Why a HeartCoach?

Cardiologists, nutritionists and other health experts have already warned us about the risk factors associated with heart disease, including:

• high cholesterol diets
• obesity
• smoking
• lack of exercise
• poor nutrition

The good news is that we can lower these risks and improve our chances for a longer, healthier life by changing our behavior. The bad news? It isn't always easy making these changes and sustaining them over time. Following a disciplined regimen of sound medical advice and proven behavior-change strategies is a serious challenge for most people, especially after years of eating an unhealthy diet or lack of exercise.

That's where we come in!
At HeartCoaches we help you embrace a healthy heart as the guiding principle for making important lifestyle changes. We start by matching you with your own HeartCoach-an experienced behavior-change practitioner who is well-versed in health and fitness protocols related to heart disease as well as the 'best practices' of coaching. Together, you and your HeartCoach focus on creating a heart-embracing lifestyle specifically tailored to improve your prospects for living a longer, healthier life.

Here's how it works:

• Target Your Goals.
  First, our HeartCoaches help you understand how your specific lifestyle choices are influencing the health of your heart and why it's important to make changes in your behavior, starting now.
  
  We then help you integrate the advice of your cardiologist, nutritionist, and other specialists with the collective knowledge of organizations like the American Heart Association to create a personalized Heart-Embracing Lifestyle Plan (HELP). Encompassing five lifestyle domains, HELP provides you with a valuable framework to use in targeting your behavior-change goals, monitoring your progress, measuring your success, and recording your achievements. You and your HeartCoach use HELP to gather and maintain intelligence about how your new behavioral routines are impacting your heart and affecting your prospects for optimal health and longevity.


• Make the Changes.
  Now you need to start making real changes in your life. Sometimes these changes can be accomplished easily. At other times, when lifestyle habits have been years in the making, these changes may require a considerable investment of insight and effort to overcome.
  
  Like every good coach, your HeartCoach sees a vital potential in you (in this case, for achieving your 'optimal health'), then helps you draw this impulse to the surface and put it to work-- making new behavioral choices, turning these choices into routines, and strengthening these routines through practice. From the early faltering 'baby steps' of behavior change to the point where you really begin to hit your stride, your HeartCoach is there, providing you with the insight, encouragement and support to overcome challenges all along the way.
  
  Our HeartCoaches use a range of proven methods and best practices of coaching to help you achieve your lifestyle goals, including those drawn from Appreciative Coaching, Positive Psychology, Cognitive-Behavior Modification (including the work of Byron Katie), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and other self-efficacy based interventions. We know just the right thing to say, at just the right time, to help you improve your awareness, deepen your insight, discover new talents or hidden strengths, and energize your determination to create a 'new YOU'. No matter how disheartened you may feel, your HeartCoach is always looking past those difficult moments to that capable, tenacious person at your core who is ready to take on new challenges. Before you know it, you'll be a champion at leading a heart-healthy lifestyle, which means you'll be optimizing your prospects for a longer and healthier life.


• Sustain Your Achievements.
  But permanent behavior change also requires a positive shift in attitude. Negative attitudes and emotions, like worry, apathy, and hopelessness, zap our energy, destroy our motivation, and ruin our relationships. They also make us sick by creating responses in our body that take over vital functions and deplete our resources. If prolonged, these stressful emotions injure arterial walls, initiate atherosclerosis, and impair vascular responsiveness. In short, negative emotions increase our risk of heart disease. They also do something else: undermine any progress you've made toward embracing a heart-healthy lifestyle.
  
  Positive emotions, on the other hand, make people happier, and healthier. Hundreds of studies have found significant associations between positive attitudes and positive outcomes. In one recent study, women described as 'optimistic' showed a lower risk of developing heart disease or dying from any cause compared to pessimistic women.
  
  An entrenched negative disposition doesn't change overnight, however. That's where our HeartCoaches can help. We know how to excite positive emotions like joy, hope, gratitude, pride and humor, and fortify your enthusiasm for the challenges ahead. We also know a little coaching secret guaranteed to aid you in reaching your lifestyle goals and sustaining these achievements over time: by nourishing your heart. Your HeartCoach helps you get involved in activities that are relaxing, pleasurable, and heartwarming (activities that also help lower your body's stress hormone--cortisol). Your HeartCoach also gives you the respect, attention and positive regard that you may have been missing in your life, and helps you create this same kind of heart-to-heart connection with others. After all, everybody gains when we deepen our appreciation for the things that matter most in life. Or, as poet Elizabeth Browning writes, "Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile."