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Holistic Living Guide: Improve Your Health The Natural Way

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holistic lifestyle guide

Your Ultimate Guide to a Healthy Holistic Lifestyle

If you’ve ever had an interest in holism, you have probably heard the expression “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” which is a great way to summarize holism, but what does that mean to you as a coach, or more importantly, what does this mean to your client?

The basic principles of holism are not new, having been around at least since the time of Hippocrates in the West, 2500 years ago, and even earlier in the Eastern healing traditions of Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine. As you might suspect, the healers and physicians who practiced the art and science of holistic medicine all treated the whole person – body, mind, and spirit.

The word holistic denotes inter-connectivity. Prioritizing a Holistic lifestyle means understanding the importance of various factors in health, and how they are interconnected. It means that for a healthy lifestyle, one needs to take multiple steps in their physical and mental health and within their home. [Read more…]

What Does Mind & Body Fitness Mean?

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What Does Mind & Body Fitness Mean?

what does mind and body fitness mean?

The mind and body are inseparable aspects of ourselves. A Zen Buddhist philosopher defines the body and mind relationship as “body and mind are not two and not one”. Considering these aspects, the IDEA mind-body fitness committee defines mind-body exercise as physical exercise executed with a profoundly inwardly directed focus. To explain further, mind & body fitness exercises aim to target mental well-being with physical actions.

In addition, mind-body exercises have five common attributes between them. For example, inner mental focus, concentration on muscular movement, synchronization of muscle movement with breathing, attention to form and alignment, and belief in life energy.

The regular practice of exercises increases our strength, mental resilience, cardiovascular functioning, and flexibility. The popular mind-body fitness exercises are Yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, and Pilates. [Read more…]

How to Use Affirmations as a Coach

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Do Affirmations Have a Place in Your Coaching Practice?

affirmations can help coaching clinets improve results

Written by Mark Teahan Director of Education Programs

I recently had a phone call with a colleague and the topic of affirmations came up. It struck me as a coincidence because I was just working on the use of positive affirmations and motivational interviewing in coach training. If you are familiar with my coaching style and its impact on Spencer institute coaching programs, you know how and why we love and appreciate motivational interviewing. It is a standard for dialogue in the early stages of coaching and it’s important to do it right.

Depending on where you are in your coach training journey and experience, you might know this already. Largely through trial and error, previous generations of coaches fine-tuned and tweaked coaching deliverable services without any training related to psychology, where motivational interviewing has its roots. They were winging it. I know this to be a fact, I am guilty of it. [Read more…]

Holistic Health Practices that Work Well with Traditional Medicine

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holistic-health-practices-that-combine-with-traditional-medicine

Holistic Health Practices that Work Well with Traditional Medicine

Holistic practices such as massage, meditation, and acupuncture are getting immense attention because they help the body recover faster when combined with traditional medicine. Another reason for their wide usage these days is that they accompany the most negligible side effects.

Although modern medicine is a blessing for today’s world, they also have various side effects. Therefore holistic health practices are gaining traction as global health challenges become complex. But it is important to know what holistic health is and how it works with traditional medicine.

What is Holistic Health?

Holistic health refers to an approach to life in which multiple aspects of wellness are considered. In holistic health practice, an individual recognizes his body, mind, social, mental, spiritual, and intellectual wellness. A person has to take an active role in his health decisions and healing processes through adopting a healthy lifestyle.

Holistic health practices have their roots in ancient tradition. The prime motive of holistic health practices is ancients’ use to cure their diseases and remain healthy. Holistic health approaches are divided into the following categories:

  • Mind-Body Interventions: Includes relaxation classes using behavioral and psychological techniques.
  • Manipulative and body-based Therapies: It Utilizes movement of the physical body and practices like massage therapy and chiropractic
  • Biologically Based- Therapies: it includes biological and plant-based treatment using herbal medicines.
  • Alternative Medical Systems: Traditional Chinese Medicine is an excellent example of an alternative medical system developed from the western biomedical approach.
  • Energy Therapies: These therapies involve some form of healing treatment using ultrasonic, thermal, or subtle energy. Practices include Reiki or healing touch. 

[Read more…]

Chemicals to Avoid in Your Personal Care Products

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Chemicals to Avoid in Your Personal-Care Products

The average adult uses nine personal care products daily, exposing him or her to 126 chemicals every day (for many women, the numbers can be higher). This statistic accounts for personal care products alone—not the chemicals in your foods, environment, or home. Here are some interesting facts about personal care products sold in the U.S. marketplace today:

Fact: The Food and Drug Administration, unfortunately, does not have control over what goes into personal care products. In fact, the FDA has confirmed its inability to control what goes into them. Essentially, the agency has no oversight with respect to chemical ingredients in products, which means manufacturers can put just about anything they want into them: plasticizers, degreasers, surfactants, carcinogens, reproductive toxins or endocrine disrupters.

Additionally, our government does not mandate safety-testing of industrial chemicals that are used as base ingredients in everyday personal care products like shampoos, conditioners, soaps, lotions,  makeup, deodorant, detergents, spot removers, and air fresheners—and the list continues! [Read more…]

Coaching 2021: A Summary

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Coaching 2021: A Summary

Time is such a powerful force, it even trickles into the coaching world. There was a time when a coach could skate by through working with clients, without any formal education! If you are already certified as a coach currently, you know how crazy this is. But this was how things were 20 or more years ago.

But advances in coach training do not come at us as quickly as advances in other areas, say, for example, science. Changes in the coaching profession come from either different techniques and training and how coaching services are delivered, or they are changed by events like our current pandemic.  This results in a shift, whereby millions of people are forced to – literally – look inward at their own health.  But the pandemic has also slowed down the already trickle speed of coach training. We didn’t really get to learn too much in 2020 apart from COVID19, we were focused on survival. But now that 2021 is nearly over, we’ve learned a few things in hindsight. [Read more…]

Can a Green Living Lifestyle Help Prevent Disease?

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Can a Green Living Lifestyle Help Prevent Disease?

The truth is, most of us would not be able to afford to pay for medical expenses directly out of pocket but when you combine our current healthcare crisis with this fact, it becomes unsettling to think of what might happen if our client needs treatment for a serious or terminal illness. This is why we have to look at taking our own health and our health care needs into our own hands. This involves becoming our own health advocate, of sorts, and to become familiar with the term “preventative medicine” in the more immediate sense. [Read more…]

Reasons That Going Green and Sustainable Living Makes Sense

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Why Going Green Makes Sense

There is a variety of reasons to go green, but most come back to supply and demand. We have a limited amount of resources available and more and more people using them up. If we want our future generations to enjoy the same standard of living we’ve experienced, we need to take action.

Green building is a great place to start, as buildings consume 14% of potable water, 40% of raw materials, and 39% of energy in the United States alone (according to the US Green Building Council). That’s 15 trillion gallons of water and 3 billion tons of raw materials each year! If that’s not enough to convince you, here are some other reasons to go green:

For The Environment

Want to make the world a better place? Implementing green practices into your home or office can help reduce waste, conserve natural resources, improve both air and water quality, and protect ecosystems and biodiversity. [Read more…]

Benefits of Bodyways Therapies for Your Clients

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Bodyways (sometimes called Bodyworks or similar) can be one way for your client to benefit from an often-overlooked method to improve their holistic health.

What is Bodyways?

By definition, Bodyways are used in alternative medicine to describe any therapeutic or personal development technique that involves working with the human body in a form involving manipulative therapy, breathwork, or energy medicine.

[Read more…]

Empowering and Repowering Your Clients

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Reaching Holistic Goals

A great coach distinguishes his or herself by how well they empower clients to begin to take responsibility and take steps towards their holistic goals. Since it helps to identify and untangle some of the barriers that have kept them stuck, we want to look at what our client sees as important.

Your First Meeting and Assessment

Holistic goals that require change for our client are not going to happen overnight but we can usually organize a complete strategy for clients within the first couple of sessions. With this in mind, be sure to inform clients that your first meeting with them is really a conversation – about the fit between yourself and the client. It is also a time for assessing if Holistic Coaching is right for them.

[Read more…]

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