The Benefits of Life and Health Coaching: Improving Your Quality of Life
Today, we will discuss Life and Health Coaching in greater detail. While these two areas of intervention may seem similar, they actually have slightly different objectives. We will explore these differences, the benefits of coaching in these areas, and the various intervention models and their use cases.
Life coaching aims to improve your overall well-being by helping you achieve personal goals through cognitive, emotional, and behavioural changes that enhance your performance and well-being. Unlike work or career coaching, it focuses on maximizing your performance in your personal life.
Health coaching, on the other hand, focuses on improving your overall health by helping you set clear objectives aimed at increasing your quality of life and overall health level. With health coaching, you can work on changing behaviours and lifestyles to increase your health. Although these two approaches, life and health coaching, are very similar, they have different objectives. Life coaching targets personal life, while health coaching focuses on improving overall health.
Why should you use this service and when is it helpful? Like other coaching processes, the goal is to identify an objective or area of improvement, clarify the current situation, consider all the options, create an action plan, and follow through with it. The main difference between life and health coaching and other interventions is that coaching focuses on building upon a level of well-being and improving the individual’s performance to achieve a specific goal. For example, you may be healthy and have a balanced life, but you want to improve specific areas, like building muscles or having a more active social life.
What are the things you can work on in Life or Health Coaching? Some use case scenarios for life and health coaching include: building an action plan to achieve the objective of running a marathon, finding new strategies to cope with increased stress, learning how to manage social media consumption, and creating an action plan to establish new habits. As you can see, all these scenarios have three things in common: they have a concrete objective, impact personal life, and build on an established sense of well-being.
In addition to helping you achieve your goals, life and health coaching has many benefits. These include an overall increase in the sense of personal realization and happiness, improved quality of life, increased levels of self-esteem and self-confidence, discovery of values and new life missions, building positive habits, overcoming obstacles, increased focus on problem-solving, increased responsibility for one’s own well-being, better choices when it comes to health and well-being, and increased self-awareness. Next, I will show you some of the models that are used during life and health coaching processes. This will give you an idea of the different approaches and problems that can be addressed.
Intervention models used
There are three different models that can be used during a life or health coaching process, depending on the coachee’s goals.
The GROW model can be used when there is a clear objective to be achieved. The acronym stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and Will/Way Forward. For example, running a marathon, losing or gaining a certain amount of weight, or establishing three habits to increase well-being are scenarios that can use this model.
The Goal stage defines what you want to achieve. It’s important to use the SMART framework to write a clear objective. In the Reality stage, you look at where you are now. This stage is crucial because gathering information helps to achieve the desired outcome. Starting points can be unclear, so it’s important to examine the situation closely. This is where potential solutions start to emerge.
Once you have clarity about where you are, setting your Options is the next logical step. In this stage, you will brainstorm different ways to achieve your goal. It’s important to be creative and think of as many options as possible. The last stage is Will/Way Forward, which has two phases. In the first phase, you will establish a group of actions and create a timeline. During the second phase, the coach provides support and follow-up to understand what is working well and what needs adjustment. This is where you get things done and achieve your objective.
The CLEAR model is focused on helping individuals achieve transformational changes based on new values, behaviours, and perspectives, rather than just achieving a specific objective. The process begins by establishing a Contract, which outlines the expected outcomes and the area of intervention. This helps guide discussions and sets boundaries for the topics the coaching process should focus on.
The next stage is Listen, where the coach listens to the coachee to better understand their situation and guide the conversation toward the objectives established in the previous step. In the Explore stage, once we have a picture of the potential problem or challenge, we explore the coachee’s emotional connection to the situation and determine what can be done to improve it.
Finally, in the Action stage, the coachee makes a commitment to implement changes and internalize a new perspective. The Review stage is where the coach follows up and assesses what is going well and what needs adjustment.
The STEPPA model is focused on exploring how a specific context or emotion is affecting a particular situation or problem. This model is particularly useful in situations where there are difficult emotions that need to be overcome. Like the models before it, the first two steps — Subject and Target Identification — are meant to understand the intervention area and establish objectives for the coaching sessions and the overall process. The following step Emotion, intends to understand if the emotions associated with the problem or situation will be blockers or boosters for the coachee’s progression. Perception looks to understand the impact of the situation on the coachee’s overall life. The final two steps — Plan/Pace and Action — are all about establishing an action plan, implementing it, and reviewing what went well and what needs improvement.
The final model is the Health Belief Model and this one is particularly important for Health Coaching processes. The Health Belief Model hypothesizes that health-related behaviour depends on several factors: perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, cues to action, and health motivation. These factors affect a person’s ability and motivation to implement changes when it comes to their health. Therefore, it’s important to be aware of these factors in order to adapt the coaching process.
Let’s briefly look at these factors and see how they can affect behaviour change. Perceived susceptibility means that people are unlikely to change their behaviour unless they believe they are in danger. For example, most people only quit smoking when a health issue comes up. People are also more likely to change their health behaviours if they perceive that the consequences are significant enough. This is called perceived severity.
The perceived benefits state that people are unlikely to change their behaviour if they don’t believe that the benefits are greater than the costs. This is why it’s difficult to stick with a gym routine, especially in the beginning when efforts are greater than rewards. If there are many blockers or frictions to implementing a new behaviour, people may easily dismiss the idea of behaviour change. This is known as perceived barriers.
Cues to action are factors that encourage a person to adopt new behaviours. These can be internal, such as feeling pain and doing stretches before bed, or external, such as watching a YouTube video about the benefits of walking.
Finally, health motivation describes a person’s level of concern regarding their health and well-being. As you can see, all of these factors can have a big impact on the overall success of the coaching process. It’s the job of the coach to identify these factors, but it’s also helpful for the coachee to be aware of them in order to help the coach identify potential blockers to the process.
Final Thoughts
Life and health coaching can be a great tool for implementing new behaviours and improving your lifestyle to lead a healthier and happier life. This article provides information about different case scenarios of health and life coaching and the tools you might encounter in such a process. If you are interested in understanding the structure of a psychological coaching process, check out my post. In the coming months, I will also provide an overview of other areas of coaching, including career, sports, and business.
That’s it for today! Let me know what you think about this post and if you found it helpful. Don’t forget to subscribe to get notified every time I upload a new blog post and in the meantime check out my newsletter, Awareness Path, the weekly newsletter where I share my latest learning on how to live in a more aware state of mind.