How many of us have wanted to change our health for the better and hit a deadend of one sort or another? Maybe multiple deadends?
Did everyone raise their hand?
That was certainly true of me for many years….
I’ve told my story elsewhere on this site, but the part that is particularly relevant for self-coaching is this:
I truly wanted to improve my health over the years when it was going downhill, and I tried regularly to change, but was not able sustain the changes I was trying to make. Sometimes I couldn’t even get myself to start. If I did get started and do well for a while, inevitably I would fall off the wagon… for months at a time. I didn’t have a way to quickly get back on the path to health that I wanted to take. And I assumed that what I needed was more self-discipline and didn’t know how to get that, either.
What I really needed were the right tools: You don’t start a garden without a shovel and trowel, or attempt to make bread without a mixing bowl and a bread pan (or bread machine) at a minimum. Instead, you collect the tools you need and learn how to use them and then tackle the project.
The mission of Reset& Renew is to empower you to successfully plot the path to health that you believe will work for you, to have the tools to be able to keep yourself going on that path, and to know how to quickly find your way back to the path if you get off course.
Being in charge of your path to health doesn’t mean that health care professionals don’t have an important role to play.
- Your physician may identify a health issue and give you advice on lifestyle choices to improve it.
- Seeing a registered dietician can give you a sense of what a healthy eating pattern would look like for you.
- A physical therapist can tell you which exercises will help.
But in order for their advice to be effective, you’ll have to be able to motivate yourself and come up with the strategies that will work for you in order to implement their advice.
You don’t become proficient with a new skill by reading about it once. You learn by practicing.
Self-coaching isn’t “one and done” either. It’s a process by which you set goals and essentially conduct experiments with what might work for you, evaluate the experiments, and revise your strategies as needed. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to draw on those tools for any health change you wish to make.
Following is an overview of the steps you’ll be taking as you learn to become your own coach. This overview is general and serves as an introduction, but it would be unrealistic to read it through once and then be able to apply it to any aspect of your health you may decide to tackle. To help you get better and better at self-coaching, each specific section of this website also contains a template for applying self-coaching to that specific outcome: Nutrition, Fitness, Sleep & Stress Management, Cognitive Health, Aging with Vitality, Weight Management, and Thriving as a Breast Cancer Survivor.
Though this site is designed around changing aspects of your health, you can actually apply self-coaching to many other areas of your life.
Your health is the resource you need to do almost anything else you would want to do in life with as much vitality as possible.
Ready to learn how to coach yourself to the healthy state that you desire?
The I-SSEE ! © method is an acronym for 5 basic steps of self coaching.
Have you ever had an “Aha! I see!” moment? Self-coaching results in those “I see!” moments when you discover what truly works for you!
I- Identify
- your overall goals
- reasons that might make you reluctant to make changes
- the deepest reasons you have for changing
- your strengths and resources
- where you are now (your starting point or baseline) and
- your current “readiness” to change
S- Seek reliable, evidence-based information
S- Set SMART goals
E- Experiment with strategies to discover what works best for you
E- Evaluate your strategies and revise as needed
