Do you want to change your life and achieve more health and wellness, but think it may be difficult?  Use the skills that coaches use and coach yourself to success.  All you have to do is to be willing  and committed to change.  If a circumstance is forcing unwanted change on you, then hiring a coach may be the best action.

Step 1: Know What You Want

When you coach yourself to success you have to know what success is, otherwise how will you know when you’ve got there?  This means that you have know what you want to change and what the end result should look like.

If you already know what you want to change, but not what you want instead, you can come up with a statement of what you want by taking the opposite of what you don’t want.  If you don’t want to weigh 200 pounds, how much do you want to weigh?  If you don’t want to work as a carpenter any longer, what do you want to work at? 

The first question is  easily answered and would lead you to focus on your desired weight.   If you don’t know the answer to the question, for example you don’t know what line of work you want,  then  your focus would be on finding out the answer.  You would first coach yourself to successfully find out what work would bring you joy, then coach yourself to find a job in that area.

If you don’t know exactly where in your life you want to change, start with a wellness health assessment using a wheel of life.  Draw a big circle, and divide it into segments and label them.  Generally wellness coaches use seven segments – physical body, mind, spirit, emotions, relationships, vocation/career, and environment.  If you were to coach yourself to success at work, you would choose different labels.

For each segment in the wellness health assessment ask yourself on a scale of one to 10, where one represents no health and wellness and 10 represents complete health and wellness, how fulfilled and happy you feel in that area..  Then, imagine that the center of the circle is at one and the rim at 10, and .place a line across the segment (parallel to the rim) at the level of happiness you feel. Ask yourself what life would look like if you were at 10. For future reference, you can make a few notes inside the circle on what your life is like now for that segment, and outside the circle for what it would look like at a 10.  Repeat for every segment. 

Step 2:  Choose One Thing to Change

It's important to take baby steps as you coach yourself to success.  Don’t try and change everything at once, or you will likely become discouraged and give up.  You might choose to work on an area you are particularly dissatisfied with, or one where only a small change needs to be made. 

Step 3:  Set a Goal

To coach yourself to success, you must know what you want and keep the focus there, rather than on what you don’t want.  Goals focus you on the desired end result and keep you moving in the right direction.  Your overall goal is to achieve health and wellness, but getting there will require many smaller specific goals.

Goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timely.  For example, ‘I will weigh 120 pounds by September 1st 2009’ meets these criteria, provided it would be possible to achieve that weight by then.  It’s often a good idea to set several short-term goals rather than one very long-term one, so you can monitor your progress and keep your spirits up.  For the first month or so as you coach yourself to success you should have a goal for every week so that you start to feel successful. 

Step 4: Take Action in Baby Steps

Choose one action that will move you towards the goal, and raise your fulfillment level in that health and wellness assessment area by just one point. Preferably choose something that must be done every day or more often.  Repetition for 21 to 30 days develops a habit, and habits make actions effortless.

Step 5: Evaluate Regularly

Once a week hold a coach yourself to success meeting with yourself.  Did you met the goal or carry out the planned actions? If yes, celebrate!  Then set another goal and another small action for the coming week while continuing with last week’s action if that is still appropriate. 

If no, then beating yourself up is not in order – instead find out what went wrong.  Coaches ask their clients powerful questions that have no right or wrong answer, but which lead the client to explore themselves.  As your own coach yourself to success coach, ask yourself questions like: What got in the way of me doing what I had planned?  How will I do it differently next week?  Be curious and gentle with yourself.  Set yourself a goal for the coming week that you think you can meet.

Step 6:  Keep Going Through the Steps

Keep going until you achieve your goals.  Achieving health and wellness may be a life-long process, but coaching yourself to successful change will become second-nature after a while.