Experts are people like clinicians, academicians and nutritionist. Most people are happy with the healthcare they receive and I totally understand that sentiment. After all if I ever have a serious accident, as long as it occurs near a hospital, I will have a very high rate of survival. The situation that this blog will address is the normal office visit where the expert tells you whether you are aware of it or not that you aren’t healthy.

If I weren’t aware of the disease I would be very grateful. The expert obviously was trained well in diagnosing my affliction. If I hurt my hand and I wasn’t sure if it was broken a clinician had tools and training to discover the extent of the damage. The clinician can then treat me or do surgery on me so that my hand can heal.

There are other more occult diseases that require expertise and tools to diagnose which aren’t as easy for me to explain in this blog. Things like metabolic disease, obesity, auto immune disease and pathogenic diseases. Some or all of these disease have a treatment which can be helped with pharmaceuticals.

What we hope will happen when we see the expert is that the condition could be helped by lifestyle behavior modification. The advantage is that you become better without needing treatment which could have other side effects. Experts don’t usually get training in helping patients change behaviors. If they did then doctors visits would have to last longer than 10 minutes. To help us change behavior we usually turn to friends or other experts who may have more time but still don’t have the correct training. Health coaches do have the appropriate training.

Why you should seek the services of a health coach after being diagnosed with diseases of lifestyle.

1. Empathy For a coach to express empathy to a client means to be with you and respectfully notice your emotions. In other words we are not going to have pity on you. This is important because you will be more willing to express feelings that prevent you from changing.
2. Vision In the beginning of your health coaching journey you wil be asked about your vision for health. Stating your vision is not just a wish list. A health coach can help you make your vision more vivid in your mind. Having a vision will help us keep you on track and help you stay the course when things get hard.
3. Consistency I health coach is trained to help you stay consistent. One way we do this is for example when you are having a hard time and we aren’t sure whats going wrong. We prepare ourselves daily and especially before a health coaching session to maintain equanimity. That is we aren’t reacting to things happening. Rather we can see outside ourselves and so when we see ourselves reacting, as emotion arise and not after.
4. Acceptance A health coach is trained to see the staged of change that our clients are in. This is important because by knowing this we will treat you appropriately and not push and risk regression.
5. Encouragement A health coach see’s you as fully capable of change. Its not that experts don’t believe in you but they tools which they feel leave out the possibility of failure. They feel you can fail on your own and we have given the task of curing us. A health coach knows how to hold you in failure and victory to nurture your progress until you succeed.
6. No agenda A health coach should not have any agenda. The type of agenda that comes to mind in the moment is diet bias. I personally am open to a client wanting to follow any diet. If and when a client wishes scientific confirmation I would honestly point them in the direction which scientific literally currently points us to.
7. Human An expert relies solely on the science. We expect them to. As a scientist I know that there are outliers. This is why I choose to treat clients as humans and not an experiment. I will push you to create N1 experiments for yourself. If evidence you have heard is compelling to you then the next step is to test the new protocol on yourself and see if you get the same results.
8. Results The fact is you are aware of what it will take to get healthy. The CDC has reported that only 25% of people follow 4 out of 5 healthy behaviors which are: not smoking, get enough physical activity, moderate alcohol consumption, Maintain BMI, and get enough sleeping. Therefore you are possibly really close to health and having someone whom their job it is for you to achieve it is a game changer.