healthandexercisetips rut Do you need some expert advice and support to help you make a breakthrough with your health? If so, you may benefit from taking part in a wellness program. In this article wellness coach Wesley Smith explains how wellness programs work to support you to get over your current health challenges and back onto the path of feeling good. Is it time you made some health supporting changes in your life? If you are ready to make some changes then you may be ready for a wellness program.
What is Wellness
Wellness is feeling healthy and happy. Wellness is having the energy to put into those things that are meaningful in your life. Wellness can mean discovering what brings you meaning and satisfaction. Finding wellness means overcoming chronic health problems and making lifestyle changes that support your health goals.
Set Your Goals
A wellness program starts with helping you to clarify your health goals. Reaching your goals is going to require you to make changes to your current lifestyle and that’s why it’s important to make the connection between the goals you want to reach and why you want to reach them. This may sound obvious but it is a crucial step to helping you sustain your effort throughout and beyond the program. It’s exploring the reasons why we want to do something that creates momentum. Take the goal of having more energy for example, having more energy is a great goal, but the crucial question is what are you going to do with that energy? Would having more energy mean you are no longer exhausted in the evening after work so you can do something you enjoy like an art class or a catch up with friends? Would you like to have more energy so you can keep up with your children or grandchildren? Would you like to go bushwalking, play sport, get fit again? Can you see how it’s the activity that is associated with having more energy that you can get excited about. You need to find your own personal examples that speak to and inspire you, so that the effort required to stick with your health supporting choices is able to be sustained. So step one is to define your goals within a time frame (for example 12 weeks) and then elaborate on how each goal will benefit you and use specific examples that really mean something to you and will inspire your sustained commitment to reaching your goals.
Assess Your Health
The next step is to get a clear assessment of your current state of health and what factors are underpinning your current health issues. If you understand what’s happened with your health then you have insight into what needs to change. It’s also helpful to understand your health strengths and weaknesses, which may include discussions about the state of your nervous system, immune system, endocrine system, the underlying health of your vital organs and your emotional and mental health. At this stage its really helpful to have a good wellness coach who can objectively see your health issues and has the experience to be able to help you prioritise what you have to do next. When you start out in a wellness program, it’s important to see progress to sustain your motivation and belief that you can be well. Its the wellness coach’s most important role to be able to see where you are stuck and give you relevant and personally meaningful advice that sets you back on track to your goals. Without that insight we can end up wasting a lot of time and effort and without the benefits we’re hoping to achieve. In other words, a good wellness coach can see where you are stuck and show you how to get unstuck.
Individual Health Report
In a wellness program, following on from your initial consultation, you will receive a comprehensive individual health report, which sets out your health goals as you have defined them, goes into detail about your current health status, the health issues that need to be address and the changes you need to make to to meet the goals that you have set. The health report allows the wellness coach to cover more than you can cover in a one hour consult, its also beneficial to have all the information in a written for so you can go over it again and again.
