Mental and Emotional Health and Motivation

Mental and emotional well-being is critical to a person's overall health, and can have a direct impact on physical health.  It also has a strong impact on our ability to get and stay healthy physically, since personal strength, motivation, and self-discipline are necessary to lead a healthy life and not get sucked into unhealthy habits. 

Health coaching strives to address mental factors such as behavior change, motivation, and support for overall mental wellbeing, such as ways to reduce the impact of stress.  

There are a few key life philosophies that I try to live by in order to keep it simple and help drive my decisions and behaviors.  

• 1. The Golden Rule!  Treat others the way I want to be treated.

  2. Try to do the right thing, for the right reasons.  

  3. Achieve and maintain an overall healthy state of being.

The goal of health coaching is to provide education, opportunities, and support for #3 - Achieve and maintain an overall healthy state of being.  This requires understanding your mental and emotional state to help support a change to a healthier lifestyle and maintaining good health once you achieve it.  To have personal strength, motivation, and self-discipline, we need to understand where we're coming from, and where we're going and why.  Consider these questions:

• • What is my current state of overall health?

  • Do I have any medical concerns or issues?

  • How is my lifestyle contributing to my health and medical condition?

  • Why do I make the choices that I do regarding my health?

  • What are my health and lifestyle goals?

  • What barriers are in the way to achieving my health goals?

  • What kind of knowledge, support, or opportunities do I need in order to achieve my health goals?

A health coach can help you investigate and answer these questions, and help you put together a plan and develop a lifestyle that can help you achieve your goals.   It's one thing to have someone create an exercise plan and stand over you while you do it.  But it's an empowering thing to lead your own effort and drive yourself, with the help of a coach, to live the life you really want in a sustainable and enjoyable way.  It's the old adage: Give someone a fish and they eat for a day.  Teach someone to fish and they eat for a lifetime.  This latter is the goal of health coaching.

For more thoughts on the mental and emotional aspects of health, check out the Coach4HealthyLife blog at blog.Coach4HealthyLife.com.