Life coach helps clients with health and wellness | BALANCE

Published 11:09 am Saturday, February 14, 2015

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Balance, the 2015 Sound Fitness & Health Guid

By LESLIE KELLY

Katherine Van Slyke has always been into fitness and health. But it took seeing her mother — who was ill with cancer — turn her life over to doctors that made Van Slyke realize she wanted to help others take control of their health and wellness.

“She was handing her body over to the doctors,” Van Slyke said. “She wasn’t taking ownership for her physicality.”

Watching that, and finding herself busy with young children and not paying attention to her own health, Van Slyke knew things needed to change.

“I really wanted to get healthy,” she said. “I’d struggled with my weight all my life and I just didn’t want to go on another diet. I wanted to own my health and happiness.”

That, she said, took tapping into something deeper. She knew she had to “drive her own ship.”

So, she enrolled in a program to become certified as a professional wellness coach. She enrolled in the Invite Change educational program in Edmonds and became a certified professional coach from Invite Change, an ICF-ACTP accredited school.

She also is an associate certified coach through the International Coach Federation, and a federation member; a certified health coach through Villanova University; and has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Occidental College.

Her business is named “Intality” and is a combination of the motto: “Where intentions become reality.”

Her approach to each client is different and depends on the personal goals each client has.

“The goal is always to get to a place where we’re healthy and feel good about ourselves,” she said. “There’s no one method.”

It does include looking at “self-talk,” she said.

“When someone comes to me and says they’re miserable in their skin, that they know they need to lose weight and that they aren’t healthy, just giving them exercises and telling them what to eat may help for awhile,” she said. “But if you don’t get at the negative self-talk that’s going on, ultimately, the person will go back to their old habits.”

So, her coaching work includes helping each client look at their inner critic. But it differs from psychotherapy and mental health counseling.

“With psychotherapy, the person looks back at their life — at the trauma — and tries to find the root of the issue or the negative feelings,” she said.

“In health coaching, we work from the now and move forward. We work to erase the bad habits and what’s getting in the way. In coaching, the client is the expert. They tap into what’s getting in their way.”

The work includes “homework” tasks including noticing when the negative self talk happens and replacing it with positive messages.

“These steps help to develop new pathways to create new habits,” she said.

Van Slyke usually meets with a client weekly for 30 to 45 minutes at a cost $250 a month. If at the three-month mark change isn’t happening, then she and the client re-evaluate what direction to go. Typical clients work with her for a year.

She meets in person with clients and over the phone, sometimes using Skype. Her clients range in age from the mid-30s to the mid-60s.

Not everyone she sees has issues with weight. Her clients have included individuals coming back from cancer and strokes, and trying to face the physical limitations they now have.

“Disease limits our physical capability,” she said. “I work with those clients to focus on what’s possible.”

Another client was someone who was the “caretaker” for everyone around her, and hence, put herself last. Creating a way for her to make time to care for herself was the goal.

Coaching clients in wellness means creating new ways of communicating from within, Van Slyke said.

“As humans, we create habits and patterns,” she said. “Negative self-talk falls into that. There’s a science component to it where hormones are released and we actually can become addicted to it.

“You have to be aware of that and replace the negative patterns with positive ones.”

Her coaching has not only been a success professionally, but personally. She’s gotten healthier herself and she’s much happier.

“I was in my 40s and just sitting around with my kids and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ ” she said. “Since becoming a coach and taking control of my health, the quality of my life is just outstanding.”

To contact Van Slyke , email katherinevanslyke@gmail.com, or call 206-353-8583. Visit her website at www.intality.com, or view her Facebook page.