Health Coaches: the Helping Hand in Your Wellness Upgrade
The term Health Coach is heard more often now as the wellness field gains traction with mounting evidence on how coaches bring value to those seeking a sense of control over their health outcomes. A growing number of health practitioners are recruiting coaches to their teams in order to provide the education and personalized support that they don’t have time to give. Many companies are offering health coaching as a part of their wellness programs in order to remedy stress and illness in the workplace and satisfy health insurance quotas. With this building fervor behind this healthy helper, let’s break down all the benefits of a health coach.
What are the benefits of a health coach?
Health coaches are behavior change experts who support you to determine and implement lifestyle changes aimed to improve health and well-being. The experience is highly individualized and geared to help you take personalized actions that work for you.
What’s the coaching process?
Coaching works well on its own or in tandem with the work you’re doing with your doctor, healthcare practitioner, nutritionist, or mental wellness professional.
Your coach serves as an ally and a guide to help you clarify your direction, revive motivation, and engage simple strategies to take the actions needed to heal or optimize.
Through a series of conversations, your health coach asks questions to help you:
Assess where you are, where you want to go, and what you need to get there
Reveal your greatest, intrinsic motivation to help you get it done
Uncover and manage self-limiting beliefs and actions that hinder your success
Work with obstacles so they never get in your way
Celebrate and tap into your existing strengths so you feel unstoppable
In essence, the coaching process is about setting you up to succeed!
Why engage a health coach?
You may choose to hire a health coach because your practitioner has referred you out to one, or because you recognize for yourself that you could use specialized support to achieve a health-specific goal such as:
Weight maintenance
Hormone balance
Eliminating stress
Improving energy & mental acuity
Sleeping better
Reducing inflammation
Strengthening immune function & resilience
Reversing/avoiding chronic illness
Reversing/ avoiding signs of aging (mechanical and aesthetic)
Avoiding the health problems that plague your family
Ensuring you feel and function great now and into your long future
How do we know that coaching can truly help?
Thanks to data collected by HealCommunity™ (a group coaching facilitator), we can see that people who engage in lifestyle wellness coaching show a 61 to 75% decrease in common struggles, such as: pain, fatigue, anxiety, depression, and sleep issues. These are notable improvements to wellness issues that often stand in the way of deeper, sustained healing.
Bottom line: we need new approaches to wellness:
80% of healthcare costs in the US are attributed to the treatment of chronic conditions. 60% of Americans have a chronic disease, and 40% have 2 or more chronic diseases.
Evidence-based studies on the reversal of chronic illness demonstrate that day-to-day lifestyle factors are responsible for upregulating or downregulating disease switches within the genetic coding of one’s DNA.* This means that one’s actions, exposures, and even thoughts play a significant role in the outcomes of a person’s health. The great news is that the right health coach is also your personal lifestyle upgrade expert.
Determining and implementing personalized actions to upgrade your health can be challenging - leading to stalling and inaction. A coach is your ally who helps you get it done in a way that feels manageable.
With this new grasp on the wellness wheel, what will you do to steer your health in the direction that you truly want?
Holly Parker | Board-Certified & Functional Medicine-Certified Health & Wellness Coach | @hollyhealthspan
I help you upgrade the lifestyle factors that have the greatest impact on your epigenetic and disease expression.
Holly Parker (aka Holly Healthspan) is a Colorado-based Board-Certified Health & Wellness Coach, Lifestyle & Longevity Coach, Biohacker, Fierce Optimist, and Transformation Junkie. Her personal wellness journey to successfully manage and reverse chronic illness catalyzed her mission to help people ignite their innate nature to heal, transform, and reverse aging.
*For more information about epigenetics, here’s an easy to understand description: https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm