Health coaching is about helping clients achieve their goals through a process of self-awareness, goal setting and action planning. It’s not just about telling someone what to do; rather, it’s about helping them understand why they’re doing things and what they want to change.

One of the reasons that I am a health coach is that I had a tremendous health success over 10 years ago. The success was so great that many people asked me how I did it. As I have discussed in other blog posts I am very shy and also very emotional. Therefore I don’t think I handled the advice giving part of success.

When you succeed in health you immediately get a lot of questions about how they can do the same. These conversation often go wrong, Here are a few ways that happens.

1. You want to give out the step by step. When asked you offer to help anybody get the same results. After all you succeed because you did it. It doesn’t matter if a trainer or clinician helped you but the main ingredient was you did it. This can go wrong because you are unique. Even if you think you followed the process as told to you it most likely was not exact. It makes you wonder if the diet worked or if the little quirks that make you, you were.
2. When asked for help, they aren’t really ready for change like you were. A person can say they are interested in what you did simply to be polite but they might not be ready to do what you did. If this is not picked up by you then you could then overstep by going on and on about how you did it.
3. When you are asked for help they are ready but when they try to do it they encounter issues. This is similar to number 1 bu tin this scenario the person may come to you to trouble shoot what is happening to them. The fact is you don’t know if the person may have just lost motivation. The other possibility is that you cant guess about the little eccentricities that the person may have and then try to figure out how to make an adjustment to the diet.

A health coach is like a friend, only better.

If you are a good friend and happen to be having an easy time getting healthy then this is a really great thing. You are a good friend but you don’t have the skills that a health coach does. The best advice is to recommend they get a health coach.

If this is too hard here are 3 pretty solid things you could say:

1. Ask for what you want and not what you don’t.
2. Seek a discourse for your own ideas.
3. Gave yourself time to be mindful.