Have you ever experienced something so life-crushing that you wanted to close the curtains and shut down? Have you ever felt so helpless with a medical diagnosis that you wondered if restoring your health was ever a possibility? How can health and wellness coaching propel your Lyme-diseased body back to the best version of yourself?
If you feel a sense of physical, emotional, or spiritual bankruptcy, a health and wellness coach can help you chart a course and co-navigate a journey of change.
During my nightmare with Lyme, most medical professionals couldn’t answer my questions about the disease. The journey felt like being dropped in the middle of a thick, dark forest without any means of protection or any way to navigate to safety.
With a disease like Lyme, the deterioration of your health can erode your resilience— if you let it.
Where do you start in your desire to restore your health? Like any new start, it’s the first, small step, the leap of faith.
Why you Need Health and Wellness Coaching If You Have Lyme?
Health coaching serves as a tool to help you optimize your health and well-being, particularly when change is hard. Unfortunately, we live in a culture conditioned to expect instant results.
But lasting and long-term changes unfold through a series of stages, like the metamorphosis of a monarch.
When you are navigating a chronic illness, the journey gets long, lonely, and intimidating. So who can blame you for wanting that quick fix, something to make it all disappear.
With a bewildering array of powders, pills, and programs from the health-wellness industry, it’s no wonder you may want to snatch up easy solutions.
The truth is, temporary results make you more dependent on that product or guru rather than tapping into your inner warrior.
Not every storm passes in an instant. You may have to push through a deluge to get to the other side.
It’s tempting to cower in fear or linger in ambivalence.
Despite your Lyme diagnosis, maybe you still struggle with unhealthy habits or pursue quick fixes that don’t last. Maybe you lack confidence in your ability to conquer the tricky bacteria that accompanies Lyme.
A health coach steps in and :
- Inspires, listens, and collaborates with you in setting health-wellness goals and accountability with empathy and compassion.
- Empowers you to harness the strength to overcome obstacles and reframe your mindset
- Discovers, clarifies, and aligns with what you want to achieve with your health.
- Cultivates a warm, accepting, and non-judgmental session
How Integrative Health Coaching Works
Once you find a health-wellness coach, then you progress through the stages of a session. First, you provide background information to inform your coach about key health concerns, your medical conditions, and your health priorities.
The first coaching session can last up to ninety minutes. In that session, you work toward creating a one-month to three-month plan with goals and a vision. Then, you decide to make changes in at least one area of your health-wellness.
In subsequent sessions (weekly or as needed), you will meet with your coach and discuss your progress and any obstacles you encountered.
Then you may brainstorm strategies, develop solutions, design goals for the new week, and decide on accountability/tracking and measuring outcomes.
The Pillars of Integrative Health-Wellness Coaching
Integrative health coaching focuses on the client-coach relationship. The sessions are client-centered, which is something that is lacking in most biomedical/healthcare provider practices. The coach asks insightful questions that build self-efficacy, confidence, and insight.
Your coach will spend time authentically listening, building rapport, and creating trust.
Integrative health-wellness coaches approach the “whole” client: mind, body, and spiritual. Wellness author/speaker Greg Anderson writes, ” The concept of total wellness recognizes that our every thought, word, and behavior affects our greater health and well-being. And we, in turn, are affected not only emotionally but also physically and spiritually.
In my coaching practice, I combine the trust built with the client and the hope found in God. I help clients move away from avoiding, denying, and doubting to seeking and restoring.
Integrative health and wellness coaches rely on evidence-informed practice. Coaches use “the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current and the best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients, [which] means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.”
Integrative health-wellness coaching looks to optimal health by helping clients build resilience and thrive in suboptimal situations.
Integrative health coaches client-centered design sessions. During the sessions, coaches support what the client wants and what you find personally meaningful.
It’s Time to Take the Next Step
Your coach will collaborate in behavior change in areas that will help restore your health. Often clients know they need to change certain behaviors but aren’t motivated or focused enough to take the next step. Lorne David Opler, a journalist for the Washington Post, writes that “health coaches focus on the here and now, helping clients identify their current strengths to achieve their behavior-change goals.”
If you have Lyme and struggle with:
- Stress management
- Rest/sleep routine
- Lyme eating protocol
- Consistency with taking your supplements
- Exercise/movement
- Spiritual growth
- Lack of a supportive community
- Self-care practices
- Motivation to detox
Then you will benefit from health and wellness coaching.
Health coaching is available in-person and virtually. If you feel a beckoning to move forward, then it’s probably time to take the next step toward change. Emily P. Freeman, Hope*Writer co-founder and the author The Next Right Thing, reminds us “that next right thing is unexpected or scary, don’t be so quick to doubt it.”
Experience the benefit of having someone completely engaged and ready to help you harness the strength to leap over and push aside any obstacles that try to prevent you from restoring your health.
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