Have you been passive about your own physical and emotional health, like me, thinking you’ll make lifestyle changes one day, just not today, or ask someone wiser to fix it for you?
Here I share with you some of the lessons I have learned about my own wellness. Through working in the wellness industry and through being coached myself, I have a greater awareness of what wellness looks like to me as an individual and I now make better decisions that support my physical and emotional health.
I believe it is essential to have an integrative, personalised, and proactive approach to our own physical and emotional health, and toward the end of this article I describe how wellness coaching does that.
Wellness Lesson One
I no longer wait for a problem to be medical before I take action.
I realised one day that I was choosing to be passive about my own health, that I was choosing to put off my lifestyle changes for another day, and assumed that if anything became an issue I would simply go see my GP for help.
I had a big shift in mindset – this is my body, no one will look after it like I can, and I have the agency and ability to influence how I use it and nourish it.
A huge shift for me has been the way I look at my diet, making better choices, and enjoying those choices has seen my relationship with food change (I am sure this will be another blog post one day).
Wellness Lesson Two
For me, exercise is not about weight control but about instant gains.
I know the benefits of an active lifestyle but with two little kids and a husband whose work is far from predictable, a routine hasn’t been easy to find, this also doesn’t help with motivation. A new perspective about my instant wins gets me moving; the bliss of 40 minutes on my own is up there, so too is a boost in productivity and creativity, and as an extra benefit, each step I take is building bone and muscle strength, not to mention improved sleep and improved mood.
Wellness Lesson Three
Just because I think it, doesn’t make it true.
Thoughts are not real, they come, and they go. The issue is when I think a thought too often it becomes real to me and therefore true for me.
It has been shown that a thought is a neuropathway in the brain, and if we think it often enough that pathway becomes strengthened and eventually becomes the usual thought for us. Incredible progress in neuroscience has demonstrated that if thoughts can be made stronger (and therefore more real to us) they can also be weakened (and therefore diminish for us), and new thoughts can form and strengthen, this is called neuroplasticity.1
My greatest breakthrough was when my coach helped me find a new thought around a troubling worry, my old thought circled around helplessness, and thinking I wasn’t helpless any more didn’t help, but my new thought (well actually it already existed I just needed to strengthen it) was that I am confident and resourceful, this thought now supersedes the old and I no longer ruminate over the ‘what-ifs’ that were taking up valuable thinking time in my day.
Wellness Lesson Four
I no longer look to see what works for other people.
Working with my own coach and working with clients has given me the perspective that health is relative and subjective, what works for one person may not work for another. There is not a perfect solution that everyone ‘should’ strive to achieve, if there were we would all be doing great by now.
I am unlikely to make a change because someone has told me to, the familiar is just too comfortable, and I am unlikely to change if I must make drastic changes to my routine and personal situation. It has to fit in with who I am and how I do things.
I like finding new and creative ways to make positive change for myself, but the latest fads are expensive and sometimes based on little science. So, when I find something a little outside of the box, I do my own research and I keep perspective about manipulative marketing and selective truths.
Wellness Lesson Five
I love therapeutic writing.
I was always told I have a ‘maths’ mind. This repeated became imbedded into my sense of identity and into my sense of ability. And conversely, if I were good at maths, I would be rubbish at English, and therefore horrible at writing.
But, without conscious decision, I’d found I’d used writing in a number of ways over the years as a form of sorting through my thoughts and gaining clarity and a sense of emotional and psychological calm.
This belief has very much shifted. Writing is a pleasure for me, especially if I am writing just for myself.
Wellness Lesson Six
It is not true that I am not very good at meditating, it was judging my meditation that was holding me back.
I had thought I needed to find a way of stopping thoughts from distracting me away from meditation. But, I had it wrong, its about accepting we humans often mind wander into “thinking, planning, remembering, or daydreaming” 2. The key is acknowledging this happening, and not to make a judgement about yourself for thinking or a judgement about the subject your mind wandered to, and then gently return to your meditation.
People who practice (and practise) meditation have a better relationship with their thoughts, particularly wandering thoughts, and unhelpful ruminating.
Although I cannot not think, because I am human, I can practise building my awareness of my thoughts and practise letting them drift away.
Wellness Lesson Seven
Norms, rhetoric, assumptions, and judgements influence my limiting beliefs, finding what is real and true for me diminishes them.
Journaling has revealed just how unhelpful the stories have been that I tell myself sometimes. They often came from other people long ago but the ones that hold me back these days are based on my assumptions about others and about their thoughts.
I often question my thoughts now to identify if they are true or based on assumptions and guessing, this has removed my (very false) superpower of mindreading, which wasn’t all that super to begin with. Working in the wellness industry brings a unique perspective to how we all tell stories to ourselves and pass them off as true.
Wellness Lesson Eight
Identity isn’t what I do, it is how I live.
This was my first lesson when I first worked with a coach, it’s a big one and one I’m still working on. Identity is important to me, when my ego takes over and I bring my spotlight onto what I do and get a little defensive when others miss that I am a three-dimensional, purposeful member of society, I feel rubbish about myself.
What works for me is thinking about my values and how I want to live my life, with self-compassion my focus switches to acknowledging that I do live in line with my values, the ego drops, and I feel more content with the world and don’t really care about other people’s thoughts about me.
I love this quote from Dr Rangan Chattergee:
“You are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes are always worth it, because when you feel better you live more.” 3
We learn the lessons early about what good lifestyle choices look like, but often we fall into behavioural or thought patterns that take us away from these good intentions, to then rely on the healthcare system to fix us when our bodies and minds experience ill-health.
Although we have the agency to make our own decisions about our physical and emotional health, as a society we have been taught that the medical profession will treat our concerns, we can remain passive, that when our concerns build and they start to impact other parts of our lives someone wiser than us will fix us, and this is when we may visit our GP.
And at times, when we choose to take an active role in our own health, we are sometimes presented with fads, poor advice and too many options which confuse us and leave us feeling that the status quo is more comfortable than trying something new.
I believe it is essential to have an integrative, personalised, and proactive approach to our own physical and emotional health, and wellness coaching does that. It reduces the gap between knowing that there is another way of behaving and thinking, to finding the resources to take action, and to potentially reduce your risk of requiring medical assistance later. Wellness coaching can also support you if you live with a long-term health condition, stress, change or challenge, improving your physical and emotional health by managing these impacts and improve the quality of your life.
This is why I fell in love with Wellness Coaching.
Are you ready to change from being passive about your physical and emotional health?
What one action will you take today to be the architect of your own health?
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