#336: Why Health Coaching Works: What Clients Need to Succeed

Hello there. Health coaches, I know facts like there are many of you out there who doubt your ability to help anyone, and you think to yourself, I'm just a health coach. You feel inferior to those who have more certifications or letters after their name if you're here with me live and this resonates it all. Tell me in the chat, what are some of the things that you tell yourself when you think I'm just a health coach. I know I felt the same way. I mean, if you've been listening to this podcast long enough, you've probably heard me share in the past. I went to college for art. I have no background in pre-med or health sciences where I can stand here and tell you I'm this big old health expert. I have a health coaching certification just like most of you. But here's the thing, and I only really understood this after doing the work for many, many years, health coaches provide something that clients often are not getting anywhere else in their life.

Certainly not from their doctors, often not from their family or friends. And that's why time after time, we hear amazing stories from our coaches about their client's progress and why health coaching works in a very specific, almost magical way. Lauren's saying, I'm just a health coach. That's exactly what she tells herself. I'm new and I don't know enough. This episode is for anyone feeling skeptical about health coaching as a concept, as a profession, or curious about its true value. And if you're curious about becoming a health coach yourself, or if you're not quite sure your training has been adequate, download my free guide that'll help you out. It's called How to Choose the Right Health Coaching School, and you can grab that for free. It's at healthcoachpower.com/school because it's not about memorizing a bunch of nutrition facts that you're going to be able to share with your clients or understanding complex systems of human anatomy, and it really hit me in the face last week in my own personal life.

So this episode's going to be a little bit of glimpse into real life with Michelle. It's been crazy lately. We had spring break trip to Florida. I was in Iceland before that. I feel like it's been a lot of travel. It's been a lot of the kids being busy with soccer. Business has been busy over here, but oh my goodness, last week it was just a chill day. My boyfriend and I were lounging on the couch. I mean, you guys, this is so rare. We weren't running around, we weren't going anywhere. We were just hanging out with no particular agenda. And I'm looking at the books on my bookshelf. I see them every day, but my eyes just landed on them and I turned to him and I was like, look at all these books I have. I used to read a lot of books and that's true, but lately I haven't really read much of anything, and I'm like, why is that?

Reading before bed? That used to be my time. The kids went to sleep, clean up the kitchen, typical mom stuff, and then I would get a lot of reading done. I know maybe a couple years ago I plowed through everything by Margaret Atwood and a few other authors. Then last year I bought a beautiful cloth bound set of Jane Austen Classics. Well, now it's almost 12 months later, and guess what? Pride and Prejudice is still sitting on my nightstand. It's like at night I haven't been reading. I'm curious if you guys resonate with any of this. I've been picking up my phone and you know what happens, the scrolling, the shopping, a little bit of both that I realized had taken over habitually. You do it once, no big deal, happens another time. No big deal. I think we're all experiencing this phenomenon right now.

It's so very addictive. So I was confessing all of this to my boyfriend and he could relate because he kind of does the same thing. So I was showing him these gorgeous Jane Austen books. They're just lovely there on the bookshelf. They would be even better if I was actually reading them and it was like we just talked about it. No shame, no judgment. It was just a calm afternoon, chilling on the couch and sharing about how the phone really has become addictive. So that night, sure enough, it was on the top of my mind and when I got to bed, I very purposefully took my phone, put it in airplane mode, sat it down away from me and picked up the book. Yes, right. I know you're all cheering for me. Guess how many pages I read? Probably two. And then my eyes started crossing and I fell asleep.

But that's so much better, right than when you're scrolling on Instagram and it lights up your brain and it keeps you awake, and then you're just still scrolling forever and ever, and now it's too late. The next day. I was really excited to tell my boyfriend about this. I texted him right away. Guess what? I read two pages of my book. It seemed like a really small win. But then that night he put his phone down and read two pages of his book. So then the next night I had to read three pages and so on and so forth. And it's been about a week now and I'm finally making some progress with Pride and Prejudice. Thank you. Thank you. And getting better sleep. So it's not like, I don't know this already. I've been a health coach for 16 years, but I was presented with this real life scenario and I could see how wildly impactful it was to have had that nonjudgmental conversation about an area of my life that I wanted to change.

And then after the change just happened effortlessly, it didn't feel hard. It didn't require willpower. It just happened, and no one had to tell me what to do. He didn't tell me what to do, right? He heard what I was saying about scrolling on my phone. We kind of just talked about it. It was something that I wanted to do differently, and because I spoke it out loud and explored the idea with someone, poof. It's like magic. Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever worked with a health coach or with another kind of coach and had something like that happen? When I look back on my career as a health coach, it's exactly how some of the most amazing results happened with my health coaching clients. So what we do as health coaches, and the reason it works so very well is that we provide on purpose.

Not just waiting for a random day when there's nothing else to do and you're sitting on the couch, but on purpose, we can provide a non-judgmental supportive space and our clients get to explore areas where they're interested in creating change. That's the magic. I mean, yeah, we do other stuff too, but that's the good stuff. Sometimes in life, we're just going to get lucky. Like I said, you're going to have that chilled out day on the couch. You might have a family member or friend who's going to listen to you. If we're really lucky, that person might be supportive. They're not always, they might be nonjudgmental. They're not always, my man was so bless his sweetheart. But you got to think, how often does that happen in a person's life? Everyone's so busy, and if we do have a conversation with a friend, they might say, oh, well you should do this or you should do this other thing.

You should try this app. You should do this thing that worked for me. Or another friend might say, eh, don't worry about it. Social media isn't so bad. Don't worry about it. I do the same thing, not helpful in the same way. How often do we have space to think and process and speak out loud and have someone actually listen, maybe ask some questions? The point is not very often just doesn't happen unless we're working with a health coach. So if you think that your clients need more stuff, I got to give them plans. I got to give them programs. I got to give them recipes that I got to educate them on every topic about the human body. Some of that stuff can be good, don't get me wrong, and it can be really overwhelming. People have so much information. We have it in our pocket at all times, access to all the information in the world.

What people need, I think especially these days more than ever desperately is to be heard. It's your undivided attention. When do you get somebody's undivided attention where they're not looking at their phone over here, right? People need space to unpack what's been simmering in the back of their minds. Maybe something that they read on social media that they've been thinking about. All right, maybe there is something good that comes out of social media, but they need space to process it and they need to be able to do it without being pressured or judged or dismissed. So in this online world, we live in this world of artificial intelligence. You try to talk to someone or chat with someone and it's just a bot chatting back with you. Often we just want to talk to a person. Has there been an occasion in your life lately where you were like, can I just talk to a person?

I had this issue with Uber a couple of weeks ago when I was going to the airport, the Uber didn't come. I had to book a new one. They charged me for both. It was a whole thing, and they wouldn't give me my money back, even though they just didn't show up. Oh my goodness. What? Terrible customer service. They had no way of contacting anyone. And I'm like, I just want to talk to someone. This AI response I'm getting from the bot is not cutting it. So before you decide that it's not enough to be just a health coach, just know that real lasting change, it does not happen because it's prescribed. If it did, every time a doctor told someone to change the way they were eating, then they would change the way they were eating, and that'd be the end of that. It doesn't happen.

I've had many clients actually ask me, are you a nutritionist? Are you an rd? And when I said, no, I'm not, I'm a health coach. They were like, oh, I'm so glad. We think that it's to our detriment that we don't have those extra qualifications. But a lot of my clients were like, that's great because they had worked with that type of practitioner before who maybe just handed them a diet plan and it didn't work, right? No surprise, they craved the individual attention and the individual support and a human ear listening to them. So I'm wondering, did your health coach school set you up for success in this area? Do you feel comfortable holding space for clients in this way? And are you seeing results that like magic the clients create for themselves by themselves, not because you told them to, but because they want to.

That's the good stuff. Or are you still worried that you don't know enough to help anyone? Are you still trying to add to your knowledge about hormones and the gut and the nervous system and the this and the that so that you can create a program that tells clients what to do? Think about the idea of sitting down next to a human being anyone and holding space and coaching them and watching change unfold. Imagine doing that with no preparation at all. That's the kind of skill that I think health coaches need more than any of that other stuff, and that's what you want to lean into for those really big, magical results with your clients. It's your intuition and theirs, and not every health coaching school teaches this. So if this is something that you have to practice and talk about, we can talk about it in our Facebook group.

I'd really like to know what you think about this. I do think it should be taught and emphasized more than learning the science, more than learning the mechanisms of this disease and that disease. That's just my opinion. After 16 years in this field, and I have a free guide to help anyone interested in how to choose the right health coaching school. Again, you can grab that guide for free. It's at healthcoachpower.com/school. The point of today's episode is to encourage you. I want you to get out there. I want you to do the work. I want you to get into it with people and do it scared and do it unsure of yourself, and just do it because your presence and your willingness to sit with someone, that's what's so needed, and it's why I am proud to be just a health coach, and you can be too. Thanks for joining me today. I'll see you next week.