What I'd tell you as a health coach if I wasn't afraid to hurt your feelings

As a health coach, most of my work is through a positive lens: helping a client see their strengths, reframing setbacks as opportunities to learn, or showing them they’ve made more progress than they thought. But there comes a time when I need to confront a client about an unhelpful mental pattern. Maybe I notice a discrepancy between what they say they want and what they’re repeatedly doing. Or maybe I recognize a thought distortion that’s holding them back. Regardless of what it is, it’s my responsibility to say something about it.

It’s a tough line to walk. It’s a balance between empathy and helping my client realize that the barrier they’re facing isn’t external - it’s them. But sometimes, the kindest thing I can do for someone is to gently call them out. It’s not empathetic to let a client stay stuck. 

I’ve compiled some frequent callouts here in this post. In the name of this trend, I’ve avoided softening the language as I normally would. Let’s get into it:

1. You are responsible for your own life.

No one is coming to save you! You have to save you.

You’ve got to be your own hero in this life of yours.

In other words: life is not just something that happens to you, and you need to be an active participant in it. Yes, you may have experienced hard things in your past that affect who you are today. You might be carrying heavy things like depression, anxiety, neurodivergence, or grief. You may have faced a lot of setbacks. These are important considerations, and they absolutely make it harder to get where you want to go. But they don’t mean you get to throw in the towel and point fingers elsewhere when life isn’t giving you what you want. Your life, your behaviors, your healing - they are all your responsibility.

A lack of responsibility might sound like refusing to work on your lateness because you have ADHD - even if it negatively impacts those around you. It might sound like blaming an ex for the failure of your relationship without acknowledging your challenges with communication. Or maybe it looks like not applying for promotions anymore because you didn’t get one in the past.

Our faults and failures are generally a combination of internal and external factors. Take accountability for the internal ones, and you’ll be able to go so much further. When things don’t go as planned, ask yourself: what was my role in this? What could I do differently next time? For lateness, you can set a timer to figure out how much time it takes you to get ready. For communication, you can go to therapy, practice advocating for your needs, or read books about communication. For getting promotions, you can practice interviewing, take skill-building courses, or regularly seek out feedback at work. While it can feel scary at first to realize your life is in your hands, it’s also empowering. Once you take charge of what’s in your control, you feel in control.

Taking ownership of your role in your own life means you take back your power, too.

2. There is no easy way.

And trying to cut corners is only going to extend how long it takes for you to get there.

There’s no fad diet that’ll make you lose the weight overnight. There’s no meditation trick that will allow you to overcome your overthinking tomorrow. Change is built in small steps, small moments over a long time. It might take a year. It might take five.

This one is tough because we live in a world that’s optimized for convenience. Diet ads are everywhere, promising you double-digit weight loss in a week. Just take this sketchy supplement, and your sleep problems will vanish! You need to resist this and prioritize small, daily action. The day you stop trying to cut corners is the day you start making actual, real progress. To help yourself keep going, bring your long-term goal closer to the present. You can do this by frequently visualizing what it would feel like to reach that goal, creating a vision board, or by writing your goal down somewhere frequently visible.

3. Yes, you do have time.

It’s just your priorities that are out of order.

Most of us would benefit from an audit of where our time is going.

I hear this more than anything else on this list. And while there are some cases where this is true, 95% of the time, it’s a lie. You’d rather sit on the couch than go to the gym, and you’d rather stop and get fast food than cook at home. In some cases, we even find ways to keep ourselves busy to avoid the thing that we really need to do.

But here’s the thing: that’s okay to admit! 

It’s okay if you hate the gym. It’s normal if you don’t want to cook after a long day of work. But here’s another thing: admitting you don’t want to do that thing is the first step we can take toward finding something else that you DO want to do, and that puts you closer to your goals. 

The way through this one is to identify why this excuse is coming up. Start by naming why you wanted to do this thing in the first place. Then, try to find a way to do it that doesn’t absolutely suck. Get creative! Be realistic! Start really really small! Break it down until it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Change the method until it feels at least somewhat enjoyable. When the voice in your head says: “well, I can do that”, you’ve got it.

And speaking of your claim that you don’t have time:

4. You need to get off your phone.

If you tell me you don’t have time but your screen time is two hours or more, we need to talk.

Additionally:

This study found that screen time is a predictor of higher anxiety, depression, and stress in college students. And this one showed that excessive screen time increases the risk of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional disorders in adolescents and young adults. This literature review includes a whole bunch of studies that suggest that high screen time deteriorates sleep quality, mental health, and physical health.

I can keep going.

Technology can be a helpful tool, but remember that we need to be in control, not the device.

General recommendations are to limit screen time to 2 hours a day. Before you change any of your other habits, start with this one. Especially if you’re working on mental health or sleep. Reduce your screen time. I promise it’ll help. 

And it doesn’t have to be a cold-turkey social media exodus. Try leaving your phone out of the bedroom, or eating meals without it. At the very least, stop taking it into the bathroom with you.

5. There will never be a “right'“ time for change.

One day, you will run out of one days. The right time to change will always be right now.

There will never be a time when you’re not dealing with some form of stress. There will never be a month without unexpected costs, events, emergencies, setbacks, etc. etc. etc.

There are also some pros of starting a goal during a time when things aren’t “right”: you’ll know how it holds up under fire. If you’ll only exercise when work is slow, when the kids are away at grandma’s, when it’s exactly 8 AM in the morning, or when you can afford a boutique yoga studio membership, it’s not going to stand the test of time. I will repeat this until I’m blue in the face: start small. Start small. Start small.

You will get there. It will take small, daily action, but you will.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got. 

If you made it this far, thank you for reading this, and for sitting with any discomfort if it came up for you. It takes a lot of courage to hold up a mirror and to be willing to really look. To be willing to overcome your ego for the sake of becoming something more. In the words of the psychologist Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” 

Change rarely ever feels comfortable at first. It often requires a reckoning with the things we assume to be true. Our old habits are comfortable. Unhelpful thoughts, though they hold us back, serve as a form of protection. But once we pull the veneer away, once we decide to take responsibility, that’s when the magic of change happens.