Coaching: The Future of Health*
*Thanks to coaches Alejandra Cortes, Alejandro Vera, Ramiro Sánchez, Moises Sandler and Betina Haiat for their valuable comments for this writing.
The title of this Post is very ambitious, I know. I used it to get your attention, but also because I think it’s true.
It is clear to all of us that our habits are at the base of our human experience. And, as such, in order for us to expand, improve, heal, or enjoy this experience, we have to enter into individual and collective transformation processes.
We are also clear on many of the things that we wish to add to our to-do lists, as well as what we need to remove from them, and we have books, tutorials, podcasts, and scientific literature that add to our never-ending laundry list of self-improvement activities. At the individual level, these activities have to do with eating better, sleeping better, moving more, changing our relationship with our body, our money, our sexuality, with nature, and with death. They also have to do with the way we understand and act regarding stress, as well as the strength of our interpersonal relationships.
At the collective level, it is not only about changing individual habits but also about understanding that there is no single economic, political, and cultural model that leads us to health in a direct and unequivocal way. As a society, we need to see ourselves in the mirror and keep learning through trial and error so that the direction of our journey is a choice and not a continuation of collective inertia. We have to believe that we are the ones who determine the future.
Coaching Principles
There are those who place the origin of coaching in ancient Greece–in philosophers like Socrates and Plato–who urged their pupils to take charge of their lives and gave them tools of various kinds to ask questions about their past and their future. Similarly, today we understand coaching as a discipline that requires two parties to function: the coach and the coachee (or client, patient, or ally), who is the beneficiary of the discipline.
Coaching is based on the idea that the coachee already has what it takes to be able to get to the place he or she is longing to get to. This is an important point because we have a tendency to think that we don’t have what it takes, and that other people simply have more luck or better genes and that is why they don’t seem to face the same problems we do.
Therefore, the coach helps the coachee in dis-covering himself and removes the veils that culture, his past, his conditioning, prejudices, and his own story, prevent him from seeing. The coach helps the coachee in visualizing what his future goals are and somehow clarifies the idea that entering a transformation process is more desirable than staying as he currently is.
Precisely because there are many theories, books and courses that help us in our transformation journey, one of the greatest jobs of the coach is to help his client to feel exactly where the need for transformation is coming from. Help him understand which part of himself is asking for a new story. To reach that turning point, the coach will only act as a guide who asks the questions, but it will be the coachee himself who controls the situation at all times.
These principles can be seen as obvious, but not obvious at the same time. Especially when we compare them with cultural maxims (“be yourself”, “you can achieve everything you set your mind to”) that through repetition have become too superficial and therefore useless.
Of course, we need people to encourage us to get through difficult times, but this cheering can only have its greatest effect when there is the certainty that the person who is encouraging us to continue knows those dark places in himself and the difficulty in any transformation process.
Therefore, and this is not obvious to many, the coach also receives and learns by collaborating with the coachee. Both enter a co-creation process that is a win-win or a grow-grow. The coach only creates the space and the conditions so that growth and transformation can take place. The more honest and transparent this space is, the greater the possibility of connecting with the need for change and the right tools for growth.
Another issue that is not too obvious in many of the one-on-one processes in health and well-being, is the role that visualization plays as the guide or the compass to walk forward. While in medicine (and sometimes in psychology) it is taken for granted that the goal is to remove symptoms to return to a state of homeostasis (physical or emotional) as soon as possible, in coaching there is a constant–and necessary–creation of vision for the future. This visualization is very powerful, and it is built, precisely, starting from the strengths and achievements that the coachee already has, and not from his defects, bad habits, or poor attitude. This has a special power because it requires us, the coach and the coachee, to strive to create new possibilities instead of repeating what we already are. It requires more effort because habits, social structures, affective ties, and even our brain biochemistry, find it easier to repeat or explain something that already is, than to change into something that it could potentially become.
Because of this, true coaching always goes through moments of uncertainty and discomfort; thus, the transformation will be more real and lasting. It is because it requires not only the re-calibration, but redefinition, that coaching can be the future of health.
Coaching and the Definition of Health
As you could already guess from what we have read so far, coaching shares knowledge and techniques with other disciplines: positive psychology, philosophy, adult learning, personal development, among many others. And even though some of its principles have been around for millennia, perhaps we have forgotten to put them at the center of our definition of “health.” While health is the physical, social, and emotional well-being and not just the absence of disease or illness, health is also a matter of freedom, self-knowledge and the possibility of self-determination. I believe that it is impossible to have well-being without there being a good degree in which each individual and each society knows themselves and knows that their reality can be shaped from the inside-out and not only conditioned by the outside-in.
Another reason why I believe that coaching is the future of health has to do with the change in focus that it generates. In the past, “Health” or “Medicine” were being imposed on clients or patients, or imposed on society in general, while now we understand that health is co-constructed with everyone. And as behavior change (individual and collective) becomes more necessary to transcend the great problems that society has, coaching is the new key player in the healthcare ecosystem but also in any other aspect of wellbeing: work, family, social ties, economic transactions, and perhaps every human endeavor.
Coaching is the future of health because it reminds us that we are its creators.
The Coach’s Approach
Today we see coaches in all areas: Life, Habit, Financial, Nutritional, Executive, Organizational, Ontological, Wellness, Health, Career, and Relationship Coaches. There are coaches for everything and that’s alright. Because as humans, we were not born knowing everything.
Coaching is a rapidly growing field that has been described as a “practice in search of a theory.” Without wanting to reduce everything to a table that explains it, here we see some of the differences that the “health experts” (your doctor, your nutritionist and even your health ministry) exert on you, and how the coaching approach transforms that ideology.
Coaches can position themselves and move along a continuum of “intervention”: some work in very structured ways and use techniques with a very specific goal in mind; some others see themselves as co-creators of new meanings and emerging stories through dialogue. The idea is that coaching is a more organic, more open, and self-created process than the authoritarian and directive processes to which we are more accustomed in the urban, tech-savvy, and industrialized societies in which we live.
Coaching and Health
What would happen if all the healthcare professionals around you became your coaches? What if the companies that sell us products and services saw themselves as coaches? What if the government saw itself as a coach who wants to serve, collaborate, co-create, appreciate and cultivate the potential of citizens and not just direct, control, criticize, or manage?
What if we embody the coaching mindset that reminds us that the obstacles we face are precisely the path we have to cross to grow? In other words, the obstacle is the path.
What if our doctor told us that we as patients have answers that he doesn’t necessarily have? What if our doctor also realizes that he is on a wellness voyage as well, and that he too can ask for support? What if he knows that he also has to heal in order to continue healing others?
What if our doctor (or any other authority figure in society) came to grips with the fact that simply telling us what to do is not enough for us to do it? And that we need his help, support, guidance, example, empathy, and closeness from him to be able to walk together the rocky journeys of transformation?
How would we feel if the authorities, educators, leaders, actually led us by example? What if as patients, doctors, parents, teachers, citizens, companies, and society, we all start leading by example and taking ownership of all aspects of ourselves?
Coaching is the future of health because its essence is to seek self-determination. Because it gives us the tools and vision to understand who we are today, as well as to create what we want to be tomorrow. Coaching is the future of individual and collective health because self-discovery, responsibility (ability to respond), self-motivation and self-regulation are part of the process. And, above all, because the process never ends: We are always on the road, more concerned with how we are living it than with the destination we are desperately trying to reach.
Everyday Coaching
Transforming ourselves not only depends on changing what we do but on changing the very experience of what it means to be oneself.
But who can achieve this alone? Who can achieve this in an environment and a society where self-determination is not the main conversation in social settings, and it’s far from what we hear on television and Instagram?
I imagine a future in which all our relationships (work, family, social, economic, even our relationship with ourselves) are enlightened with the principles of coaching. Doctors learning from and with their patients, parents learning from and with their children, teachers from and with their students, gardeners and their plants, companies and their customers, governments and their populations.
Coaches and Chronic Diseases
In a world where chronic diseases are the main cause of death, disability, lack of productivity, and loss of quality of life. In a world where health care costs are increasing because they do not solve or prevent problems, but at best only “manage” them. Health is now moving towards empowerment, prevention, and generation of health instead of only fighting disease.
More and more we realize that medical specialists need coaches in order to really help their patients. A bariatrician, for example, does not solve a patient’s life just by operating him. The patient needs a coach to prepare for surgery as well as to continue the transformation journey that begins with his physical image but has yet to address his nutritional and psychological habits that go hand in hand with such a radical change; An oncologist does not finish his work only by performing chemotherapies, but must guide you throughout the process of living during and after treatment; The same applies to health professionals who are now practicing new kinds of medicine (such as functional, integrative, or lifestyle) and who see the coach as a fundamental piece to empower and educate their patients.
In the United States, the health coaching market represents 7 billion dollars with an estimate of 130,000 coaches. A professional career in coaching is no longer crazy and it becomes, not only a decent and well-paid job, but can also have a great impact on individuals society at large.
I would not be surprised either, that as the decades pass and it becomes culturally clear to us that the greatest determinants of health and well-being are our basic habits of nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, emotions, addictions, and interpersonal relationships, that doctors will also be coaches.
I like this idea: The best doctors will be the ones who are the best coaches.
(I do not think that coaches are coming to replace nutritionists or doctors. Although there are many health professionals who, on the one hand, feel threatened and on the other, do not like the fact that someone with less training and less experience gets involved in their “field.”)
Technology and Coaching
And today, with our absolute connectivity to cell phones and wearables (sensors in our watch, shoes, rings, etc.), with the normalization of telemedicine, with Big Data and Machine Learning, with increasingly personalized diagnoses (genetics, nutrition, etc.), we have the coach in our palms at all times. From an algorithmic coach to a flesh and blood coach who helps us choose the products at the supermarket, helps us cook when we get home and helps us process the anger and disappointment when our partner never arrived for dinner.
My opinion is that computers will not be able to replace the creativity and human connection that are so important in the processes of co-creation, but technology undoubtedly facilitates and empowers coaching in ways that were previously impossible.
At a systemic level, if companies, schools, and governments begin to take their role as coaches a little more seriously, this will take technology from a mechanism of control and entertainment, to one of empowerment and communication. It gives me the impression, although I may be completely wrong, that the great problems of civilization–particularly the epidemic of chronic diseases–will be undoubtedly imprint on our brains that our health depends on each one on us and, at the same time, on the health of everything else. This means that we should see a growing interest in projects and resources that embody the values of coaching. The collective consciousness will be somehow expand so that we know that “no one is in complete possession of the truth”, “every individual carries a talent that awaits to be revealed”, “people can change”, and that we are all “much more than what we do”.
Closing Remarks
Take a moment to reflect on the principles of coaching. You will feel empowered.
Get yourself a coach and you will be even more.
Get closer to the topic, and you will see that the future (or at least the vision you have for the future) depends on adopting this approach to life and living.
Other Articles:
8 Principles to Start Building a Multidisciplinary Clinical Practice
Dreaming of a New Health Ecosystem
Dentists are also Health Professionals
The Dance of the Doctor and the Entrepreneur
From a Hammer to a Toolbox: The Health Industry and Systems Thinking
Bibliography:
Books:
Stelter, R. (2014). A guide to third generation coaching: Narrative-collaborative theory and practice. [Kindle Edition]. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Tarragona, M. (2010). Psicología positiva y psicoterapia. In A. Castro Solano (Ed.), Fundamentos
de psicología positiva (pp. 183–206). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.
Tarragona, M. (2015) The Positive Psychology of Coaching. In Joseph, S. (2015) Positive Psychology in Practice. New York. Wiley
Links:
https://www.blogdecoaching.es/origen-del-coaching
https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2019/09/physician-coaching-the-new-normal.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/well/live/health-coach-benefits.html
