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LIFEBridge Mental Health Coaching
What Mental Health Coaching is:
A hope-filled, life-giving relationship in which one person (coach) helps another person (client) move powerfully in the direction of clearly defined goals, one step at a time. Mental Health Coaching takes a strengths-based approach to change and recovery.
“Coaching is a growth-promoting relationship which elicits motivation, increases the capacity to change, and facilitates a change process through visioning, goal-setting, and accountability which leads to sustainable changes for the good.” – Wellcoaches
What Mental Health Coaching is not:
Mental Health Coaching is different from therapy. In general:
- Therapy focuses on dealing with the past whereas coaching focuses on the present and the future.
- Individuals who seek counseling are motivated by pain, unresolved issues, and emotional struggle, whereas individuals who seek coaching desire to set and move powerfully toward specific goals and are ready to take their next steps.
- Therapy explores the root of problems, whereas coaching is results-based and focuses on exploring solutions.
What does a whole-person approach to mental health look like?
The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete spiritual, physical, social and mental well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization n.d.). It involves your whole person—body, soul, and spirit.
At the core of whole-person health is the understanding that your body, soul, and spirit are intimately and intricately related, for better or for worse. What happens in your spirit and soul (your mind, will, and emotions) impacts your cells. Likewise, the health of your cells, tissues, and organs affects your emotions, your thoughts, and your relationship with God and others.
Your mental health is intimately connected with and impacted by your physical health, your spiritual health, and your relational health. A whole-person approach to mental health coaching addresses all of you – soul, spirit, body, and relationships.
As your personal coach, I will come alongside you and help you to take meaningful and sustainable steps in each of these areas.
I believe with all my heart and mind that the best approach to healing depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles, is to tend to your spirit, your soul (mind, will, emotions), and your body. By design, these parts of us are intimately and intricately related. This whole-person approach will lead you on a journey toward healing, wholeness, and freedom, one step at a time, throughout every season of your life.
What does lifestyle have to do with it?
Research has shown that your lifestyle (what you eat, what non-food substances you put into your body, how you sleep, how you move, how you are impacted by stress, and how you relate to others) affects your mental health in a powerful and significant way, for better or for worse. Therefore, a lifestyle approach to the healing of mental health offers hope for physical and mental/emotional healing.
As an added bonus, as you embrace a whole-person approach to the healing of your soul, you will find that not only will you begin to heal mentally and emotionally, but you will also move powerfully in the direction of physical healing and disease prevention.
Our work together is not intended to replace any essential clinical relationship you have with your physicians and/or therapists, but rather to supplement that relationship in a way that fosters healing and empowers you to become involved in your healing process in a meaningful, powerful, and sustainable way.