable of applying it.
I knew that by offering 20minutes (on a good day) of bedside dietary education relative to their hospital admission was paying lip service to the type of help my patients needed.
I wanted to be able to serve my patients not a little bit but a lot better than this.
It was clear that making health changes required more than education. But what?…
It wasn’t until I had my own personal experience with working with a life coach during my recovery from anorexia nervosa that I learned how it was possible to offer patients more than education on what they should and shouldn’t be doing.
Looking back, it’s easy for me to identify why coaching was so powerful and helped me where other things including many other forms of therapy I’d tried had failed but at the time it was my first experience of this whole new way of doing things.
And coaching really is a whole new way of doing things. It’s a different profession than any of the other health professions including medicine, dietetics, psychology or psychiatry.
Health coaching is the “how to” achieve your personal goals you’ve set for yourself or the goals a health professional like your doctor has given you that will improve your health. Health coaching is the doing of the actions that allow us to reach goals such as lowering your blood pressure, improving your gut health, increasing your memory and concentration or to control diabetes and many others.
The “gap” between recommendations and the support the person gets along their path to achieving them (usually zero to minimal unless you directly seek this out yourself) has long been recognised in the healthcare system.
Doctors simply don’t have the time nor quite honestly often the skills that a health coach has to assist you as you go about achieving your health goals in your day-to-day life.
How Can a Coach Help Me Achieve My Goals?
First and foremost, coaches help you get super clear on what it is you want.
This in and of itself sounds simple and it is simple but at the same time it’s not always an easy task to do alone.
I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve worked as a life and health coach that people are frequently very good at describing what it is they don’t want and far less competent in articulating what it is they do want.
When we are so close to the problem (aka inside our own minds and lives where the “problems” exist) it’s very hard to “think outside the box” and to see solutions, a clear path from A to B or even the next step forward.
Even when we think we know what to do the truth is if we truly knew we’d be doing it.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
Secondly coaches support and guide you as you build the tools, resources and capabilities to make those things you want a part of your reality.
Great coaches will help you not just achieve goals by keeping you accountable to the actions that will lead to those goals being achieved but crucially to understand why it is you want to achieve those things in the first place.
We all have things we’d like to experience, do or achieve in our lives but it is the “why” we want those things that holds the most power.
Many people spend good chunks of their lives or indeed their entire lives chasing after goals that once reached simply aren’t what they thought they’d be.
We all know stories of people who were outwardly “successful” in terms of monetary wealth and status but inwardly depressed, anxious or unfulfilled.
Maybe you have had your own personal experience of this?
When we achieve goals based on our “values” aka what it is we want most in life then achieving goals becomes fulfilling and meaningful versus an internal battle to get there and/or an emptiness once the initial thrill of the achievement has worn off.
As a coach we are trained in a very specific set of tools to assist our clients to elicit what it is they do want, identify what it is they need to make what they want a reality and go about assisting them to realistically make that happen.
What is The Difference Between Coaching and Therapy?
One of the things I enjoy most about being a health coach is that coaching operates from the premise that this person is healthy, well-functioning and has all the tools and resources within themselves to succeed or if they don’t yet they have the capacity to acquire them.
I love that!
I love it because it is so far from how I was treated as the patient with anorexia nervosa and it’s quite far from how I was taught and trained to treat my own patients years later.
This is primarily what distinguishes coaching from therapy.
Therapy is often about understanding our “problems” in order to overcome them slowly or maintaining a level of okness. Therapy assumes people have a level of dysfunction happening (and they very well may!)
As coaches we don’t try to be therapists or doctors. Neither of those roles are our roles.
We don’t psychoanalyse or diagnose and instead we assume human beings are whole and capable it can, by definition take much less of a “don’t rock the boat” and much more of a “let’s get in there and change things” attitude.
Coaching is about getting results and is therefore often robust and solid.
It is also often delivered by someone who’s been there. Who has experienced a similar issue to what you are now This doesn’t mean they are better it does mean they have a different level of insight and belief around what’s possible and how to change.
I know when I lived with anorexia nervosa I didn’t believe it was possible to change. It wasn’t in my map of the world that this was a problem people successfully moved past and meeting people who had fully recovered was revolutionary and transformative in and of itself.
Some Examples of The Types of Things I Help My Clients with As a Health Coach
You would be forgiven for thinking health comes down to what we eat and how much exercise we do. While these two are a big part of what we’re sold we know real health encompasses so much more. Including our work, our relationships and friendships, time in nature and how much sleep we get amongst many others.
Today I predominantly work with clients who themselves work in the healthcare profession. In a day this can range from doctors, nurses and allied health to other health coaches and consultants.
After living with anorexia nervosa for 15 years a large part of my passion and therefore work is in coaching people who are wanting to recover from eating disorders/eating issues.
I facilitate my clients to do the work to overcome anxiety, depression, stress, self-sabotage, imposter syndrome, addictions, eating disorders, burnout and many other health conditions from diabetes to irritable bowel syndrome and liver disease.
I assist them on their path to functioning and performing at their best at work while simultaneously building and genuinely enjoying the lives of their dreams outside of work.
Overall, it’s worth knowing that coaching is an overarching framework I use amongst many tools when I am working with my clients.
The other top tools I use are clinical hypnotherapy, neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and dietetics or nutrition information.
What I love and why I’ve trained in all these modalities and choose to use these most often, even though I’ve also trained in a lot of other modalities from CBT to motivational interviewing, is that they are highly solution and growth focused.
I also see clearly that any place our mind is involved in a problem (which is everywhere to one degree or another) there is major benefit to be had by incorporating some level of intentional unconscious work (i.e. clinical hypnotherapy and/or NLP).
How Do I Decide if I Should Work with a Health Coach?
In terms of working with a health coach are you living with any of the above examples I gave (for example an eating disorder, anxiety, depression, low motivation, IBS, diabetes)?
Would you like that to be different?
Would you like to live the rest of your life different?
If you answered yes to these 3 questions, why not look into working with a health coach?
It may just change your life.
At the very least you will learn some interesting things about human psychology and about yourself!
Essentially coaching is an additional extra to the more traditional health care professions out there. I am not here to tell you it is something anyone “needs” but rather it is one of those brilliant things that although not a necessity for survival will make your life better. Work with a great coach and I can confidently guarantee that.
If it is your desire to go beyond surviving and go that little bit or big bit further in life, to get the most out of life or you want results relatively quickly then working with a coach may be a great option for you.
As much as I’ve said it’s not a necessity or requirement for survival or even a great life, I can share with you that I’ve worked with clients who very possibly may have died if they didn’t do this work. For me personally it’s highly likely I would have gone on living with anorexia nervosa or died because of it after 15 years of trying everything the mainstream medical system had to offer, I wasn’t getting any closer to recovered.
Remember coaching is the real-life day to day stuff, and this is one of the reasons it is so powerful because it is within the choices and actions of our day to day lives where the transformation happens.
And coaching is about transformation.
If you are curious to see, you don’t have to believe it’s possible, but if you are curious to see if it is possible to not have the problem versus learning about the problem and altering your life to accommodate and live with the problem then you’re in a great place for coaching.
The Take Home Bits
If you want to achieve anything of importance you are going to make it a lot more likely you achieve those things if you work with a coach in the area, you’re seeking to excel in.
That’s why coaching exists because it works.
You want to live a life that’s fulfilling and meaningful to you?
You want to have great health?
If your answers are yes, you’re going to have to put time and effort into first getting the right information and then secondly applying it.
The thing that we often overlook when it comes to applying a lot of this stuff is that in many ways it requires our transformation to do life in this new way we’re wanting because if it didn’t we’d be doing it already.
If you have a diagnosis of something, if you have some recommendations from your doctor or you have your own health goals and you’re finding them difficult to understand, stick to or even start then you’re in a fantastic position to work with a great health coach.
If you want to cut out the confusion and streamline the process and you’re after more than behavioural change then you’re in a fantastic position to work with a great health coach.
Coaching is all about bringing out the best in people and utilising their unique skillset.
It is designed to eliminate doubt and second guessing and bring clarity and certainty because with that clarity and certainty we are far more often to do the healthful thing than we are from a place of uncertainty and fear.
Coaching is about helping someone develop the ability to live in the world at a higher level than they were before.
If parts of this sound intriguing to you then consider working with me.
Click this link to go to my contact page for options of how to get in touch with me.
With my whole heart I hope you found this information useful and inpsiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
