Why Health & Wellness Coaching? And Why now?
With India fast becoming an epicentre for non-communicable diseases, it is practically imperative to partner with a trained health and wellness coach for sustainable changes in habits. Our doctors today are overburdened with 50 plus patient engagements a day. A typical doctor’s appointment would range from five to eight minutes, where the patients get to speak for an average of 30 seconds, leaving very little time to evaluate the underlining causes of disease stemming from lifestyle habits. These habits pertain to nutrition, exercise, stress, emotional wellbeing, mental wellbeing, smoking, alcohol consumption and others. Extremely credible information on health and wellbeing is freely available on the web. The challenge, however, is not the information or the lack of it. The challenge is implementation of habits in a sustainable manner. Therefore, while conventional approach looks at signs and symptoms of disease, health and wellness coaching addresses its underlining root causes.
The National Wellness Institute, USA has adopted the following definition of wellness. “Wellness is a process of becoming aware of making choices toward a more successful existence.” Health and wellness coaching is the application of the principles and processes of professional life coaching to the goals of lifestyle improvement for higher levels of wellness. It is an alliance between a professional health and wellness coach and a person (or persons) who, through the benefit of that relationship, seek lasting, lifestyle behavioural changes. Health coaching focuses predominately on the physical dimension of one’s life. Wellness coaching touches all other dimensions as well, such as the emotional, spiritual, social, love, health and wellbeing, personal growth and development, fun and recreation and career. If one area of one’s life is in imbalance, it affects all other aspects of one’s life.
Health and wellness coaching as an approach helps individuals achieve perfect health that is perfect according to them. Health and wellness coaches are hence, behaviour change experts who have an understanding of integrative health, neuroscience of behaviour change, coaching psychology powered by positive psychology, adult learning theory and healthy lifestyle principles, including the science of nutrition, exercise, stress and much more.
Once you decide to embark on the journey of personal health and wellness transformation, your health and wellness coach becomes your ally or accountability partner. The primary objective is to create a heightened level of awareness around your health and well-being, establish the root cause of the problem, educate you on a healthy lifestyle and facilitate growth by gauging your readiness and willingness. Your coach will help you understand the underlying thoughts and perceptions that govern you and enable you to take effective actions that favour your health and wellbeing. Your coach becomes your ally in the process of change. Research says that it takes an average of 60-90 days to formulate a shift in lifestyle habits and can take up to a year for those habits to become sustainable.
This holistic approach to well-being is truly the need of the hour. Health and wellness coaching today finds itself making inroads into the Wellness Landscape in India. The industry and the general population is waking up to the need for an integrated behaviour change approach to well-being and lifestyle disease management and prevention. While there is a lot of focus on digitising healthcare and artificial intelligence, there is a new tribe of industry thought leaders who are beginning to understand and bring to focus the need for a sustainable lifestyle habit change. Corporates, insurance companies and hospitals are beginning to realise the impact health and wellness coaching can have on individual health outcomes and quality of life. From 2019 onwards this trend will cement itself in programmes that keep in focus all dimensions of wellness.
