6 Health Coaching Benefits That May Surprise You

If you’re focused on living a healthy lifestyle, then engaging with a health coach might be the key to achieving your aspirations. In essence, health coaches leverage their extensive knowledge in health and wellness to assist you in pinpointing the health goals that align optimally with your lifestyle. They craft a customized health and wellness strategy tailored to your needs, guiding you to make progress on your goals while helping you overcome any obstacles that may arise. Throughout this journey, a health coach ensures you stay accountable to your goals through consistent check-ins. Yet, the advantages of health coaching extend well beyond merely attaining your health and wellness objectives. Here are six unique benefits of health coaching that may surprise you.

1. Enhanced Decision-Making Skills

Living a healthy lifestyle comes down to making informed choices. Yet, discerning which choices are beneficial and consistently acting on them can be challenging. You may recognize the need for more restful sleep and improved nutrition to enhance your health, productivity, and overall satisfaction with life. But what do these changes entail in your daily routine? Must you invariably opt for the salad instead of the steak, or adhere to a sleep schedule that mirrors the setting sun? A health coach can illuminate the path to your health goals and values, guiding you to make choices that cater to your unique needs rather than relying on one-size-fits-all health directives. As you gain confidence in making the right decisions for your health and wellness (and see the benefits that follow), you’ll likely gain more advanced decision-making skills in other areas of your life, too, as you learn how to navigate your needs and the data or information at your disposal, to make the most beneficial decision possible.

2. Cultivating Mindfulness

Often, the elements of our lives that define our health and wellness can become afterthoughts. We often reach for the quickest option in the refrigerator without contemplating our body’s nutritional needs, and we hustle through our to-do lists without pausing to consider if our pace is detrimental to our health. Engaging with a health coach, however, prompts a shift in this dynamic. You’ll find yourself pausing to reflect on these everyday choices. Achieving your health goals will demand a conscious, present state of mind — and the mindfulness practices you adopt through health coaching can enhance other aspects of your life as well. Embracing mindfulness across all facets of your existence can lead to a multitude of benefits. As reported by the National Institutes of Health, these include diminished anxiety and depression, better sleep, reduced blood pressure, and an enhanced quality of life for individuals with chronic health conditions.

3. Improved Self-Accountability

A key role of a health coach is to serve as a reliable accountability partner, offering structured support. Collaborating with a health coach typically involves systematic progress reviews to track your advancement toward your goals. This professional relationship demands a more earnest commitment to your goals than what you might experience with a colleague or friend acting as an accountability buddy. With a health coach, there’s no room to downplay your efforts or willpower as you might in a casual text to a friend. As you progress, you’ll likely find that your accountability to your coach strengthens your accountability to yourself, particularly as you observe the tangible benefits of such discipline. This heightened sense of personal responsibility can be instrumental in maintaining your dedication to goals in other areas of your life as well.

4. Access to Health Technology

In their practice, health coaches employ an array of technological tools tailored to health and wellness, from specialized health coaching apps to broader apps designed to promote a healthy lifestyle. They are adept at identifying and suggesting the most effective technological aids to suit your specific health goals and can introduce you to resources and tools you might not have known even existed! If you’re skeptical about the efficacy of health apps, rest assured that studies have indicated their potential for success. Under appropriate conditions, these tools have been proven to foster healthier living habits, such as reducing calorie intake, boosting daily step counts, and enhancing overall exercise activity.

5. Cognitive Enhancement

As you pursue your health goals, you may very well begin to exercise more and eat more nutritious foods, and you’ll probably see the number on the scale go down — but that’s hardly the only benefit you’ll notice. As you make positive changes related to your physical health, you’ll see mental health improvements as well. As Harvard Health Publishing reports, numerous links have been made between cognitive performance and nutrition, with poor diet shown to impair brain function and increase symptoms of illnesses such as depression and anxiety. Likewise, increased exercise improves mental health overall, including cognitive function and even self-esteem.

6. Increased Job Satisfaction

Health coaching in your personal life can also produce benefits in your professional life. According to Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, job satisfaction can more than double when well-being increases. Additionally, increased well-being can raise productivity, both on an individual and a team-wide level.

The Bottom Line

These benefits highlight the multifaceted role of health coaching in improving not just physical health, but also mental and emotional well-being, leading to a more fulfilling life.

Interested in improving your health with the guidance of a coach? Get started with a complimentary introductory coaching call.