In my years of coaching, I’ve learned that clients consistently seek to optimize or enhance aspects of their lives. Health and fitness emerge as frequent topics across all age groups. Many express a desire to feel healthy and fit but struggle to achieve it. Typically, their goals can be categorized into three segments:
Health: This includes eating right, ensuring adequate sleep, and achieving weight loss.
Fitness: This involves engaging in physical activities such as exercising at the club, practicing yoga, running, and hiking.
Wellness: This can be spiritual or non-spiritual. It includes activities like quiet walks, reading, morning vespers with passages from religious texts, and meditation.
I help clients overcome the reasons why their highly inspired personal initiatives often fail. For example, even after addressing poor eating habits such as portion control or choosing fast food over home-cooked food, weight loss can still be elusive. In these cases, we examine the role of stress or discomfort, which often manifests at night when stress eating begins. It's common to find themselves munching through a whole bag of chips or candy after dinner. I help clients understand this dynamic and take steps to reduce or eliminate unconscious eating.
When it comes to sleep, if you’re not getting enough and are experiencing high stress, consider skipping the doctor’s office and sleeping aids. Instead, try sleeping for eight hours per night for two weeks. Most people report a 50% reduction in stress levels. Then, we coach on managing the remaining stress.
Fitness is another area where challenges arise, often because people put themselves last rather than first. Additionally, it's important to reassess if you still enjoy your chosen sport or type of workout. If you no longer feel like going to the gym, consider canceling the membership and hiring a private trainer. This change can make the experience more pleasurable and help you learn new things.
Regarding wellness, finding something that works for you has never been easier with online offerings. Many people quit new meditation routines because they feel they can't do it. The start can be bumpy as you retrain your mind and body, which takes time. Outside formal meditation practices, I often introduce clients to the calming effect of fire and flame. While setting a wood fire every morning isn't practical, lighting a candle and staring at the flame for 10 minutes can provide a similar sense of peace to start your day.
These are some fun and easy-to-deploy tools to get you started. If you still have trouble, that's where coaching comes in, helping you examine beliefs or life conditions like high stress or mild depression. Coaching can help untangle the things that hold you back. Sometimes, in our commitment to missions like launching a career, we forget that we can't keep climbing indefinitely; we must level off and cruise.
Are you one of the many who struggle to achieve your goals in health, fitness and wellness? Are stress and poor habits getting in your way? If you're ready to overcome these obstacles and achieve lasting change, let's work together. Reach out to start your journey towards a healthier, fitter, and more balanced life.
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