Blog Posts For Our Practitioner Community

It’s really rewarding to help people transform their lives for the healthier. Personally, I’ve never felt more fulfilled in a job than I do right now as a health coach.

It can also be exhausting, not because clients themselves are exhausting, but because they’re changing on a deep level.

Giving up gluten isn’t just a “quick and easy” change. It’s often deeply emotional and sentimental. Giving up sugar can be even more difficult because sugar is associated with so many of the celebrations of childhood (and adulthood, for that matter).

And when people learn that alcohol turns to sugar in the body? That brings another wave of pain.

As coaches, it’s our responsibility to be present for this process and we can get tugged along on this emotional roller coaster, which, let’s face it, can wear us down.

Even the savviest coaches can get so swept up in helping others that they forget to tend to their own health and wellbeing. I have Jill’s permission to share that she has struggled with this lately.

As for me, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been working away and suddenly realized that it has been hours since I had a glass of water or gotten up from my chair.

With the holidays coming, we need all the strength and resilience we can muster, not only for ourselves and our families, but also for our clients. This is true year ‘round, but the holidays bring about a unique type of stress that can make coaches feel particularly stretched, especially when we’re coaching clients through new ways of eating at a time when our holiday celebrations are largely about food food food.

Here are seven ways to take care of yourself this season so you can continue to do the amazing work you do. The world needs your wisdom and healing this holiday.

1. Hydrate. It can be so easy to suddenly ‘come to’ at 3:00 in the afternoon and realize that you haven’t had more than half a glass of water all day. Yes, we get water from other non-caffeinated beverages. Yes, we get a good portion of our daily hydration from the foods we eat (vegetables and low-glycemic fruits are the biggies here), but nothing beats clean, filtered water for staying hydrated and helping the body detox. The warmer the better – warm water is deeply hydrating to our tissues and also helps to open capillaries and allow lymphatic drainage (detox) to occur.

   Keep water at desk when you’re working. If it’s there, you’ll drink it. And if you drink it, you will…

2. Stand up … to go to the bathroom. It can be so easy, so seductive, to just start working, get into the thick of things, and not stand up for hours. This might be especially true if you’re running your own small business. The amount of work you have to do is about 120 percent greater than the time you have available to do it. You know the dangers of sitting as well as I do; I don’t need to harp on them here. So set a timer on your computer to remind you to stand every hour, or use the hydration trick to kill two birds with one stone.

   Jill and I are big fans of these hip stretches. You don’t have to do all of them each time you get up from your chair – even one or two before sitting back down will do wonders in opening up your hips.

3. Eat before you caffeinate. Just like heading to your desk to work and not standing enough, it’s easy to go straight to that first cup of coffee or caffeinated tea before eating breakfast. Caffeine before eating a substantive, well-rounded breakfast is a trainwreck for metabolism, adrenal health, and blood sugar.

4. Set clear boundaries. If you work from home, it can be easy to start work immediately when you roll out of bed (or before, if you have email on your phone, though you know you shouldn’t sleep with the phone by your head in the first place!) and work well past the end of the work day. “Just one more e-mail, honey, and then I’ll be ready to eat dinner with you!” This isn’t good for you or your family. Have a designated workspace in your house and, when 5:00 comes, shut the door of your office or put your computer to sleep if you don’t have a separate space, and focus on the things in life that refuel you.

5. Push your personal pause buttons. Mark Hyman, MD, has dubbed the things that refuel us our “pause buttons.” What are yours? Gardening? Cooking? Sewing? Tennis? Golf? Playing piano? Playing Monopoly? Embrace yours, whatever they are, and do them often.

6. Don’t isolate. Another working at home problem: loneliness. Make a date on your calendar to work at a coffee shop or shared office space once a week to fight isolation. (Of course, you only want to do this when you aren’t working with HIPAA-protected private medical information.) Our connection with clients is part of what helps them transform. We need our own healthy connections, too.

7. Hire your own coach or therapist. Speaking of which, those in the helping profession often benefit from having their own professional advisor of some sort. Even if you don’t have a specific or acute problem, just having someone there to lean on, listen to you, and offer support and advice can make you feel better in general – and perform better on the job. 

Knowing isn’t enough. Maybe you just read this advice and you’re thinking, “Well, that’s all great but I’ve got work to do, so back to the grind. Besides, I’ve just wasted 10 minutes reading this thing and my own weekly newsletter isn’t going to write itself!” But – and I can’t stress this enough – just knowing the advice doesn’t mean it’s automatically working for you. You have to actually do it. So get up now and grab a glass of water, stretch your arms, and talk with a coworker or email a friend. I promise that, when you do return to your work, you’ll be more efficient, more helpful to your clients, and have a renewed outlook because of it.