How Health Coaching Can Help

A H&W coach can help you set goals, change habits, work around barriers, mitigate chronic conditions, celebrate successes – in service to a more healthful lifestyle.

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Why Should I Hire an Integrative Health & Wellness Coach?

The process of integrative health coaching empowers clients to make lasting behavior changes that are the foundation for a lifetime of health and well-being. It recognizes that our health is impacted by multiple interconnected dimensions – including the choices we make that affect our physical, mental, spiritual well-being, and the medical care approaches we can access and choose. A health and wellness coach will support her clients in discovering ways to successfully implement healthy lifestyle behaviors across these various dimensions.

Making change is hard and it takes time. The processes and tools that integrative health coaches use are evidence-based; they rely on the on decades of research on the neuroscience of change and existing behavior change models and theories. Specifically, this approach is deeply influenced by the work of Carlo Diclemente and James Prochaska’s Stages of Changes (the TTM Transtheoretical Model) that demonstrate that we humans generally move through five stages in the adoption of healthy behaviors or cessation of unhealthy ones. And it’s married to the strategies and skills developed by Miller and Rollnick’s interventional technique described as Motivational Interviewing. Underlying the process of health coaching are Martin Seligman’s theory of Positive Psychology and the practice of Mindful Awareness. Positive Psychology focuses on the five pillars that define a life well-lived – what is right with you. The PERMATM Theory of Wellbeing encourages “flourishing” and helps us to build greater immunity and resiliency through self-awareness, limit setting and mindset changes. The five pillars are: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments (PERMA)

Health and wellness coaches work with individuals and groups in a client-centered process to facilitate and empower the client to develop and achieve self-determined goals related to health and wellness. Coaches support clients in mobilizing internal strengths and external resources, and in developing self-management strategies for making sustainable, healthy lifestyle, behavior changes. While health and wellness coaches per se do not diagnose conditions, prescribe treatments, or provide psychological therapeutic interventions, they may provide expert guidance in areas in which they hold active, nationally recognized credentials, and may offer resources from nationally recognized authorities such as those referenced in NBHWC’s Content Outline with Resources. As partners and facilitators, health and wellness coaches support their clients in achieving health goals and behavioral change based on their clients’ own goals and consistent with treatment plans as prescribed by individual clients’ professional health care providers. Coaches assist clients to use their insight, personal strengths and resources, goal setting, action steps and accountability toward healthy lifestyle change. For more information, visit https://nbhwc.org.

Coaching is effective for people managing a variety of health conditions. According to a recent study, coaching “results in clinically relevant improvements in multiple biomarker risk factors (including systolic and diastolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, fasting glucose, body weight, body mass index, waist circumference, and cardiorespiratory fitness) in diverse populations.” Coaching has also helped improve health-related quality of life and reduced hospital admissions in patients with COPD. No wonder some doctors’ offices are offering it, some insurance companies are paying for it, and private companies are even starting to offer coaching to their employees in order to lower their healthcare costs.

Integrative Health Coaching empowers clients to make lasting behavior changes that are the foundation for a lifetime of health and well-being. Health is impacted by multiple interconnected dimensions that include the choices we make that affect our physical, mental, spiritual well-being and the medical care approaches utilized for our health. The “Wheel of Health” (the graphic that linked to this discussion) shows the seven major aspects of our lives that impact our health.

For additional references and research on the efficacy of Health & Wellness Coaching, please see the attached “Compendium of the Health and Wellness Coaching Literature”

  • Coaches work with the whole person. They listen to your concerns and ask powerful questions to help motivate you to make the changes you desire.
  • Coaches spend time exploring what is most important to you in your health and allow you to choose your course of action.
  • Coaches guide you through a process to maximize the possibility of your success.
  • You and your coach work in partnership to identify obstacles to change and create strategies for moving forward toward your goals.
  • Coaches support you in tracking your weekly progress and hold you accountable for your commitments.
  • Coaches provide additional resources for making healthy behavior changes.

The coaching relationship is unique. The coach and the client form a partnership to better equip you to realize your optimal health vision based on your own goals and values. Any concern that gets in the way of taking care of your optimal health is the perfect subject with which to begin coaching. Therefore, any topic you want to bring up that you think will contribute to your optimal health is an appropriate topic for Integrative Health Coaching.

My coaching practice focuses on my peers – that cohort known as boomers, seniors or, as we have recently been labeled, perennials. Especially those who aspire to a new normal of maturity – a physically and intellectually active life where age is simply a number. And, most important, those who are fighting for that new normal in the face of chronic diseases. I form a structured, supportive, non-judgmental (and confidential) partnership with my clients. Together, we focus on the whole person – body, mind and spirit – to facilitate behavior changes in service to a healthier lifestyle.

We can help with all manner of lifestyle changes including: Stress-Reduction, Brain Health, Diabetes Prevention, Weight Loss, Cardiovascular Disease, Diet Makeover, Home Cooking, Movement, Sleep, Mindfulness.

In addition to these areas, I specializes in several programs for which certificates recognize specific training:

Integrating a National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) into your patients’ care team (or offering these services as an option) can increase patient satisfaction and engagement – and also reduce physician stress and burnout by freeing up time.

An NBC-HWC can help your patients actually implement the lifestyle modifications that you have recommended. She can become your patient’s accountability-partner by helping him or her develop a series of short-term, SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. And then helping your patient accomplish each of those small steps – one-by-one – until the main goal is reached.

With this type of focused teamwork patients understand the management of their treatment and your lifestyle recommendations, and are actively engaged in their own health care. This can work in concierge practices as well as those catering to high-needs population— whether on Medicaid, uninsured or underinsured.

For Practitioners

Nuts and Bolts of Coaching