How to Build a Healthy Work-Life Balance As a Health Coach
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As health coaches, our job is to help others live their healthiest and happiest lives.
But do we take as good of care of ourselves & our own health? 😬
Sadly, many of us don’t. 😢
I know I personally have spent hours and hours at the computer, writing articles about moving regularly, drinking enough water, looking away from the computer screen every 20 minutes… while not doing any of those things myself! (Tsk tsk, Melissa!)
But, the reality is: health coaching is a job.
And, like any other job, there are pressures and deadlines and (whether we’re conscious of it or not) barriers to achieving our own desired work-life balance.
What is work-life balance?
Naturally, work-life balance means something different to each of us. What works for me is not necessarily what works best for someone else, or vice versa.
But, in general, work-life balance means: a state of equilibrium between one’s work and other life roles.
In other words, it’s the lack of opposition between the demands of our work life and our personal or family life.
The balance between work and “home” life is especially complicated in an industry such as health coaching, as many health coaches are self-employed (which has its own unique relationship to work-life balance, which we’ll get to in a moment), and we increasingly rely on technologies that make us accessible around the clock.
Work-life balance for health coaches
Despite our “positive and healthy living” line of work, health coaching tends to have some career characteristics that can actually make us health coaches more susceptible to an unhealthy work-life balance. Things like:
Many health coaches work from home
Many health coaches work for ourselves, from home.
Though this can certainly be a great opportunity for improved work-life balance (more flexibility and time vs. a job that requires commuting in to an office everyday), the reality is: “working for yourself from home” can also turn into “working all the time.”
When you live at your office, it can be harder to know when and how to turn off.
Building a health coaching business is hard!
Because health coaching is still a relatively new field and a significant number of health coaches work for ourselves (larger institutions are starting to bring more health coaches onto staff, but it’s a pretty small percentage of total health coaching), most of us must personally build a business around our health coaching services.
Building a business is somewhat like birthing and nurturing a baby. You pour yourself into it (mentally, physically, financially) and do everything you can to help it succeed. Especially at the beginning, building a health coaching business requires a lot from you.
Side note for women of child-bearing age who are starting a health coaching business:
The commitments of starting and growing a business can be quite challenging to balance with the physical/mental/emotional commitments of pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a newborn. Not that it can’t be done, but I’m definitely in awe of anyone who balances this happily! For many women, it can feel like just a “fact of life” that our career endeavors are put on hold by the significant commitments of pregnancy and motherhood (if we choose those). We have a finite amount of energy, and we can’t give 100% to both a business and a baby.
So, while managing a business as a working parent is quite the endeavor in and of itself, starting a health coaching business at the same time as starting a family can be its own special brand of exhaustion that women in particular must be especially conscious of.
Because, mother or not, building a health coaching business is a significant time and energy commitment that often leads to working way more than the standard 40 hours per week.
Health coaches tend to have a non-traditional work schedule
As mentioned above, the number of traditional 9-5 jobs for health coaches (for example, health coaches who work in a clinic setting) is fairly limited—instead, most health coaches have a more nebulous work schedule.
Perhaps we schedule client sessions in the evenings or on weekends. Or we have lots of clients on certain days of the week and not others.
In general, health coaches tend to have a fairly inconsistent and non-traditional work schedule.
Though that’s not a bad thing in and of itself, it can be tough if your home life revolves around a more standard 9-5 schedule—for example, a partner who works typical business hours, or kids in school specific hours. Having a mis-matched schedule with the rest of the household can limit the amount of true rest a health coach gets, because we often get tied up in others’ schedules as well (driving kids, being the person who runs errands during business hours, or even just feeling obligated to work during others’ business hours, even though we also work outside of them).
Many health coaching businesses start as a side hustle
This is not true of all health coaches (some are full-time), but many health coaches just starting out are health coaching as a side hustle. And that means: work on top of work.
Having a side hustle can be a glorious thing—a passion project, extra income, and a ticket to leaving your day job and running a dream wellness business. But, it can also lead to burnout much more quickly than simply working one job and resting outside of that.
Work-life balance tips for health coaches
So, work-life balance is especially important for health coaches to keep in mind for ourselves—not only because we, too, deserve to take good care of ourselves, but because “you can’t pour from an empty cup.” We definitely need to be filling our own cups first, so to speak, in order to take the best care of our health coaching businesses and clients.
With that in mind, here are a few ways to manage your health coaching workload and mindset to achieve your desired work-life balance as a health coach:
Establish your non-negotiables
A “non-negotiable” is a daily activity that you commit to doing, no matter what. That may be things like:
eat a healthy diet
take a walk each day
get enough sleep
take time for fun + relaxation
leave the home office by a certain time each day
Know your own non-negotiables, and set them firmly. What would you recommend if you were health coaching yourself?
Set boundaries with health coaching clients
Being a health coach does not mean being accessible 24/7. It’s important to build your health coaching business around healthy boundaries with your clients.
A few recommendations for setting healthy boundaries with your health coaching clients:
Don’t give out your personal cell phone number. Instead, use business tools that help you schedule sessions and communicate with clients. Check out the top business tools I use and recommend for health coaches. A couple key examples are Acuity Scheduling to schedule client sessions, or Practice Better to manage all client communication.
Be clear with yourself about what your reasonable health coaching work hours and turnaround times are—and then clearly communicate that to clients. For example, I let clients know that I’ll get back to any messages within two business days.
Set clear expectations about the type of communication that’s available to your health coaching clients: How often are you available to clients between sessions? How should they reach out to you (email, text, Practice Better, etc.)?
And, this goes without saying, but be sure to set clear boundaries with clients regarding your health coaching scope of work, and stay firmly within that scope. If a client is seeking assistance in an area you’re not comfortable working in, know when and how to refer them elsewhere.
Know when + how to unplug
This can of course vary by person, but we all need downtime (aka, not-thinking-about-work time!).
Feel into how much time you need daily or weekly to reset and recharge, and build that into your schedule. Whatever’s needed for you to step away and “unplug” from work during that time, be sure to honor it. That could be steps like:
Setting an alarm for the time you’ll wrap up work each day.
Closing the home office door at the end of the “work day” and not entering again until the next day.
Turning off work notifications (email, Instagram, Practice Better, etc.) on your phone. This allows you to consciously check them on a schedule that works for you, rather than being constantly notified (and distracted) at times it may not be best for you.
Do one thing well at a time
A lot of research shows that multi-tasking really doesn’t work as well as we’d like to think it does! Our brains are best, and most efficient, at doing one thing at a time.
One of the tips I personally use for improving work-life balance is to do one thing at a time, and focus on doing that one thing well.
This means that if I’m writing a wellness blog post, I’m writing a wellness blog post—and that’s all. I’m not also checking emails as they come in, or stopping to answer a phone call, or following up with a client question.
Manage your time as a health coach
Some of the tips above (unplugging, non-multi-tasking, non-negotiables) also relate to a key part of optimizing work-life balance: Consciously managing your time as a health coach.
We’re all limited by the same number of hours in a day. Within those hours, we need to manage our health coaching business operations, sleep, eat, exercise, have personal time, have social time, and more.
So, we need to be conscious of how much time we intend to devote to each of those activities each day. (Part of the practice of creating non-negotiables is so we actually get those healthy activities into our daily hours, rather than accidentally running out of time for them!)
I like to schedule out each day to clearly outline how my time will be spent that day.
I start with the non-negotiables—how much time do I want to earmark for my daily walk, how much time do I need to prepare the meal on tonight’s dinner menu, how much time do I want to spend on my self-care activity du jour (right now it’s paint-by-numbers, woohoo!).
I account for all the non-negotiables I’ve set for my healthy work-life balance, and then assess which business tasks I can fit into the day on top of those. This is a reverse process from what I used to do when I was just starting out (I used to first schedule my business tasks… and then never get to my own wellness activities, oops)—and it’s working out much better now!
Side note: Many people say “Ohmygosh, I have so much to do each day, I don’t even have time for myself!” Well, that sounds like we need to re-think some of your health coaching business operations: What are you doing that you don’t need to be doing? (There’s probably something!) What can you automate or streamline? There’s a reason I wrote an entire post on the business tools I’ve personally used to free up time by automating my health coaching business operations. That’s important stuff for our health coach work-life balance!
It’s okay to say no
And, finally, it’s okay to say “no!”
Especially when just starting out as a health coach, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “I need to take every opportunity that comes my way.”
But, you don’t. You don’t need to take on more health coaching clients than you have time to healthfully manage. You don’t need to accept business opportunities or partnerships that require more from you than you feel you have to give at that time.
It’s totally okay to pass on something (even just “for now”) if you don’t have the personal or business resources to take it on.
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