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Often I am surrounded by people who think I live such a naïve form of life. I have faith, I have hope and I am rarely concerned about my life in many ways these days. This was not always the case. If you have read this blog you often will hear me refer to the days before I lost my weight and changed the focus in my life.
I didn’t like the way I felt back then, but I still never gave up working on being excited about life and finding a way out. Struggle is tough! It sometimes takes all we have to keep going. Heck there are still some days at the end of the day I am glad that day is over. The good news though is even those days have something exciting happening and progress is made in some area of my life.
What’s the difference? I get to set the pace! I make the choices to stick to the plan I have or to take some time off from it. I had to laugh yesterday I was told that I sure have myself in a lot of areas. I work with clients, I am part of a team putting together a revolutionary life coaching plan, I do clinical hypnotherapy, have a full time IT position that put me on call, I watch what I eat and exercise, and recently have been asked to go back into ministry work. Sounds like a full plate. My response was that in one of my favorite life giving books I often read that if you are given talents you should use them or they may be taken away. In the same book it tells me to whom much is given, much is expected.
With all that said than I control my life with choices. I choose into my life to get all life has to offer. Diet and exercise take time and planning. So does being ill, it robs hope and joy along with time. Everything has a cost. I just look for the results rather than getting bogged down in the effort. It is more fun to be fit rather than struggling with carrying around all that extra weight. It was a small price to pay for the fullness of life I experience now.
Want control of your Life? Take it, plan it, work it, and live it. Start replacing disempowering thoughts with empowering thoughts. Learn to breath. Find out what faith and hope is again. Stop the excuses, stop the self abuse, and take one step at a time. Do it and keep going at it. Perfection is not the mantra here. It is all about the journey and what you learn along the way. After all whose life is it anyways?
Not sure where to start? Fill out a contact form and lets talk. No charge! Yeah, that is one more thing I do, help others to find a way to get started to enjoy their life. After all, to whom much has been given, much is expected.
To continue the series I want to address the people who you will want to coach. If you are reading this series as a possible client you may see yourself in one of the categories mentioned.
First Timers
This is a group of folks that have decided for the first time in their life to really take on their health. They are ready to take an honest look or have been motivated recently to take care of themselves. Often one would associate this with age, but I see a trend that it is about awareness of their personal health condition. They may have recently visited their doctor, taken an honest look in the mirror, or even heard someone say something when they thought they weren’t listening. Something has them thinking about needing to make a change without any knowledge of how to get started, more or less to finish the journey successfully. They need someone with the expertise to do it right and teach them how to make it stick!
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Yo-Yo’s
I was one of these so I have particular affection for them. This person is someone that tries to lose weight, in fact often has tried many times. They may have had some measure of success. The hard thing for them is the ability to find it inside to try one more thing. Why would they think this diet would work for them, everything else failed at some point, why this one? They don’t understand why and they don’t know about metabolism and diet, they just know they have really tried and failed. They need someone that understands they are serious about it, they just struggle with something that keeps them from succeeding. Often they are the hardest to get to try again. They need an uplifting coach to believe in them and motivate them to give it effort and determination that this time they will succeed.
The Expert
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
This bunch is a hard bunch to even get to work with. They know it all. They have read every book. They have tried everything, and yet they have not reached optimal health. Another version of these wonderful people show up at trade fairs and run when they see a weight loss booth. They know nothing will work for them. I was also part of this group. I was convinced that nothing would ever work and that somehow I had messed up my body so bad that I would never be able to lose weight. I knew that there was no magic pill, no patch, no abs system, and it seemed like there was nothing that would work. If there was certainly I would have found it already, after all wasn’t I the real expert on what would work for me. This group has one question to ask them: Are you happy with the results you are getting now? If the answer is yes, they automatically become un-coachable. To be coach you have to be willing to admit you don’t have all the answers.
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Don’t read this set of articles, if you don’t enjoy working with people. Don’t read them if you haven’t got time to spend with people. Last but not least, don’t read these articles if you don’t believe that you can make an impact on others performance. A coach has to be willing to go beyond their comfort zone and learn they can’t control others and they have to think differently.
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Many people who experience some level of success have a coach or a mentoring relationship. Health and fitness are no different. A health coach teaches people to build on their successes, work on their skills, come up with a plan, monitor important milestones, and stay on top of the feelings that go along with it.
When talking about success on any journey we have to remember that success is never an accident. It takes planning, training, commitment and monitoring. The dictionary defines a coach as someone who trains people in order for them to prepare. Wouldn’t we prepare them for success? What better success could be achieved that optimal health and fitness? My goal as a health coach is to improve your performance in all of the areas of health. Do it in a planned and tested way and offer guidance. But like all forms of coaching, the steps of the journey are still up to the person being coached.
In order to facilitate success a coach should have a range of learning experiences to draw from to help their client bring about improvement. I honestly believe that the most successful coaches are either very teachable themselves (intense observers and learners) or they have walked the same journey before themselves. Take a coach that has both and you have a power-packed combination of skills to assist and guide others.
Check Back for Part 2 – Why be a Health Coach? Health Coaches Role
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I had an experience yesterday that I won’t go into a lot of detail with, but I found myself severely disappointed and feeling let down. Perhaps you know the feeling. You work really hard during the week. You eat right, you work-out as planned, and you even pass right by that tempting desert. Yet at the end of the week you don’t see the results that you had great expectations for. Well this disappointment wasn’t weight related, it was people related. It also didn’t involve days, weeks, or even months worth of work. It involved years! Thank goodness I have had this last year to learn a few things. Otherwise I might have been even more crushed by the results.
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First Lesson: No matter what you think the results should be, they are what they are. You have to dig down to find that hero inside to keep going. After all why do you do what you do? Is it the short term results or the long term journey that you are after. For instance in weight loss. Loosing weight and adding years to your life is a long term goal. In the scheme of things does it matter if it moved today? No what matters is your consistency of doing the right stuff to reach the long term goal.
Second Lesson: Don’t count on anyone else to get you where you want to be. After all they are so focused on themselves they might not even give you another thought. Now don’t confuse this with coaching and mentoring. They are essential to success. It is just a clear statement that if it is meant to be it is up to me! I will need to take the steps each day to achieve that dream I have. I need to stay on my purpose.
Last Lesson: It is not if there will be disappointments in a journey. There will days when it seems like everything is going as planned. The scale is moving, people are noticing, you are feeling stronger, and you make all the right choices towards your goal. Then there will be days that everything seems to go in the opposite direction. It is on the days that you feel like nothing is changing, you question yourself on if you will ever get there. Remember this one thing: “What the mind can conceive it can and will achieve.” Stay faithful to your journey and mindfully take each step. You will get there!
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So once you work out your long term or “Primary Goal” you have to fuel it with the choices that you make along the way. These are “Secondary Choices”. So it begins by breaking down your goal over time. With health and weight loss I would begin with a year. So you primary goal defines where in a year you want to be. You attach vision, emotion and purpose to that goal. You picture it in your mind and often people are assisted by creating a collage of what that life would look like.
Now it is time to figure out how to get there. If my goal is a fitness oriented goal what is in the way of getting it done. First maybe is my current condition of my physical body. If I had not been working out then I need to start slow enough to not hurt myself right out of the shoot. Begin with increasing movement and adding a little bit at a time.
There is however a mental set of goals as well here. What am I going to do to get my butt out the door on the days I don’t feel like it? Oh it is too cold or too hot out, or I think I am coming down with something, whatever the reason, what will get you to go anyway? For me I had a list of the things that would not change if I didn’t keep working on them. For others it may be a list of the people they told they would do this or their blog readers, or just one more look in the mirror that says, “I can’t keep looking like this.” But trust me there will be mornings that you need something extra to get you out the door.
Perhaps one other thing that most people don’t take the time to think through is the idea of what we are going to do when we fail. What if I eat something I shouldn’t? What if I don’t work out today? What if there is a special occasion and today I just choose not to be on program? What do you do after those choices? I know the old me would lean towards losing faith in myself and my plan. The old me would slowly but surely start to give up. What I found out was that doesn’t work. One thing that works for me is to stop for a moment and look at the choice and the consequences and decide what I was willing to give up.
From there I need to look at why this was even a consideration at this stage of my plan and what my next move would be. Whatever I decided I needed to learn where I was in my journey so I could move on. No time for regret or excuses. No time for self pity or loathing. Just time to make another step, reset my goals, monitor the results of my choice and move on.
Clear you mind daily. Decide to live life on purpose and stop letting life direct you. We all make some mistakes. We all have victories and defeats. It is what we do with both that effect how we will live and love our lives. Use your secondary choices to reset your track to your primary goal and you will get there and have the life you worked for.
Today I find myself wanting to write about inspiration. Each day as I work with various clients I wonder if they really get it. By that I mean do they really know how much I care for their success? I am a passionate coach. I work with people to see their success because I want them to feel the joy of knowing that they can do anything they set their mind to.
What I am finding out is that I also need to make sure I am inspired. In order to fill others cups to overflowing I need to have my cup filled. In days where everything seems to be getting busier and faster paced it seems that is like exercise and meal planning used to be in my life, it doesn’t always get done. So I felt the need to take a look at that. What where my results in the past when I didn’t take the time each day to take care of the things that mattered? They got out of balance.
So today I took a moment to reflect. I read some wonderful quotes on Twitter and also took some time out to breath, I read from my favorite book. And in the moment of silence found this post. So, remember to fill your cup to overflowing each day. If not there will soon be nothing left to give. Read, breath, and take care of yourself. Someone is counting on you today to be at your best. Keep an eye out to find them.
While trying to lose weight over the years I thought it was from lack of knowledge. I hadn’t read enough to create a good diet. I hadn’t learned to exercise the right way to get results. Facts where, I didn’t have the “Right Stuff”.
I didn’t have the dedication to plan every bite of food that went into my mouth. In fact as I got bigger I got even more careless. After a while I let my mind slip into what difference does it make, I will never get this weight off. I read reports that this diet or that diet worked and then a year later it was just another fad. I read about intake and output and realized I needed to cut calories. I needed to burn them too.
So then came the complexity of exercises. I kept looking for one that didn’t feel like it was killing me. And just when I thought I was making progress some part of my body would give out. It just felt like there was no win available. So when I read doctors tear down this and that and fitness experts say they have the secret I just know one thing. They didn’t have it for me. I had to find something simple, effective and fast enough to get past that mental barrier that nothing was going to change.
I needed to get healthy enough to be able to work at getting healthy. I hope this ramble makes sense to some of you as I experience it daily with my clients. Get me started. Teach me the right lifestyle changes and I will take it from there. So find what works for you, make it simple enough to follow from your weight loss phase, to your transition back to everyday life at your ideal weight, and finally maintenance of your desired weight. It does not have to be a long process to get to your ideal weight. It just has to be a change in your determination to stay there. It is the journey that makes it a lifestyle change that can effect the rest of your life and help you to live longer.
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