What is a Health Coach?

Health Coaching is a service-based profession wherein a trained coach works in close partnership with a client over a period of time (usually a minimum of 90 days) to achieve a desired health outcome.

Coaching was once a little-known profession, but it’s been rapidly on the rise in recent years as global health has reached a crisis point. At Health Coach Institute, we believe that in 10 years’ time, everyone will have a Health Coach.

Why? As a society, we’re more unhealthy, stressed, exhausted, overweight, overworked, and burnt out than we’ve ever been before. Lifestyle diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are at an all-time high, and the current healthcare model’s answer is to spend money, time, and energy treating disease reactively instead of investing in preventive medicine. In fact, according to the CDC, 86% of all healthcare dollars ($2.9 trillion and growing) are spent treating chronic diseases.

This is where Health Coaches come in. Health Coaches are at the forefront of a massive paradigm shift in the way we approach healthcare. In fact, we believe they’re the FUTURE of healthcare…and others agree!

According to the book, The Sage Handbook of Coaching, “The dissemination of coaches and coaching principles across the healthcare spectrum – to leaders, the provider workforce, and the entire population in clinical, corporate, community and consumer settings – is positioned to make a vital contribution to the reinvention of healthcare systems globally.”

Instead of treating symptoms, Health Coaches focus on disease prevention, total body health, and getting to the root cause of illness. Health Coaches help people improve their health and happiness, change their habits, and empower themselves to be advocates for their own well-being.

Did you know that some scientists believe up to 95% of human behavior is a result of habit? That’s why so many of us struggle to make lifestyle changes that stick, even when we know we need to and our resolutions are strong. We’re creatures of habit…which is why it can be so difficult to make drastic changes with no support or accountability to help us follow through.

Health Coaches intervene in that space between the gravitational pull of habit and the desire for lasting change. They help people cross the divide.

Doctors, dieticians, and other practitioners often don’t have the time or the skills to help their clients stay motivated and follow through to get lasting results. Without the right support and accountability, clients default to old habits and the vicious cycle continues, or gets worse, with often disastrous results.
That’s why more and more individuals and corporations are turning to Health Coaches for help getting healthier and following through with their health and wellness goals. They recognize the expertise, accountability, and support coaches can provide with healthy lifestyle design and facilitating positive behavioral change.

A client may choose to work with a Health Coach if they want to:

• Lose weight
• Increase energy
• Reduce stress
• Discover how to use food as medicine
• Adopt a healthier lifestyle
• Prevent or manage lifestyle disease
• Improve Fertility
• Bypass traditional medicine in favor of natural alternatives
• Be happier
• Take a holistic approach to health (mind, body, spirit)
• Feel more vibrant and alive
• Improve mental clarity

A Health Coach’s role is to help clients set health-related goals, create an action plan to achieve those goals, break negative patterns and habits, and replace them with healthy ones that serve them.

Health Coaches work with clients to better understand their current experience (and how they got there) and empower them to create a different experience. They help clients follow through with their goals by offering ongoing support, accountability, encouragement, and guidance.

Health Coaches help clients in 5 big areas of life:

• Health
• Money
• Love/relationships
• Career
• “That which is greater” (God, the universe, or whatever greater power moves you)

They help clients assess those 5 big areas and get clear on new habits they want to create. Through the transformative power of coaching, Health Coaches then help their clients turn those new habits into automated routines.

The Health Coaching relationship between coach and client is a collaborative partnership in which the relationship continually seeks to empower the client. Health Coaches don’t provide all the answers for their clients…they hold the premise that the clients hold the answers to the challenges they may be facing—even if the answers may appear to be hidden, muddled, or obscured.

A Health Coach’s skill lies in knowing the right questions to ask to empower their clients and bring the answers inside to light, thereby expanding the menu of choices available to the client to create what they desire.