Do you have a health goal?
If you’ve ever wanted to drink more water, eat better, increase your daily step count, quit smoking, manage diabetes or hypertension, or safeguard your mental health, you’ve had a health goal. And if there’s anything positive this pandemic has highlighted, it’s how important prioritising our collective health is.
Having a health goal is great. However, successfully achieving that goal requires making a change – that’s where the hard work comes in. Achieving a health goal requires disrupting, modifying, and transforming your daily habits into new, possibly unfamiliar, actions.
While it’s possible to make behavioural changes independently, the process takes time, often much longer than you would like, and comes with much trial and error. For example, studies show that 55% of people will give up on a new year’s resolution by the one-month mark, and only 4% will stick it out.
To reach your health goals and reach them quicker, you are going to need a little help. You’re going to need a coach.
What is health coaching?
Peter Grinspoon, a medical doctor and Harvard Medical School lecturer, explains, “just as a sports coach can help an athlete develop and excel at a sport, a health and wellness coach can help anyone excel at living their life, even — or especially — if they have a chronic medical condition.”
Studies consistently show more people achieve success with their health goals with the support of a professional health coach. That’s because health coaching combines health and medical knowledge with the science of behavioural change to help you cope with and reach your goals.
That said, the work still needs to be put in. A coach can’t do the work for you. But what a coach can do is guide you, help you explore options, opportunities, and solutions that bring you closer to where you want or need to be, and help you dodge common pitfalls that often force you to give up.
How health coaching can help you
Coaches see the bigger picture
We don’t always know what we don’t know. A coach will provide an objective perspective to identify underlying physical and mental health issues that may not be immediately apparent.
Coaches help define intrinsic motivations
By asking the right questions, a coach will help you clarify your fundamental objectives and values, help you define the best strategy, and create an adaptable and actionable plan.
Coaches provide important feedback
Actions should directly correlate with your intended outcomes. A coach has the expertise to help you identify weaknesses you can avoid or improve upon. Their experience will help you reach your goals much more effectively and quickly.
Coaches motivate and educate
Coaches offer a safe space where tough issues, suggestions, and advice can be discussed without intimidation, to empower you. They are there to fill in the blanks in your knowledge and understanding, and to ensure you achieve your health goals as efficiently as possible.
Coaches keep you accountable
Effective health coaching is built on a strong relationship of trust. A coach will challenge you to take responsibility for your progress - knowing when to be sweet-talked and when to be pushed to stay the course. Science says so.
If you’re serious about making lifestyle changes and sticking to them, improving your health, and getting a headstart on becoming your healthiest and best self, get a coach. Better yet, get a team.
Naluri offers a multidisciplinary health coaching approach. Since goals vary as much as people do, it’s only fair that you get a team of experts on your side. Naluri’s holistic coaching system is led by a clinical psychologist who acts as a head coach and is supplemented with a team of specialists, each an expert in their field. Dieticians, fitness coaches, pharmacists and medical professionals all work together to devise a plan personalised to you. With a suite of digital transformation tools such as food journals, daily modules, planners, and thought journals, your Naluri coaches can guide and support you on your time via asynchronous chat.
To get started with the Naluri app, including an asynchronous chat with health coaches and other medical practitioners, email hello@naluri.life for more information.