Habits of Health #3: Training Your Taste Buds

Thoughts On Success In Business and Life From Next Level Coaching

There’s a well known and totally accepted axiom in the health and fitness world that warns, “Don’t put anything in your mouth that doesn’t promote health.”

Before you start nervously fidgeting in your seat thinking of your guilty pleasures like fried foods, coffee, alcohol, sugar, cigarettes, white bread, desserts, caffeinated and sugared soft drinks etc. etc., I’d like to say that there’s a happy solution.

“Happy” if achieving optimal health is more important to you than that plate of French fries.  The secret lies in:

1) Occasional abstinence – choosing on a desired emotional outcome, i.e., do you want pleasure (short-term) or happiness (long-term)

2) Education – we can’t learn important health lessons for each other, we must do the legwork ourselves, and

3) Retraining your taste buds in favor of better choices.  It’s this last one that I think requires more examination.

Everyone has heard the expression (more…)

How’s That Resolution Going?

Thoughts On Success In Business and Life From Next Level Coaching

If you are one of the millions who made the most common New Year’s resolution — “lose some weight” — then I have a question for you.

How did that first month go?

Before you answer, let’s take a look at why losing weight is such a common goal.

• WE INHERENTLY KNOW THAT (more…)

Habits of Health #2: Exercise

We’ve always known that there are huge benefits associated with exercise, but let’s talk for a bit. First off, when you first consider exercise you need to start with a purpose. Is your purpose to build muscle, is it to maintain weight by burning calories, is it to provide cardiac health by doing an aerobic paced workout, or is it because it’s fun? (Did he say “Fun?”)

To build muscle you need either free weights, a gym membership or a professional trainer. But this is not today’s focus — been there, done that. I’m talking getting health — not some vanity thing. Something that can provide quality as well as quantity of life.

Wow! That’s quite a claim. Well, it’s not my claim — there’s a huge body of evidence provided by the medical community and it’s growing. It asserts that (more…)

Habits of Health #1: Sleep

You’ve been told to “get more rest” from too many people not to believe it.  The funny thing is, it only comes from people who really care about you so maybe there’s something to it.

The thesis is further “proven” if we examine the importance of keeping your axe sharp.  Now this might be your mental axe or it might be your physical axe.  Doesn’t matter.  If you’re not playing at your best, you’ve handicapped your results.  Life’s too short and difficult and too short to hobble your effectiveness.

Given the need for a good night’s sleep, just how is that done? Remembering that everyone is different, here’s (more…)

If Experience Is The Best Teacher, Are You The Best Student?

Thoughts On Success In Business & Life From Next Level Coaching.

We’ve all heard that experience is the best teacher (grandma’s wisdom as it were), but I’d add that “experience is the best teacher as long as it’s someone else’s experience.”

At first hearing, that seems to have the sound of truth but what exactly is wrong with independent thinking and action?

Nothing, really, so long as you’re not “reinventing the wheel.” What’s so good about having a garage full of reinvented wheels especially when all the work it took to reinvent the wheels is considered?

So often we creative thinkers rush off to find the perfect solution to (more…)

So You’ve Got A Client — What’s Next?

Thoughts On Success In Business & Life From Next Level Coaching.

You determined your niche, you’ve started to fill the pipeline and now you’ve converted a suspect into a client.

As that continues you start gathering a “clientele” (that’s a group of life-forms that you’ll want to keep as clients and as referral sources).

You want to build a relationship with each so you’re not strictly transactional. If this is so, you’ll need a client management strategy. Any client management strategy basically recognizes that the larger revenue and referral producing client MUST be given more touches than the client at the other end of the spectrum.

The touches can be (more…)

Be Like Einstein

Thoughts On Success In Business & Life From Next Level Coaching

Just a few years before his death, the world’s smartest man was quoted as defining “insanity” as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Change requires change.

That’s not zen (maybe it is), it’s logic.

Another great person and author named Charlie “Tremendous” Jones wrote a book a few years back called “Life is Tremendous.”  He became one of America ‘s greatest insurance salesmen, but in this book he claimed that (more…)

Be A Person Of Character: Thoughts

Thoughts On Success In Business & Life From Next Level Coaching

I was in a study last year where we pondered the notion of “setting your mind.”

It’s not a crazy idea. After all, “as a man thinketh, so is he.” Self-control plays such a large role, but I believe imagination must be considered. For example, say you’re on a diet and you have a beautiful dessert set before you after dinner. If you falter I think it’ll be because you were undone by imagination (the cause) and not a lack of self-control (the effect).

Literally setting your mind can provide “healthier” environments that make the job of having a healthy thought life more likely.

For instance, other ways to create a healthier environment might include (more…)

Health Coaching: Be Coached To Your Ideal Weight

Ever wonder why 85% of all dieters regain the lost weight within two years?

It’s because they’re going it alone. No encouragement. Probably no nutritional guidance.  No successful examples that have gone before.

Let a health coach (like me) take your hand and guide you to your ideal weight, a weight that will probably extend your life, since the AMA says for every 10% of weight loss there’s a 50% drop in the likelihood of contracting weight-related diseases. We’re talking about things like (more…)

Health Coaching: The Foundation For Your Success

I am pleased to announce an expansion to my business, Next Level Coaching. As of September 1, I’ve become a Health Coach with the Take Shape For Life company and we’ll be offering health and nutrition coaching as well as the normal repertoire of individual, group, and executive coaching for businesses.

There are  two aspects of this additional service of health coaching that needs to be briefly described. (more…)