Health Coaching
This is an online or in person approach that supports individuals in achieving their health and wellness goals which include:
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Assessment: Evaluating your current health status, lifestyle, and goals.
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Goal Setting: Helping clients set realistic and achievable health and wellness goals.
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Education: Providing information on nutrition, exercise, stress management, and other health-related topics.
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Motivation: Encouraging and inspiring clients to stay committed to their goals and make lasting changes.
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Support: Offering accountability and emotional support throughout the client’s journey.
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Personalised Plans: Creating tailored action plans that fit individual needs and preferences.
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Behaviour Change: Assisting clients in developing healthier habits and overcoming barriers to change.
Overall, a health coach acts as a guide and partner in promoting a healthier lifestyle. I utilise a blended approach of Counselling Skills, Executive Function Coaching and Family Constellations
Executive Function Coaching
​This is an approach to coaching that looks at psychometric skills related to organisation, progression and behaviour change. These are important skills in creating healthy habits and are often ignored and overlooked in favour of prescriptive solutions. Bringing some of these elements into awareness can help with solving unconscious trip wires that keep us stuck in repeated patterns of behaviour
Each of these functions will have an impact on our ability to create and sustain change. There will be significant overlap of many functions that translate into action, but having an awareness of where you have strengths and weaknesses means that coaching can be tailored to meet the deficit.
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Executive function deficit tends to be associated with neurodiversity, however research in this area is constantly evolving, and many individuals will have executive function deficits without necessarily fitting into a prescribed diagnostic box. Some loss of executive function will happen with trauma and overwhelming or protracted stress. When we are in a state of stress or high emotion, the brain networks managing this will override the executive function networks, and we start behaving in a reactive way rather than a thoughtful responsive way. Our reflex brain may respond to stress in 3 different ways which most of us are familiar with – Flight, Flight or Freeze. Each of those will look very different in how we behave in response to stress:
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Fight – becoming defensive or angry.
Flight – avoiding something.
Freeze – unable to process what is happening.
A further 3 responses less commonly known are:
Flood – release of emotions by bursting into tears or fits of laughter at inappropriate moments.
Fawn – taking on lots of responsibilities as an unconscious strategy of control in order to feel safe.
Fatigue – feeling very tired and wanting to sleep in response to stress.
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It is important to understand your own response to stress, working with the elements above to help with issues such as procrastination, overwhelm, self-doubt and inability to sustain change.
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Additionally, some of your diet and lifestyle choices may be impacting your executive function skills. Part of improving your health and wellness goals would be to build the habits that support executive brain function.
Systemic Constellations
This is a philosophy and methodology for shifting patterns in life, and broadening perspectives in relation to current difficulties. It is an approach that can be applied in many different ways both in individual or group settings. I use it to facilitate behaviour change around health issues, helping people to improve their relationship with their bodies. Often where there are seemingly intractable issues related to health there can be attitudes of judgement or rejection related to the body as an extension of the self. Sometimes there can be emotional holding patterns of something unexpressed in life.
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I work with individuals using visualisation or figurines or by placing markers on the floor to represent people, events or elements related to their issue. The placement of these objects externalises the inner workings of the mind bringing relationships and dynamics into visual clarity fostering insight and understanding. Typical examples of this would be exploring an individual's relationship to pain or weight.
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This approach can be done in person, online or in groups. Please get in touch if you have any questions with regard to this approach.
Client Story
A female client in her mid-50s was wanting to lose weight having found herself gaining with the menopause. We looked at her history of dieting and found she had struggled with her weight over most of her life and had lost a significant amount of weight in her 30s. She had struggled to maintain her weight loss and had set up a pattern of a period of exemplary eating followed by a breakout of bingeing, a habit she could not break. We began to unpack her expectations of herself, her lack of flexibility in her approach to food and her capacity for organisation of her fridge, freezer and store cupboard in order to plan meals effectively. She began to quickly recognise elements of her executive function were playing into the issue, as well as eating a rigidly repetitive diet of “good” food which then played into the breakout binge on “bad” food. Meeting once/week for 6 weeks we worked on greater organisational capacity and broadening her range of acceptable foods. The client was a highly motivated individual with a high capacity to self-reflect, which meant she was able to understand and implement changes relatively easily. We then spaced the meetings to once/month for maintenance for 6 months to embed the changes she had made. We also focused on identifying situations and stressors that could act as triggers for binge behaviour and collaborated on strategies on how to manage these events without relapse and downward spiral. Switching her focus away from weight loss and onto her personal story and behaviour around food led to weight loss without trying to lose weight. She was aware of her stumbling blocks and potential pitfalls and will sometimes book in for a single session or small run of sessions any time she feels wobbly, such as in the run up to Christmas.