Your health coach will educate, engage, and encourage you on your journey to health while also monitoring how you cope with problems such as:
- Emotional Issues
- Financial Stress
- Work Demands
Your health coach’s primary responsibility is to be your partner, guiding you to better health by collaborating with you during one-on-one sessions in a way that understands what’s important to you, where your values are, and lead you to self-realizations about health behaviours that make health changes stick. They exist to take the many pieces of the puzzle and help their client arrange them for a successful journey to health and wellness. Here are some aspects related to heart failure (HF) where a health coach can help:
Stress management
Your body, and therefore your heart, may be strained by stressful experiences that are common in today’s world. Your coach may offer you various stress-reduction techniques to begin coping effectively and help negate the effects of stress on your body.
Work-life balance
Creating and maintaining a career can be challenging. With structure and small rearranging of tasks, your coach will help find a balance between your personal and professional lives so that you have the time necessary to implement the recommendations given by your dietitian, exercise physiologist, or personal trainer.
Educating caregivers
Dealing with a chronic medical condition can be a difficult undertaking. Your coach can be a facilitator and help educate and inform your friends and family about how they can participate in your healthy activities and do so in a fun and constructive way. We all want to be supported in our health journey and your coach can facilitate this support structure – if that’s your wish.
Navigating through challenges
Unexpected challenges in life can deal devastating blows to a positive “status quo” that we’ve built up for us. But by working with a health coach, some of these challenges, such as job changes or new family obligations, can be negated or minimized so you continue on your road to health and wellness.
Health coaches can serve as directors – helping to link you with specialists who can customize your diet and workout plans to your specific situations and provide diet and exercise recommendations to you – then help you bring those recommendations into an actionable plan. Your health coach will then work closely with you on a one-on-one basis to educate you on the reasons for the recommendations, engage you in the process of implementing them in a fun and exciting way, then encourage you as you solidify these recommendations into “habits” that will stick with you into the future.
To maximize the management of your heart failure, it will require some work along with supervision and customized approaches and recommendations from experts such as exercise physiologists, dietitians, and health coaches. Using these resources will put you on a path from where you are now… to where you want to be!
