The business world continues to grow at a tremendous rate, and its demands tend to take a toll on executive leaders. When the responsibility of achieving company goals and reaching targets falls on your shoulders, it’s natural to feel burnt out and stressed.
Leaders globally have come to understand that it’s hard to do it all themselves, and this is where business coaching comes in. While business coaching takes care of your performance at work, you need executive wellness coaching to live an all-around fulfilled life.
What Is Executive Coaching?
Executive coaching, also known as performance coaching, is an individually tailored practice to develop senior leaders’ skills. It helps you improve your performance as you work one-on-one with a professional coach to set goals and deal with professional challenges.
Executive coaching is about finding the resources within yourself to create sustainable transformation. An executive coach helps optimize your leadership performance, maximize your potential, and effectively manage the challenges that come with day-to-day responsibilities.
What Is Executive Wellness Coaching?
Executive wellness coaching is a holistic approach to helping senior leaders maintain good physical and mental health. It’s about implementing positive, long-lasting lifestyle habits that create balance between your work and personal life.
It involves activities designed to help you pursue a healthy lifestyle. An executive wellness coach empowers you to thrive in all areas of your life. Executive wellness coaching helps you fulfill your highest potential in every role you play.
Your optimal performance depends on the balance you have between your work and other aspects of your life. Working with an executive wellness coach is a journey of self-discovery to get to a point where you can balance your mental, social, emotional, and even spiritual state.
How Is an Executive Wellness Coach Different From a Health Coach or a Life Coach?
One of the most common questions about executive coaching is how executive wellness coaches differ from health or life coaches. Health and wellness mean the same thing to most people, so the two are often assumed to serve the same function. However, there are significant differences between the two coaching fields.
A health coach is focused on helping you set and achieve long-term physical fitness and health goals. Health coaches work with you to identify and change unhealthy behaviors and develop strategies to help you live healthy lives.
A life coach is a type of wellness professional that empowers people by helping them meet their goals in both their personal lives and at work. They’re like a supportive friend who will push you to identify your goals, hold you accountable, and encourage you to become a better version of yourself.
On the other hand, an executive wellness coach takes a more holistic approach to help you develop your leadership skills and work towards living an overall healthy lifestyle. Executive wellness coaching solves problems like burnout, compromised health, a decline in productivity, and strain in relationships.
Do I Really Need Executive Wellness Coaching? 7 Signs You Do
The business world can get rather complex and intense, and most leaders fall into the trap of overworking themselves to prove their worth. As such, executive wellness coaching has become a necessity for senior leaders.
You don’t have to wait until you’re burnt out and extremely stressed to seek help. The sooner you partner with an executive wellness coach, the better, for your performance and quality of life. There are several characteristics of an executive wellness coach that should inform your decision.
You might need an executive wellness coach if you experience any of the following signs:
1. You Feel Stressed and Overwhelmed
Stress is among the top causes of declined productivity and poor performance. When struggling to meet deadlines and achieve goals, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stressed. Sometimes, several demands outside of the workplace also contribute to stress.
Naturally, your body will exhibit physiological responses to stress. When these signs go unnoticed, they could manifest as health problems over the long term.
This is where executive wellness coaching comes in. Your coach will work with you to alleviate and manage stress by adopting a healthy mindset and altering your lifestyle as needed.
Stress is unavoidable, especially for leaders in senior positions. Your coach helps you to build resilience, so you can change your relationship with stress and its effect on you. Executive wellness coaching helps you frame challenges as opportunities, so you can channel your productivity into dealing with stressful situations in a healthy way.
Leaders thrive even in adversity, and your coach will enable you to build the capacity for dealing with hardships and challenges. Once you’ve built capacity, your resilience improves, and you can bounce back from setbacks.
2. Clouded Judgment and Poor Decision-Making
Many factors can lead to a loss of clarity. For example, when you’re eating and sleeping poorly, it can cause fogginess and affect your judgment. External fears and stresses can also weigh heavily on your mind and impact your ability to think rationally.
Clarity is one of the most essential qualities of a leader, which is why you should never ignore the signs of declining clarity. An executive wellness coach can help you cultivate a culture of continuous self-evaluation and development.
Poor physical health due to unhealthy lifestyles could contribute to declining clarity and poor decision-making. Your wellness coach can help you work on your physical fitness, which often translates to mental fitness and helps maximize your focus and engagement.
Your performance depends heavily on your focus. When you’re able to fully engage in your tasks and think rationally about your decisions, you’re in a creative and self-aware state that generates valuable insight.
Working with an executive wellness coach will help you switch from a cloudy haze to a life of greater clarity and sharper focus. This results in better business outcomes and improves your quality of life.
3. You’re Struggling With the Demands of Work and Life
Leaders in the corporate world often struggle with work pressure, resulting in a poor work-life balance. It is easy to blame the work environment, but there are ways to control this to achieve balance.
As a leader, you’re the driver responsible for bringing about change in your organization and reaching company targets. When you’re solely focused on your business’ growth, it’s easy to forget about your well-being, which is a critical factor affecting your ability to perform optimally.
If you’ve been so focused on your work that you’ve barely had time for your personal life, you might need the services of an executive wellness coach. Executive wellness coaching will help you create and maintain healthy boundaries between your work and life.
Your time and role at home are just as important as your work. High-achieving executives sometimes prioritize their work over their personal time because they believe their work is more important.
To establish a good work-life balance, you need to develop the right mindset. Your coach will work with you to shift your mindset so you can make your personal time a priority. This way, you can easily manage these demands and avoid driving yourself to burnout.
4. You Feel Your Relationships Slipping Away
Relationships are the bedrock of leadership. At any time, you are juggling several valuable relationships, from your organization to your personal life. Each leader has their own style and approach to relationships, but it all comes down to valuing others and being mindful of their needs.
It might be time to hire an executive wellness coach if you feel like you’re watching important relationships slip away. Perhaps you have tunnel vision and have been solely focused on company needs, causing you to neglect the needs of those around you.
Great leaders are humans first. Besides the sales targets and revenue goals you achieve, people will remember how you impacted their lives. Every leader wants to leave a legacy, which is only possible when you invest in relationships and value the people in your life.
Your executive wellness coach will help you develop strong communication skills, enabling you to foster healthy relationships in your organization and personal life. Great leaders know how to identify people’s strengths and build on them.
Executive wellness coaching is one strategy you can employ to deepen your relationships and develop your interpersonal skills. Strong relationships are the key to experiencing fulfillment and success in all aspects of your life.
5. You Have Body Aches, Pains, and Fall Sick Frequently
Your mental well-being is intrinsically tied to your physical well-being. When you’re experiencing mental instability caused by stress and burnout, it often manifests itself physically. If you’re tired and drained most of the time, you have regular muscle pain, headaches, and lowered immunity causing frequent illnesses, these could be signs that you’re experiencing burnout.
Burnout is gradual, so the symptoms will creep up on you and worsen as time goes by. If the symptoms go unchecked for too long, you may end up having a major breakdown.
While burnout often stems from your job, many factors, including your lifestyle habits, can contribute to burnout. Your personal life and overall outlook may also play an important role in causing overwhelming stress.
Executive wellness coaching helps you manage all aspects of your life for optimal performance. When you work with an executive coach, they help you feed your best self and avoid losing yourself in the daily pressures that come with your job and personal life.
Your executive wellness coach helps you balance your career, self-care, relationships, and other hobbies and interests. This way, you’ll be your best self in every area of your life.
6. You Feel a Loss of Purpose and Connection
Sometimes you’re so used to the routine of your job that you find yourself simply going through the motions. If you don’t feel challenged or motivated by your work, you might end up feeling a loss of purpose and connection.
At this point, it’s crucial to cultivate emotional intelligence and self-awareness through mindfulness. This is where executive wellness coaching comes in. Your executive wellness coach will help you cultivate mindfulness in various aspects of your life.
Mindfulness is a strategy employed by great leaders to increase self-awareness. When you’re present and grounded in every moment, you make conscious and deliberate decisions rather than drifting through your days on autopilot.
Your executive wellness coach will help you develop emotional intelligence, practice mindfulness, and maintain harmony in your life to manage your emotions and interactions with others. This will result in greater connection and rediscovery of your purpose.
7. You Have Trouble Sleeping and Concentrating
Several physical and psychological factors can cause insomnia. In most cases, difficulty sleeping stems from temporary problems like short-term stress. Insomnia can also be a sign of underlying mental health problems like anxiety and depression.
Sleep is vital to maintaining your health. Lack of sleep has adverse effects on your body and brain. When you’re not resting enough, you’ll notice you’re exhausted all the time, and you’ll have trouble concentrating on your work.
Environmental and lifestyle factors can also contribute to insomnia. Executive wellness coaching can help you get to the root cause of your sleep problems and fix it. Your coach will help you create healthy habits and patterns to restore your sleep and focus. This way, you can maximize your time and boost your energy.
In addition, your coach will help you set and maintain healthy boundaries so you can focus on one thing at a time. They can also help you commit to exercising regularly and improving your diet, which has been proven to help with sleep.
Become the Best Version of Yourself by Working With an Executive Wellness Coach
One challenge most leaders face is hyper-independence. There’s nothing wrong with getting help to tap into your greatest potential. Executive wellness coaching provides you with the resources, tools, and mindset to balance your career with your health and well-being.
Ready to unlock your potential and become the best version of yourself? Champion Performance Systems offers products and services that help high achievers like you get back in control of their lives with invaluable insight into how to balance career success and personal health.Get a renewed sense of focus and clarity by working with an executive wellness coach today. Visit Champion Performance Systems to take advantage of our coaching services tailored to make you a champion in all aspects of your life.
