How coaching can help health transformation
It takes guts to make life changes.
If you're ready to improve your health and wellbeing, but need help bridging the gap between thinking about it and 'doing' it, then coaching can empower you to take charge of your choices in a mindful, intuitive and holistic way.
WHAT IS WELLNESS COACHING
Enjoying great food and an easy balanced relationship to food. Having more mental and physical energy. This is all possible.
The premise of coaching is that you hold the answers to fulfilling your own health potential and ultimately creating the life you really desire.
Whilst coaching you, I am simply there to create a space for self-discovery and give you a helping hand, to help you see things from different perspectives and create new possibilities and choices for yourself, find solutions to any barriers to change, tap into your own intuition and resourcefulness, and develop other skills which help you move forward in your chosen direction.
Working with a wellness coach is an empowering and powerful way to shift your mindset when you feel stuck, and to precipitate life change. And the ‘toolbox’ you acquire endures well beyond the scope of working together, which is so important for long-term health and wellbeing.
In fact, health and wellbeing are in themselves 'whole-life' experiences and the many benefits of coaching in this area may extend beyond your health alone. When life is working well for my clients, they feel set to achieve any goal take on.
That is why I’ve coaching complements my empowering approach to nutrition and Intuitive Eating Counselling.
I primarily draw on techniques from extensive trainings I’ve undertaken in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy - a mindfulness-based behavioural therapy and form of CBT, otherwise known as ACT, as well as NLP and other mind-body medicine practices gained through my health coaching trainings with Zest4Life and Food & Spirit™.
TRANSFORMING HABITS
I believe that much of what we do on a daily basis, including how we eat, is largely habit-based - simply learned behaviour that has become ingrained over time. Habits are the little things we do everyday which become our systems for living, the sum of which determine our quality of life.
Even the way we respond to unhelpful thoughts and emotions are habitual reactions which can keep us stuck in old ways.
I believe the most effective way to improve a person's life is to help them discover and ingrain powerful new practices which enable them to live life to the fullest.
NURTURING a GROWTH MINDSET
Take a moment to consider the power of the mind. You may not realise it yet, but we all have the ability to listen our own thoughts and decide how we react to them.
Why is it important to be choosey about how loud we let the chatter of our mind get? Because we have about 60,000 thoughts per day about the events, facts or circumstances in our life. When we get too hooked on the unhelpful thoughts or start to create running stories in our heads, this can impact the actions we take/don’t take - which in turn determine our outcomes in life and health.
I can help you develop some skills to get unstuck from any dominating unhelpful thoughts, such as entrenched food rules or beliefs about your self or body image, that may be currently limiting your behaviour and taking you away from the life you want to lead.
Seeing your thoughts and self-beliefs for what they are, and still acting mindfully guided by your values is the path to lasting diet and lifestyle change.
What’s more, a growing body of evidence shows that changes in how we handle our thoughts, beliefs and also our feelings can bring about changes in our physical health and wellbeing too. Mounting evidence for the role of the mind in disease and healing is leading to a greater acceptance of mind–body medicine, and this is an area of increasingly relevance to my practice too.
NOURISHING THE ‘WHOLE SELF‘
When body shape and weight are valued at the expense of other important values, life balance suffers. For example, if the goal is to lose weight, a common action many people take is is to jump into a quick-fix faddy or restrictive diet, (or it could be to try to learn every fact about nutrition), or exercise hard for a short time. Those actions may drive a short-term outcome - but what people may not have considered is how such a narrow focus on weight loss, can be problematic in the long-term - narrowing life, enjoyment of food, potentially demising their experience of health, sense of wellbeing and vitality overall.
Whilst good nutrition is fundamental to supporting a healthy body and mind, we are nourished by so much more than the food we eat alone. This is why I trained in Food & Spirit™, a revolutionary approach to supporting health based on a seven chakra framework, fusing the wisdom of ancient healing traditions with science-based functional nutrition and lifestyle medicine.
I believe that all parts of ourselves, mind, body and soul, are all interconnected and work together to support our health and keep us with a zest for life. So working with me, you not only discover how to make your eating patterns and nutrition work for your personally, but you will connect with other aspects of your self-care that work towards helping your ‘whole self’ feel nourished, vibrant and resilient.
CREATING SPACE for Self-discovery & change
I appreciate it takes guts to acknowledge a new approach is needed and to start rethinking your habits or how you relate to food, and that’s why I’m passionate about ensuring that everyone who works with me feels attentively supported and has a safe space in which they are listened to intently and without judgement.
My coaching space will enable you to:
Crystallise a clear, inspiring vision for your success and connect to what really motivates you and the values you herald as important in your life and health
Distill and implement achievable personal health and wellbeing goals that are aligned with your values and purpose, and regularly set manageable, meaningful intentions with the benefit of accountability
Identify and find solutions to overcome ‘blind spots’ or personal barriers to change that may have previously held you back from achieving what you want or kept you stuck in repeating patterns or unhealthy lifestyle habits. Potential barriers may be physical, emotional, motivational or practical
Transform your relationship to destructive thoughts and uncomfortable feelings that may have impacted your body confidence or relationship with food
Develop your intuition and mindfulness skills so you can tap into the wisdom of your emotions, feelings and innate wisdom around your own body, and find the answers already in you
Activate a 'resourceful state of being' where you are empowered to take committed action to reach your goals.