About Integrative Health Coaching
Integrative Health Coaches support clients in making sustainable behavior changes in order to reach new levels of health and wellness using an evidence-based coaching process.
The framework provided by the coaching process empowers clients to explore, prioritize, and define their personal health and well-being goals and set up a success-oriented plan for reaching them. Since change can be challenging, coaches help clients connect to their intrinsic motivations and strengths and provide ongoing support as a client carves a new path that incorporates healthier behaviors.
What makes coaching effective?
Structured Coaching Process—Duke Health’s evidence-based coaching process was developed by leading behavior change experts to build and support momentum for change and learning.
Whole Health Approach—Coaches consider your health and wellness broadly and explore interconnections between different aspects of your life to help you select priorities for change. Using Duke’s Wheel of Health model (right), we explore where you are currently and where you want to be along several dimensions.
Client-Driven Agenda—Coaches encourage you to choose the health and wellness goals that you feel are the most important for you to pursue and recognize that you are the expert on your own preferences and life circumstances. Coaches don’t provide mandates, diagnoses, or specific recommendations, but instead work with you (and with input from other health care providers if applicable) to design a customized approach to attaining your goals.
Collaborative Problem Solving—If you encounter obstacles as you work toward your goals, coaches work with you to maximize learning from these experiences and create effective strategies to keep you moving forward.
Facilitating Lifelong Insight—Insights and learnings that come about during the coaching process can be valuable not only for supporting your present goals, but also can be returned to in the future as you seek to accomplish new things.
Accountability—Regular check-ins and e-mail support help to hold you accountable to your commitments.
Reinforcement—Some clients find success working with a coach to supplement work they are doing with other health care professionals or teachers. For example, if you are working with a nutritionist on a new diet plan, a coach can help you determine how to best incorporate those changes into your own life and help to hold you accountable on an ongoing basis.
Expertise to Support Well-being—I am trained in basic mindful awareness and applied positive psychology methods and continue to cultivate my own practices, so if these subjects are of interest to you, we can explore them together as a supplement to the coaching process.
Note: Health coaches are different from public health educators, physicians, and therapists. Coaches partner with you through the process of change rather than acting as experts who make recommendations on specifically what and when change should happen. Coaches facilitate behavior change rather than making diagnoses, providing treatment recommendations, or acting as mental health experts.