Why Work With a Health Coach?

I spoke with a young woman wanting to make health and wellness changes. Her concerns were very common: she was interested in weight loss, under a significant amount of stress, and wanted to feed her young son well so that he’d grow up healthy. She was overwhelmed with the volume and inconsistency of information available. Already so busy, she was frozen into inaction.

Here’s where a health coach comes in.

To begin, we engage in conversation. We ask you questions about your life, your desires, your dreams, your demands, your stressors. We seek to understand you completely, where you are today and your goals for tomorrow. With this information, we formulate the path, the step-by-step action plan, to get you from where you are to where you next want to be. Then we help you navigate that path, one new mindfully creative, consciously chosen healthy habit at a time so that you reach your desired next place. Most importantly, we are with you and support you on this journey. We guide you as you establish the healthy habits that will soon become your new default choices; these habits will become muscle memory. The end result is that you will habitually make the choice that best sustains you and your family, without effort and deliberation, while you are living the juicy vibrant life you desire.

The most challenging and vulnerable time is when you are establishing new habits and goals. We are creatures of habit—thankfully so! If we had to rethink every single choice we made all day long, we’d be overwhelmed and life would not be possible.

At Austin Health Coaching we help you figure out whether the habits you currently have are the ones that serve you best—do they help you create the life you want? Are they the next step on the path to where you want to go? Did you consciously or mindfully choose that habit? Or was it something you slid into by default, pushed there by lifestyle pressures? For example, do you eat a yummy nutritious breakfast each morning? If not, wouldn’t you like to? Many people are so rushed that they skip breakfast or grab something that is easy and convenient but doesn’t necessarily fuel their body well. Sometimes people think they are choosing good food because of the health claims on the package but never read and assess the fine print to see that the claims are a marketing trick designed not to create health, but to sell product. But how is the average person supposed to be able to figure this all out?

Most can’t—we are too busy! And most don’t even realize that the lifestyle choices they habitually make have put them on them on a path the leads to low energy, poor nutrition, and chronic disease—disease that might be preventable with subtle, gentle lifestyles. Many are motivated to become healthy but thwarted when faced with contradictory information and the challenge of making lifestyle changes without proper support and information as to what it truly takes to make the changes permanent. Some think that “health” requires going to extremes they’d never choose.

Have you ever been told that you need to exercise for 60 to 90 minutes a day and think “I could never do that”–so you ultimately don’t do anything? Some have just ,settled, thinking what they have is “pretty good.” However, they don’t have a realistic comparison—really, what is “pretty good”?—and inadvertently sell themselves short. They look around at other people and think they seem to be doing pretty good by comparison, without ever even getting a taste for how good life can be if they stopped settling for “good enough,” and realized they were likely just a few simple changes away from something truly great. Unfortunately, some have bought into the stereotype that “healthy” choices are self-depriving or not tasty or too challenging to sustain or beyond their reach or too hard or not fun or lacking in yummy juicy vibrancy, so they give up their dreams of Optimal Health without even trying, believing it’s unattainable.

True Optimal Health overflows with yummy juicy vibrancy while harmonizing and balancing around aspects of the physical, emotional, and spiritual. It is your entitlement. It is your birthright.