Using a health and wellbeing coach to kick-start your new year’s health goals
Right about now you’re probably thinking how you will start and maintain any new year’s resolutions you’ve set yourself. Perhaps you want to lose weight, improve your diet or fitness, or even reduce your stress levels?
It’s easy to set lots of goals initially and then find a few weeks down the line you’re struggling to maintain them.
So how can you ensure you stick to this year’s goals?
One way to ensure you set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed) goals and make sure you achieve them is to work with a health and wellbeing coach.
What’s a health and wellbeing coach?
Usually, a health and/or wellbeing coach tends to specialise in helping you create improvements to your health through identifying what you want to achieve, and how best you can achieve it for you; given your lifestyle, habits and environment. Sometimes they’re called life coaches, or personal coaches too.
What can they do to help?
Coaches are experienced in ensuring you set the right goals for you, your lifestyle and that you work towards achieving them. If your goal is to go up 50 flights of stairs every day but you work in a ground floor building, they might help you identify increasing your steps as a more achievable option – something that you can easily do with some help to work out how.
Don’t worry if you know you want to improve your health but don’t have a clue where to start. A health coach can spend time with you and help you understand what you can improve, how best that could work for you and get you to set smaller milestones to make sure you reach those bigger goals.
So how does it work?
Health coaches will usually work with you over a specified period of time, with an assessment and goals setting session at the start and an evaluation of your achievement at the end. By being held accountable to someone, even initially in the first few weeks as you work towards your goals, you’re far more likely to stick to them. To find a health coach in your area head to the coaching section of our directory.
