Wellness in the Face of Illness – How a Health Coach Can Help Cancer Patients Live Their Best Life
In the blink of an eye, your world is turned upside down. You barely have time to digest the diagnosis before you are inundated with more information and reality than you can process. Treatments begin and a cascade of challenges follow for you and those who love and care for you. You may even begin to feel like your days are a haze and your life is not your own anymore. It can be a demoralizing experience. But it doesn’t have to be.
While absolute outcomes are out of our hands, the quality of the journey is very much within reach. You can find wellness in the face of illness. Whether it’s learning how to nourish your body better, finding a mind-body-movement practice that soothes and strengthens, learning how to communicate in a healing way, experimenting with a new hobby, staying engaged with work, nurturing your relationships, or becoming a student of mindfulness, there are a wealth of ways to live and feel well with cancer.
But where do you even start? How do you sort through the wellness options and figure out which ones are for you? Once you figure out what options might be helpful to you, how do you make them happen? And then how do you stick to a plan when daily life has become so unpredictable?
It helps to have a partner. A partner who is committed to your unique wellness journey. A partner that can provide you with non-judgmental support, guidance, accountability and insight and share with you whatever resources you need to be successful on your path to wellness. That partner is a health and wellness coach.
Health and Wellness Coaching Is:
- A powerful tool to help patients and caregivers identify and integrate health promoting behaviors during and after treatment, with the goal of improving outcomes and quality of life at all stages of the process.
- A guide for sorting through the often overwhelming quantity of health information patients are given and create a realistic plan that enables a patient to make positive, sustainable health-supporting changes based on what matters most to them.
- Strength-based and draws heavily from the field of positive psychology. Coaching sessions focus on a client’s strengths, interests, and natural motivation.
- Equally powerful and important for caregivers who may become concerned about maintaining their own health and sense of equanimity as their loved one goes through treatment.
- Focused on the whole person: emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual. No area of life is “off limits” when it comes to priorities and goal setting. The patient’s thoughts, feelings and views guide the process and the coach supports and facilitates.