Being a busy parent can often mean taking care of your own health takes a backseat. That’s where health coaching comes in! By simplifying the process, a health coach can help you achieve your wellness goals without sacrificing precious time with your family.
This post will cover the role of a health coach, what to expect when working with one, and how they customize plans for busy parents. We’ll also explore the approach of building healthy habits and how this can benefit your life in other ways.
The Role of a Health Coach: Helping Busy Parents Achieve Their Goals
A health coach is a wellness professional who supports individuals to achieve their health and wellness goals.
The role of a health coach is to guide clients through lifestyle and behavior changes that will improve their overall health and well-being. For busy parents, a health coach can provide invaluable insight into creating and maintaining healthy habits while balancing a hectic schedule. The never-ending juggle of family and professional life can make it hard to see the wood for the trees, so this is a good place to start: Defining Goals
As a health coach, I create a space for busy parents to step off the hamster wheel for a moment, catch their breath, slow down, and work out what it really is they want to change. Quite often we absorb intentions from family, friends, and society at large and can mistake them for our own goals. What I’m really interested in is finding someone’s Why.
For example: A father of two girls decides he needs to get fit, so he goes for a couple of runs, but ends up injured. He meets a health coach, and they ask “What’s important about being fit for you?”. They dig deeper until the father makes a discovery. He realizes that deep down he wants to model fitness for his daughters, and wants to stay fit and healthy so he can be the best father he can be. One of his daughters has just joined a sports team, and he wants to spend time with her helping her practice. Understanding what motivates him and what values he holds will help him find a path to fitness that aligns with these goals.
Working with a health coach is a very personalized process. It’s about using what fits each client’s needs, resources, and communication style. We talk about meeting our clients where they currently are at and helping them figure out their own path to where they want to be. A Health coach is present-future focused.
In each session, we focus on a particular goal that you’re working on. We drill down into specifics and map out what success looks like for you. Together we explore how you get there, the resources you already have in place, and what obstacles are in your way.
Once we’ve collaborated on possible strategies, we work on putting things into action. I support my clients to build their action plan in a way that works for them. This can be really empowering for people to realize that they already have a lot of the skills and knowledge to make lifestyle changes. Then by putting these plans into action, they grow a newfound sense of confidence too.
What to Expect When Working with a Health Coach: A Busy Parent’s Guide
Working with a health coach involves a collaborative process between the coach and the client. As health coaching is still relatively new, it’s helpful to understand the process and our Scope of Practice.
Container of Confidentiality:
A lot of coaches follow guidelines that uphold confidentiality between coach and client. PreKure Health Coaches follow the competencies of the International Coaching Federation, and everything we talk about is confidential. This also supports us in creating a safe, non-judgemental container to explore what comes up. Health coaches work through the lens of curiosity so when we ask questions, it’s to look at possibilities for problem-solving.
Defining Goals:
Early on we talk about what goals you want to reach. It’s important to dig deeper to understand what reaching those goals means for you. These goals become our North Star for the process. This helps a client get clarity on why their goal is important to them. We create a specific picture of how this future-you behaves, what habits they have, and how they feel. Understanding and connecting to this vision can help a client when they are struggling to stay on track. Throughout the process, we will continue to check-in on your goals. We want to make sure they are still the strongest guide for you.
Health Coaches are all about building your awareness of your current well-being. We want you to highlight your strengths and use them to help get to future-you. Occasionally, we ask about a past feeling that connects to this moment, to bring you clarity. However, we always connect it back to where you are now and investigate how that is currently serving you.
Understanding Motivations & Values:
With clarity around a client’s goals, it’s helpful to understand why they want to achieve these goals. What will it mean for them intrinsically? Understanding what personally motivates us can become an important lever when we’re implementing an action plan. Following the thread of motivation backward from daily actions can give us insight into what a client values. Such as the father in my example earlier. He clearly values Family Time, Responsibilty, and Modeling Good Health. Opening up the conversation at the start of the process about values can build a client’s insights into their choices.
Assessment – Meeting a client where they’re at:
Whenever we want to change our habits around a particular behavior, it’s useful to understand where we are starting from. This builds awareness around space for improvement and gives us a measurable point to reflect on. In medical terms, this can be asking your doctor to log current blood tests & blood pressure results. If clients have a goal that involves fitness, weight loss, or blood sugar control, then logging current measurements is important. They can log their body measurements, keep a food log, and track how much movement they are doing already, for example.
Creating The Plan:
The reason why health coaching is so effective is that we collaborate with clients on creating a personalized approach. When we create a plan we take into account the client’s lifestyle, preferences, resources, and needs. This way there is a lot more chance of success. This is also where a health coach can provide support and guide a client in choosing a particular fitness modality, nutritional protocol, or mindful practice. A health coach will empower the client by encouraging them to seek out further specialized information when needed, such as engaging a qualified nutritionist, or a specific fitness trainer to help create the plan further.
Lifestyle Medicine Support:
Lifestyle medicine takes a holistic approach to health. We do this by working with the five pillars of health, which are Nutrition, Movement, Sleep, Mental well-being, and Social Connection. All of these affect our overall health and improving any of these can help establish quick wins when starting a new health journey.
As a PreKure Certified Health Coach, I trained in the latest science and evidence of preventative lifestyle medicine. I have foundational knowledge in health science, nutrition, mental well-being, and behavioral change.
Good health to me, as a health coach is about getting the most out of your life. This is eating food that nourishes your body to feel your best, moving every day in a way that helps you feel strong, relaxed, and comfortable in your skin, optimizing your sleep so you can function and feel relaxed, building in mindful practices into your day to help balance stress, and connecting with friends and family in a meaningful way. Some of the side effects of that just happen to be helpful for weight loss, blood sugar control, stress management, fitness, and improved sleep.
Encountering Obstacles:
As you make your goals and start to take action you will encounter obstacles. That may be muscle soreness making you believe you can’t work out as planned, or it might be a surprise cake at work that you believe undoes all your effort, or a stressful evening with the kids that propels you towards the chocolate stash.
When I unpack these challenging moments with clients, this is where I see shifts start to happen. The internal dialogue and struggle people go through with these moments of decision-making can be when all of our habitual thought programs switch on. They are there to keep us doing what we’ve always done. Our brain wants to keep us safe, and in terms of evolution, that is what has worked up until now.
Building new healthy habits takes time. The path isn’t straight either, it can be winding back and forth. So the biggest leverage we use when encountering obstacles is focusing on the resilience we’re building. I teach clients to reframe with obstacles; ‘What is this obstacle teaching you?’ Or, ‘In order to overcome this obstacle, what part of yourself needs to get stronger?’.
Championing Achievements:
I love this part of being a health coach. A lot of people struggle with recognizing what they are good at or the action they have taken. We’re so focused on what we don’t achieve or where we fall short, that we miss our successes.
I celebrate with you along the process the milestones, the incremental steps, and the mind shifts. Because small changes add up, and it is hard work. That deserves to be highlighted and acknowledged. By championing my clients’ efforts, I teach them to see that they are capable, worthy, and showing up for themselves in a meaningful way.
Accountability Support:
Health coaches can work as accountability buddies on the regular actions clients plan for themselves. For example, a client may determine they will do three walks that week, and each time they do it, they will send a picture of the view to their coach. Or the coach checks in on goals in session and helps adjust any plans to keep that habit embedding.
Health coaches also employ accountability around honest feedback and using their intuition. We are there to hold clients accountable to their goals, so when we sense that a client is avoidant, or deflecting away from facing their internal obstacle, it’s our job to gently hold them in that space and help them dig deeper. Change can be uncomfortable, but health coaches can help by carefully navigating alongside clients one step at a time.
Personalized support:
The exact nature of the coaching session depends on the coach and client’s preferences, but they may include regular check-ins, goal-setting exercises, and education on healthy behaviors. No two clients and life situations are the same, so we are trained to dance in the moment with our clients around what may come up.
How Health Coaches are effective for Busy Parents
As a health coach, one of my main focuses when talking to clients, is to help them slow down, even if it is just for the session.
Parents are so stretched for time, and they walk around with an unachievable To Do list in their heads. This weighs heavy on them, and that overwhelm can mean they are internally racing. Talking a plan through and considering the practicalities can be easier when you don’t have to do it alone, especially if your own knowledge can be supported.
Health coaches kind of work as Mental De-Clutterers around a health goal. I can collaborate on creating a plan that fits into a hectic schedule and finding small habits that make big shifts. I help clients identify opportunities for exercise, stress reduction, healthy meal prep, and strategies for temptation.
Our thoughts and emotions drive our actions, and the pattern of these actions become our habits. Over time we identify with those habits, and then that identity feeds back into our thoughts and emotions. As your health coach, I can help you slow this loop down and see your patterns, so you can be more aware of the choices you’re making.
So often we hear, it takes a village to raise kids. I think parents need a village of support too, to be their best version for their family and themselves.
I offer free discovery sessions as a health coach. This helps to work out if we’re the right fit – and it means you get to experience the process, and possibly understand more deeply what you need to put into action to improve your health. What are you waiting for?
