The Health Coach lifestyle is a way of being. It’s a personal value system as well as a career path. From physical to spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being, Health Coaches engage in practices that influence their daily lives in a positive way. These practices fuel their personal growth and success, creating a transformative and powerful effect on the world around them.

Here are six ways to live the life of a Health Coach every day to benefit your total health.

1. Ground Yourself

The five minutes before a coaching session are often the most important. This is a dedicated time to become mindful and grounded for the upcoming session. It is the space to cultivate presence, awareness, and connection to the task at hand, allowing the coach to maximize their abilities and support their client fully.

This practice is also essential to everyday life and can be applied to anything you do. For example, in the mornings, you can engage in grounding practices such as prayer, meditation, mindful movement, or self-reflection to positively influence the rest of your day.

2. Move Your Body

Health Coaches know and understand the value of moving their bodies often and include exercise in their routines on a regular basis. From yoga to strength training to running, qi gong, and trance dance, Coaches take pride in making movement an active and conscious part of the daily experience.

Moving your body doesn’t mean attending classes or hitting the gym – Health Coaches know that movement doesn’t need to involve structure. Taking walks, spending time gardening, and going for a swim are all ways you can incorporate exercise into your life.

3. Practice Active Listening

Health Coaches are professionally trained to be active listeners, which means they can reflect on what they’re hearing from their client and facilitate a session that promotes curiosity and exploration. This practice also extends into regular life!

Health Coaches know the value of listening above speaking and are keenly attuned to verbal and nonverbal cues. Noticing body language during a session provides an important indicator of how clients are moving through the coaching experience as well as important indicators for any interaction you may have. Active listening is applicable in work settings between you and your coworkers as well as in your relationships, as it helps you to read between the lines and absorb or respond accordingly.

4. Practice What You Preach

Health Coaches emulate a way of living that can be expressed through everything they do, such as their language, food choices, fashion, and lifestyle habits.

Their presence has a powerful effect on the coaching relationship and is a compelling agent for change. Emulating strength, health, and well-being speaks loudly and carries as much weight as speaking and providing information. This presence extends into daily life for the coach as they feel connected to how they present themselves and enjoy emulating the characteristics of a Health Coach. It is a persona, together with a profession.

5. Eat Well

Eating is a big part of the Health Coach’s daily life.  For a Health Coach, it consists of what to eat and where and how to prepare it; how food makes you feel, and what nutritional value it might impart. Food is an ongoing discussion that is often specialized and exciting ‒ and a huge part of the daily practice.

Health Coaches love food and often cook, prepare, share, source, and consume new foods consistently. They typically stay up to date on trends, flavors, discoveries, updates, benefits, and risks. Coaches may juice, farm, forage, go raw, cleanse, or fast as part of daily living. It’s a conversation that never seems to run out of topics to discuss.

They also speak about, listen to, read, teach, and study all kinds of food-related topics, for both personal and professional reasons. Essentially, keeping an open mind and listening to your body are key for finding ways of eating that work for you throughout any season of life.

6. Be Present

Living the life of a Health Coach also involves a high level of consciousness. Being can sometimes supersede doing for a coach, as it brings an added dimension of awareness to the act of any daily activity. Being is doing but with a consciousness that sees the physical aspect as a component rather than the entire action. It is the space in between.

Health Coaches understand the role of being in daily life and value spending time in stillness and cultivating levels of being. Whereas the mainstream world might measure accomplishment as it relates to health through physical changes only, coaches widen the perspective and include the state of being, such as their emotional, mental or spiritual state, as an additional indicator of wellness.

Living the Life of a Health Coach

These areas offer depth and meaning to the personal and professional life of a Health Coach. Health Coaches are strongly rooted in their daily routines, which then ripples outward to impact those around them. Health coaching is a culture, a passion, a profession, and a lifestyle.