Life Coaching Blog

Wellness is currently a $500 billion industry and just getting started. It is about how simple choices profoundly affect our lives. Wellness integrates mind, body and spirit with a balanced flow of energy. It is an ongoing process of choices that become the stories of our lives.

Proactive or Reactive?
Sickness is reactive: people react to a specific condition or ailment. Products and services treat the symptoms of a disease or attempt to eliminate the disease.

Wellness is proactive: people seek activity, products, and services to feel healthier, reduce the effects of aging, look better, and prevent illness. Wellness is characterized by problem avoidance and prevention.

The Need for Wellness Coaching
In studies of coronary bypass patients—when their lives are at risk unless they adopt healthier lifestyles—only one in nine is able to change their habits by themselves. Other findings:

• 70% of health-care costs stem from preventable diseases.
  (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• Stress undermines work productivity in 9 of 10 companies.
  (Industrial Society Survey)
• 70-80% of physician visits are stress related.
  (US Public Health Survey)
• Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease have reached epidemic proportions—almost all are preventable.
  (American Medical Association)
• Every dollar invested in worksite wellness yields 300-600% return through reduced absenteeism, increased productivity, and decreased health-related costs. (Partnership for Prevention National Coalition)

People don’t need more advice about vitamins, supplements, how-to exercise, or 1700 calorie diets. They need a clear, specific, step-wise program for change and an informed guide to help them.

Shouldn't that guide be you? Become knowledgeable about integrating mind, body and spirit and you're well on your way to guiding your clients to wellness.

David Krueger MD was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and is now CEO of MentorPath™, an executive coaching firm helping professionals write the next chapter of their life. You can join Dr. Krueger in Coaching the Wellness Revolution. See below...

by David Krueger MD
Executive Mentor Coach

Ben Fletcher at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom devised a study to get people to break their usual habits. Each day the subjects picked a different option from poles of contrasting behaviors -- lively/quiet, introvert/extrovert, reactive/proactive -- and behaved according to this assignment.

So an introverted person, for example, would act as an extrovert for an entire day. Additionally, twice weekly, they had to stretch to behave in a way outside their usual life pattern – eating or reading something they would never have done.

What do you think was the biggest change in the group?

The remarkable finding was that after four months, the subjects had lost an average of eleven pounds. And six months later, almost all had kept the weight off; some continued to lose weight. This was not a diet, but a study focusing on change and its impact.

The Underlying Principle
Requiring people to change routine behavior makes them actually think about decisions rather than habitually choosing a default mode without consideration. In having to actually process decisions actively, they exercised their choice and decision-making abilities, extending to other choices such as what to eat, and what not to. Once becoming aware of actively making choices, they could decide what’s in their best interest.

“The box” most of us are in is the result of programming and conditioning. And it is self-created in adulthood. Recognizing yourself as the author, the creator of your story challenges an assumed model and leads to the deeper question, “How do I create something else instead?” And, “What will the ‘something else’ be?” Coach outside the box and watch your clients flourish!

David Krueger MD is is CEO of MentorPath, an executive coaching firm tailored to the needs of professionals, and author of The Sage and Scholar's Guide to Coaching Professionals.