Coaching, could it be saving lives as well as costs?

Coaching can have profound health benefits. With absenteeism costing the UK £12 billion every year this is interesting. When great human resources are missing from your work environment there is noticeable gap. The deficit either has to be picked up by others, often adding more stress or work, or the impact is felt in other ways.

How often have you noticed one of your teammates being out? Do you sometimes just wish you had a spare clone of them all? What happens when you get sick? These are all questions that fly through people’s minds daily around the world. The lost potential when people are ill, people are covering for those ill people, the ill people are catching up and recovering and the well people are bringing the recovered people back up to speed is huge. This is about supporting and minimising those challenges, rather than anything like blame.

The way you process and deal with being ill can have consequences itself. Getting frustrated, beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself all can have negative impacts on your body and actually slow down your recovery time. Paying attention to your body and how often you feel low or get viruses or infections gives you a benchmark to work from.

A recent study looked at 6000 people and used statistical models to give us the likelihood of death based on differing diseases. The conclusion was that people with depression had 2 times the mortality risk of their healthy counterparts. Those with heart disease increased their risk by two thirds. The people with depression AND heart disease however, had 5 times the mortality risk.

At Synaptic Potential we believe that Coaching can substantially improve the effects of depression and help speed up recovery. Spending as little time as possible in the grips of this, often devastating, illness provides welcomed relief. The implications of being depressed are far-reaching, family, colleagues and clients all very obviously suffer. The quicker the individual can receive proper help the easier their recovery is for them in the long term as well as the short term.

Even the medical profession are recognising the power of the mind now in health. Bupa have used Health Coaches in Europe to help people return to health more quickly. With the thousands of studies that are immerging on harnessing the power of the mind to help give people better control over their lives we’re working in an exciting time.

Imagine not only being able to recover more quickly anytime you get sick, but also be more in control of your thoughts. Escape from negative thought cycles, which you know bring you down and make you more susceptible to getting ill. The starting point is to increase your self-awareness; however doing this without positive back up can do more harm than good! So perhaps start by creating a journal of all your skills, strengths, successes and achievements. This will provide a good reference point later when you start to look at other things that you need to improve, but often in life people go straight to the things that aren’t working.

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