As health coaches, it’s imperative we uphold what we teach, and a major aspect of this is prioritizing our own self-care.
Self-care is about looking after yourself and taking care of your personal needs, health and well-being.
When running your own business, it’s easy to slip into unhealthy habits, especially when your schedule is fully booked and you feel like you’ll never reach the end of your to-do list. You may find yourself working late into the evening, or skipping workouts.
These unhealthy habits can lead to chronic stress and a sense of losing control.
If you can relate to the sense of being overwhelmed, then this post is for you.
Here we outline six simple yet effective tips to help you stay on top of your self-care as a health coach.
1. Avoid Over-Committing
Avoid taking on too much too soon, especially if you’re just starting your own health coaching business.
As a new health coach, you may feel the urge to take on as many clients as you possibly can. However, this approach is not necessarily the wisest.
If you find yourself over-committed, you may become overwhelmed, and you may find yourself struggling to keep up with your workload. This in turn will affect the quality of your coaching and the other services you provide and it can also become highly detrimental to your health and well-being.
It’s important to allow plenty of time in your schedule for all aspects of running your business, including your client preparation, marketing, bookkeeping and all the other important behind-the-scenes jobs you need to manage.
Allowing yourself some extra time will avoid any unnecessary pressure and stress, and is an essential part of your self-care as a health coach, as spreading yourself too thin may lead to burnout.
It’s important to set yourself and your business realistic goals and to keep reassessing these goals as your business grows and develops.
2. Get Organized
Do you feel as though there’s never enough hours in the day?
With some forward thinking and a little planning, you may actually have more time than you think.
Having a daily, weekly, monthly and even a yearly plan will help you make the most of your time and will even help you identify blocks of time that you can allocate to self-care.
Here are some useful tools to help you organize different aspects of your health coaching business.
Calendar Apps
Organize your schedule using an online calendar such as Google Calendar or Apple Calendar. Calendar apps allow you to share events with others. You can use this feature to share appointment times with clients which gives a professional touch to your service. You can also set alerts and reminders so you’ll never have any sneaky surprises arise in your schedule.
Evernote
Evernote is a super handy note-taking app, that you can use to collate all sorts of different types of information, including draft blog posts, articles to read later and images of receipts for your book keeping records. One of the best parts of using Evernote is that it syncs across all your devices, including your smartphone, your tablet and your computer.
Pinterest is a clever way to store and save images or other visual content you may like to use on social media. You can make separate boards to suit the different types of images you collect, such as “funny fitness” or “motivational quotes”, so when you need to find an image to fit your social media post, you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for in one of your Pinterest boards.
These tech tools can help streamline your work and free up time in your schedule to focus on yourself.
3. Schedule “Me” Time
It’s important to look after the most important business asset you have, you!
Don’t be tempted to simply skip the activities that you enjoy when your calendar begins to fill. Instead, make yourself a priority and schedule your “me” time into your weekly plan.
“Me” time can be whatever you want it to be. Your “me” time could be going for a walk, a yoga or meditation session, a gym workout or simply spending time with loved ones.
The most important aspect of “me” time is to make sure you feel recharged and refreshed afterwards.
4. Get Enough Sleep
As health coaches, we all know the importance of sleep, but can you honestly say that you get enough of it?
Many of us use night time as a chance to catch up on the tasks that we didn’t have time to complete during the day, or even as a chance to get some alone time after the kids have gone to bed.
It’s important to remember that getting enough sleep is an absolutely essential part of your self-care.
Adequate sleep allows for hormonal balance, optimal immune functioning, optimal neurological performance and growth and repair of muscles.
How much sleep do you need? This varies from person to person, but the average adult will likely require somewhere between seven-eight hours of sleep each night. Any less can lead to emotional and physiological disorders as well as impaired immune function.
5. Eat Well
This may seem like a redundant piece of advise to give to a Primal Health Coach, but eating well is such a major aspect of self-care that it can’t be left out. Eating well is critical to achieving hormonal homeostasis and optimal health and vitality. A primally-aligned diet filled with real unprocessed food while avoiding grains, legumes, sugar and seed oils is an essential aspect of your self-care and will definitely boost your energy levels and keep unwanted illness at bay.
6. Listen to Your Body
Our bodies are usually pretty good at letting us know when we need to slow down, but sometimes we’re too focused on finishing off all the items on our to-do list that we don’t listen to the signals our bodies give us until it’s too late.
If we let ourselves become too overwhelmed, too often, this may lead to chronic stress, which is hugely detrimental to your health.
Being organized, avoiding over committing, lifting heavy things and getting enough sleep are all fantastic ways to manage chronic stress.
Most importantly, listen to your body and take some time out when you feel like you’re getting rundown.
As health and wellness advocates, our clients and the wider community look to us for health advice, so it’s an absolute must for us to prioritize our own self-care. Getting rundown and overly stressed is easy to do, especially when you’re your own boss.
Here we’ve provided you with six handy pieces of advice to help you incorporate your self-care into your schedule, so you can be the best possible health coach you can be!
