Here’s why:

Eating has always been and will always be a centerpiece in our lives even if you eat to live and don’t live to eat. Since the beginning of time, people’s lives have always been oriented around food, activity and recuperation. These are the 3 core essentials of health and high performance living, and if you build them into your lifestyle successfully, you have the opportunity to stay very healthy, function and perform at high levels.

If you are truly healthy, functioning and performing at high levels is possible, and chances are good you will be living at or near your ideal weight with a good deal of personal energy at the same time as a result. These are the benefits for knowing how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully.

That’s basically what we teach in Performance Lifestyle training; how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully, by harnessing the true power of these 3 core essentials. And while recuperation might very well be the MOST essential aspect of your lifestyle, eating Nutrient Rich food is the most prominent and assuredly the cornerstone.

• What’s the most successful way to eat?
• How do you stay healthy and eat great tasting food at the same time?
• Why will it work and enable you to live at or near your ideal weight all year round?

The answer is of course, eating plant based Nutrient Rich foods, up to 90% or more of the time, in great tasting ways. It works because you get your bodies needs met, aren’t giving it what it doesn’t need, for the most part, and you won’t be driven to consume more than you need; it’s Nutrient Rich!

When you start eating Nutrient Rich foods, and are no longer opting for nutrient poor fast foods 90 percent of the time or more, your lifestyle WILL change.

Don’t get me wrong, you can eat nutrient rich foods fast, you can also find fast food establishments that will serve you nutrient rich foods and meals in the same time frame that it takes you to buy a burger. The difference is, you will not be dependent on fast food establishments anymore, and change your lifestyle patterns because eating nutrient rich foods extends beyond eating out to how you shop, organize and prepare foods for yourself and your family so that you get the full benefit and pleasure of healthy eating.

Now, for those of you who are thinking right now, “I don’t have the time“, this is a blessing. When you make the decision to eat Nutrient Rich food up to 90% or more of the time, you will actually have more time as you prioritize and make the time to maintain this new quality standard in your life.

You’ll soon learn a secret about healthy eating, that will make you so much productive and calmer at the same time and believe it or not, it comes from spending more time, taking care of the essential needs in your life, like eating nutrient rich foods!

By the way, you could say that we are all time strapped, but that’s a story and you can change your story. There are incredibly busy people right now eating the healthiest diet in the world based on nutrient rich foods, and they have lots going on. How do they do it? That’s the question you want to be asking.

When you know how, eating healthy nutrient rich foods in the fast paced world we live in will force you to make other changes in your lifestyle. It will naturally force you to think and live better; and having the mindset and skills set to change your lifestyle for better results will go a long way.

That’s why eating Nutrient Rich foods is the cornerstone of the lifestyle we will help you develop here at The Lifestyle Coaching Center, in person, online and by phone!

If so, you may need to improve your lifestyle with the help of a coach.

Almost everyone has been in that place where they are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, sometimes for far too long; you know something is wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it and it seems like the same ole story each day.

Matter of fact, when we’re tired we create stories about our life that are not accurate or supportive of what we would like to see happen.

In a fast-paced world where it’s incredibly easy to get worn down from the high performance demands we all face, lifestyle coaching helps you change your story, identify what your needs are and get them met, so that you can better achieve your goals.

We do that by aligning the three levels of your life you want to be aligned and “working for you”. When they are not, that’s when overwhelm… starts.

1. The structure of your life
2. Your Lifestyle
3. Your Goals

Performance Lifestyle Coaching is a blend between life, health and success coaching. It focuses on understanding your present situation and on applying the Performance Lifestyle skills, the defacto formula for improving your quality of life.

When you expand your awareness and take the steps to function and perform better, as a person and in your life, by exercising the 12 Principle Rights (aka, the fundamentals of transformation and achievement), you will be healthier, happier and more successful.

Performance Lifestyle is the mindset and skill set balanced, healthy, high achieving people know and live by. It is a proactive way of life, where you actively manage stress and enhance their energy. It is life at the next level where you are no longer living in chronic overwhelm and exhaustion (for some fatigue) or dealing with the overweight condition and the health complications that usually follow suit.

Instead of wearing yourself down and responding to stress with lifestyle habits that create more negative stress on you and your body; in a PerformanceLifestyle you improve your wellness, health, energy and fitness routinely so you can function and perform better and achieve even your most ambitious goals.

That is the premise of Lifestyle Coaching.

Resolve, Evolve and Achieve Your Goals

The key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle successfully, while achieving your goals, is resolving your challenges, those things that might be driving you a little crazy and throwing you out of balance.

Coping only goes so far before you end up covering up what needs to be resolved, typically with unhealthy lifestyle patterns. When you resolve your challenges, you can evolve with new thoughts and the skills to maintain new levels of balance, health and peace of mind, while achieving healthier success results. When you get proficient at this, you can do it while achieving even your most ambitious goals.

The support of a coach will go a long way in helping you handle at least the initial phases of optimizing your life.
Even coaches have coaches for this reason!

In Performance Lifestyle coaching we don’t make goals out of improving any aspect of your lifestyle (i.e getting more sleep, eating better or exercising); rather you learn the best practices, and routinely improve these aspects of your lifestyle, among others, by taking small but effective steps each day and week.

The Performance Lifestyle mindset and skill sets were clarified over two decades by leading psychology, energy management, nutrition , fitness and success training experts all collaborating on creating a balanced health and success solution that supports any area of your life. It is not about every area of your life, but gives you the lifestyle skills to thrive in any of area of your life as everything depends on how well you can function and perform as a human being.

Imagine living at or near your ideal weight all year long and proactively reducing future health risks while achieving your top level goals instead of internalizing both the physical and mental stress that hold you back.  That’s what living your life at the next level is all about; living a lifestyle that works for you, not against you, where you steer clear of the hidden lifestyle challenges that hold almost all people back.

Get ready to harness high level health and well being for better performance and greater success – without all the hidden sacrifices with lifestyle coaching.

PerformanceLifestyle is broken into two fundamental disciplines:

1. Life Coaching

The personal foundations you need to understand, accept and transform your thought process so you don’t make more out of things than they need to be. Becoming more aware, emotionally fit and psychologically strong, will make you more energy efficient and experience better health and success results.

The focus here is on Your Story(s).

2. The Lifestyle Mindset and Skill Set Education & Training

Applied performance lifestyle knowledge organized in a step-by-step system so you can learn how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully, function and perform well, no matter what your circumstances.

==>> To learn more about how you can begin to improve your lifestyle and  your quality of life Download the Resolve, Evolve and Achieve Your Goals™ Method.

Personal performance and quality of life go hand in hand and they are optimized when living happens without the cost of chronically depleted energy that results in exhaustion, weight gain, health complications and an overall compromised sense of happiness that distracts you from your goals and purpose in life. In order to avoid these health and vitality issues, you must learn to effectively manage your personal energy, including the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels so you can better achieve your goals.

It’s all about “the way” in which you achieve your goals.

Today, many health & wellness, diet & exercise and even goal achievement programs focus solely on a small fraction of overall lifestyle, when it’s your lifestyle as a whole that enables you to achieve your goals.

These programs rarely address the importance of personal energy management; the core behavior patterns or total lifestyle improvement that are critical for long-term health, productivity and sustainability.

Performance Lifestyle Coaching concentrates on the alignment between your lifestyle and your goals and making sure you have solid personal foundation and life structure on which to operate from.

Performance Lifestyle training optimize your lifestyle from the inside out while addressing the twelve proven principles of transformation and achievement that drive you and it all starts with understanding your present situation to determine what really needs to change.

To begin living a lifestyle that works better for you, you must first recognize what type of achiever you are. Understanding and acknowledging the way you achieve your goals, will reveal your mindset and draw attention to the lifestyle skills that will streamline, simplify and support you no matter what your present situation may be.

You begin by understanding the Resolve, Evolve and Achieve Your Goals Method™ with the lifestyle benchmark assessment uniquely designed to help you identify where you need to work and where you will benefit from coaching.

We hope you take the time to learn more about improving your lifestyle with the support you’ll receive from The Lifestyle Coaching Center, online and live in Livingston, NJ.

Is is achieving your goals? Or, is it the lifestyle that supports your capacity to achieving your goals?

I think the later and so do people in-the-know.

Want to know why?

It’s likely because we have tried so many solutions over time and realize that no one solution works all the time, but the one that is always working for you is your lifestyle. It’s producing results all the time guaranteed; the question is, are they the results you want?

For example, when it comes to looking, and feeling better, you’ve probably tried it all too – low cal, low carb, low fat diets and as some would say “eat less” ‘starvation’ plans. You’ve relied on nutritional supplements, bought tons of great exercise equipment (literally) and attempted to sustain rigorous work routines at the gym month in and month out.

The list goes on…

It’s not that these solutions don’t work, or won’t work; it’s that they don’t work alone, forever, or in some cases at all. And, none of these has solved your real problem – why are you tired, overeating, and less physically active? Meanwhile the pounds just keep creeping up and up and up.

It was this reality that lead me to PerformanceLifestyle as the way to achieve my goals while maintaining the quality of life I want.

No it’s not a quick fix by any means, nothing is, but it’s quicker than chasing your tail for year and years. It is the mindset and skills set, “the lifestyle” for achieving your goals, and in a relatively balanced and healthy way. I should say it’s the healthiest lifestyle there is, simply because for perhaps the first time, you find yourself living successfully.

And that means, in a way where you are aware of your circumstances. Where you know how to change your story to manifest the results you desire, manage your energy – how you spend and recuperate your personal energy, the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels (the core essentials of health and high performance) so you can better achieve your goals and live with the quality of life you want.

Yes, there is a lifestyle for living your life to the fullest, without depleting yourself and driving yourself into the ground, the result most people are getting from their current lifestyle. A Performance Lifestyle is not a one-type-fit’s-all, but it is the time tested and proven mindset and skills set that can help anyone function and perform better in their life.

Understanding that focusing on your capacity to perform “well” is it’s premise. Only when you are learning all that you need to know to function and perform well, will you function and perform well and not go into the downward trend over overwhelm, exhaustion and overweight that so many people suffer from. Anything less, will not work for you.

Imagine, for example, being an expert in nutrition, but not knowing much about personal energy management? I see this all the time, “healthy” burnouts talking about nutrition but requiring coffee to get through the talk. I’ve been one myself at times. (hand raised).

Case closed! You get the point.

This is why it’s good to know that performance is a lifestyle. No matter what your role is in life or what you want to achieve, structuring your life and developing your lifestyle so that you can achieve your goals works.

Learn the 12 Principle Rights, and let’s improve your lifestyle. It’s what gives you the edge today.

Life coaching is about addressing your well being which is a big subject and a term used to describe the whole of who you are.  It’s inclusive of many aspect that define who you are, such as your rules, value’s, boundaries, toleration’s and values… all of which and more, define your conscious self or your “personal foundation that affect the great many beliefs “stories” you have and communicate about yourself and your life as it was, is and will be. (read that again)

The strength of your personal foundation is experienced as your sense of self and your abilities to interact successfully with the world. It’s felt through your emotions, your guidance system that lets you know that, and where you have weaknesses, and when you are on course and off course towards you goals.

At The Lifestyle Coaching Center we are always looking to help our clients improve their personal foundation and the stories they have about their life; as it is from this place and with this skill, that one is able to change or “improve” their lifestyle, or not. Your personal foundation and story give rise to your outlook, the vision and goals that you feel fit to achieve.

Life Coaching helps you to identify where you are so that you can grow from there and determine what you need to develop your personal foundation. There is no training system that can capture your life and your needs perfectly, but they are highly useful in expanding your awareness and helping you identify where you really are exactly which is why coaching is so effective.

No matter where you are there you grow is a philosophy that is adapted to helping you identify where you need work to strengthen your personal foundation, and as coaches we ascribe to it as we always start with understanding your present situation, so we start as close as possible to meeting your most pressing and most influential needs.

In order to live a forward moving, healthier, higher achieving life, personal foundation training and coaching is invaluable. It’s the basis of life coaching, and having a personal coach that has a vested interested in your well being, whom you can talk to about what is going on in your life and what you think is behind it with a vested interest in only dealing with the past to the extent that it helps you thrive in the present, is invaluable.

Of course, understanding the life you are wanting to live, is the coaches greatest value in coaching you. They can see what you can’t, help you identify what you need and where you want to go to realize the outcomes you want.

Lifestyle Coaching, the fundamentals of a successful lifestyle, of transformation and achievement and healthy success are more clear cut; but to live the lifestyle, a lifestyle that works for you, not against you (known as a “performance lifestyle”) you must work on 3 things:

The Three Things:

1) You must build and strengthen your personal foundation

2) You must learn how to change your story to support what you want.

3) You must understand what it means to manage your energy, as that is what you manage to most in your lifestyle.

All aspects of your lifestyle, which is really your style for living your life to achieve your goals, are based on your personal foundation, your story(s) about your life and your understanding of how to manage your energy for the best return of investment possible in life.

The purpose of your lifestyle is to achieve your goals, living the lifestyle that will help you live in balance with vibrant health and greater peace of mind so you can achieve even your most ambitious goals is ultimately what we are all learning.

Your lifestyle is based on The Three Things.

Get started Improving Your Lifestyle Today!

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Here at The Lifestyle Coaching Center we are grounded in life coaching expertise that we have expanded into what’s known as PerformanceLifestyle.

We speak of “Performance” because at the end of the day, all coaching is about helping you function and perform better. When you do, you get benefits of all kinds in your life and business from better more energy to better communication and relationship skills, better health to clarity on your real goals…

We speak of “Lifestyle” because we are focused on helping people convert earned- insights about themselves and what they need to do to achieve their goals, into the way they think and live/work in the present – i.e. Your Lifestyle.

Too often we become smart, we “know” what we need to do (so we think), but don’t experience a desired result that seems so within reach. That we have not yet converted the new thought into present action as a result of integrating the idea into our lifestyle (how we presently think and live) we stagnate. These insights accumulate, and before you know it, you’re overwhelmed with all that you need to do or could do that you are not doing and the stories of failure begin to emerge.

That is one of many patterns that you will break when you have Life/Style training and coaching supporting you.

Here’s what Steve has to say about life coaching:

Life coaching (or personal coaching) is fairly popular these days. Many people have asked me what I think of life coaching, so I’ll share my thoughts on this subject.

A life coach is someone you hire to help assist you with your personal development, especially in the area of setting and achieving specific goals. Typically this involves paying a few hundred dollars per month to speak with a trained coach by phone for 30-60 minutes per week. Pricing and service offerings vary tremendously. Your life coach may share advice, offer guidance, help you make plans, and hold you accountable for taking action. You can hire a health coach to help you with health and fitness goals (like a virtual personal trainer). You can hire a business coach to help you build or grow a business. You can hire a productivity coach to help you get organized and increase your productivity. Every life coaching situation is unique, so there’s a great deal of flexibility here.

At two different times in my life, I hired a life coach, each time for about six months. The first time was in 1993 while I was in college. The second time was around 2001 when I was running my games business.

Life coaching experience #1

When I hired my first life coach, I thought it might be useful in helping to increase my productivity. This coaching program began with a very thorough personality assessment test, so ostensibly the coach could use this info to make the coaching more personal.

My results with this particular coach were mixed. I hired him during the time I was going through college in 3 semesters, and I liked that he helped hold me accountable to getting certain things done. Unfortunately he decided to use my test results to try to improve what he considered some of my personality flaws, so he would sometimes coach me to work on his goals for me instead of my goals for me. Today this practice is largely considered unethical by the coaching community. Most coaches now know they must work on their clients’ goals, not their own goals for their clients. Some coach training and referral organizations have written standards of ethics to clarify this.

This particular coach wasn’t a great fit for me. He wanted to mold me into a more well-rounded person, whereas my goal was to become sharper in a few key areas. For example, he determined that I needed to improve my social skills, so he gave me assignments like, “Smile at 10 people today.” As a computer science and math major, I thought that was a stupid assignment, so I didn’t do it. I think his heart was in the right place, and later in life I did put some serious effort into developing my social skills, but as a coach it really wasn’t his place to set goals for me. This caused me to lose respect for him, and it made our relationship less productive than it could have been.

This coach worked as part of a larger coaching operation, and they had a very generous money-back guarantee. I paid about $900 for six months of weekly 30-minute phone coaching sessions. The guarantee was such that if you weren’t satisfied for any reason, you could get a full refund on your entire six months of coaching. That guarantee was one of the reasons I signed up; I figured I had nothing to lose. In the end I did ask for the refund, and to their credit they promptly refunded the full fee. I was excited about the coaching at first, and even at the halfway point it seemed like it was going somewhere, but in the end I realized it didn’t meet my expectations. I felt bad asking for the refund, but I would have felt worse if I didn’t. I did get some value from the six months of coaching, but it wasn’t worth $900 to me, and the terms of the guarantee made it clear that I should have been delighted, not disappointed. On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate this coaching experience a 4.

Life coaching experience #2

The second time I hired a coach was during a period when my games business, Dexterity Software, was growing nicely. I thought it would be good to have a coach to help me sort through all the projects on my plate and to solve some tricky problems.

This time I hired an independent coach instead of going with a larger organization. Most independent coaches offer a free session (try before you buy), so you can decide if they’re a good fit for you. I tried 3-4 different coaches and picked the one I liked best. I paid $70 per 60-minute weekly phone call. I also had the opportunity to do simple follow-up emails with this coach throughout the week.

I liked this coach, and I was happy with the service he provided. He was an experienced programmer like me, but he was also a very right-brained person. He taught me some creative problem-solving and visualization techniques. He was also very intuitive, so he would often detect the unspoken problems behind my spoken words. This made our conversations very efficient because he was able to get to the core issues quickly. We worked mostly on business challenges but also on some personal goals. My sales increased during this coaching period, so that was certainly nice.

This coach especially helped me understand the importance of intuition in business. When I first came to him, I was extremely left-brained, and he helped me integrate more right-brained qualities into my decision making. In the long run, this was very beneficial to me.

After about six months, I decided to discontinue our coaching, not because it failed but because it succeeded. This coach helped me achieve a higher level of performance, but after a while I was so familiar with his style that I didn’t need the weekly phone calls anymore. Eventually the law of diminishing returns kicked in.

On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate this coaching experience an 8.

I should also mention that this second personal coach was in the same time zone as me, but the first one wasn’t. Being in the same time zone made it easier to schedule appointments. Usually we’d speak at the same time every week, but that wasn’t always the case.

Life coaching lessons

Life coaching can work nicely. The skills and ideas you gain from your life coach may endure well beyond the paid coaching period, so you aren’t just paying for your time on the phone or for short-term benefits. Ideally you’re paying for a permanent shift to a higher level of performance. For example, if a life coach can help train you to become an early riser, that gain is yours for life. Even though good life coaching isn’t cheap, the results can easily make it worthwhile.

When it comes to selecting a life coach, it’s important to shop around to find someone compatible. You want a coach you like and respect. You want a coach that is knowledgeable and experienced. And you especially want a coach that will help you achieve the results you desire. This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring a coach who’s just like you, only better. It may mean hiring someone who’s very different from you.

When you identify some coaches that seem like a good fit for your needs and your budget, request a free trial session. I don’t recommend hiring a coach who doesn’t offer a free trial session — it’s too much of a gamble. Try several different coaches until you find one you feel confident will help you. If the free trial leaves you feeling doubtful or hesitant, definitely pass.

After the free trial session, ask yourself, What do I honestly expect will happen if I hire this coach for several months? Pay attention to your honest predictions. If you don’t think you’ll achieve your desired results, you probably won’t. If you’re excited that this coach can surely help you succeed, that’s a good sign.

Understand that a coach is your helper, not your boss. You must be the one to decide what you want out of each session. You’re always in command. My coaches began their sessions by asking, “What would you like to work on today, Steve?” It was up to me to share my goals, challenges, and problems and to request help where I felt I needed it.

If you aren’t clear about what you want to work on, a good coach can help you gain clarity and set new goals. Just be sure that the emerging goals are your goals, not your coach’s goals for you.

Life coaching relationships are usually short-term. Partly this happens due to saturation. Eventually you become so familiar with your coach’s style that your coach isn’t challenging you as much, or perhaps you’ve achieved the major goals you wanted to achieve, such as losing a certain amount of weight or starting a business. On the other hand, greater familiarity can also create a stronger bond that increases accountability. You’re less willing to disappoint your coach by dropping the ball. You’ll have to decide if your coaching is generating sufficient results to justify the ongoing costs.

If I were to work with a life coach again, 6-12 months would probably be my limit with any one person, and 12 months really seems like a stretch. The exception would be if that person was growing and improving very rapidly, always learning fresh ideas and techniques that could be applied to our coaching sessions. Otherwise it’s like taking classes with the same teacher year after year — you eventually reach the point where you’ll grow faster by learning from someone new.

Life coaching can be especially fruitful for self-employed people and independent professionals. When your income is performance-based, a good coach may be able to help you boost your performance at least enough to pay for the coaching. I’d say that was true for my second coaching experience. I paid about $300/month for the coaching, but I ended up boosting my income by many times more than that.

If you have your own business, and you hire a coach to help improve your business’ bottom line like I did, you can deduct your coaching fees as a business expense. I was able to do this with my second coach but not my first. If you generate income from blogging, you should be able to justify deducting personal coaching if you blog about the experience as a service for your visitors or if your coaching experience benefits your business.

My first life coaching experience involved 30-minute sessions, but with my second coach they were 50-60 minutes each. I preferred the longer sessions. A 30-minute session would probably be okay for most people, but I had a lot of complex business issues that took a while to work through. Longer sessions are generally more expensive though.

How to find a life coach

Finding a decent life coach is fairly easy. Lots of independent coaches who’ve gone through formal training programs can be found online. One good site is FindACoach.com. That’s where I found my second coach. I don’t have any financial interest in whether or not you decide to hire a coach from there.

You can also find a coach via personal referral, but you’ll still want to get a free trial session. You need to determine if the coach’s style is compatible with your goals.

Many coaches specialize, so if you have a specific area you want to work on, consider hiring a specialized coach just for that area. For example, if you want to build or grow a business, you can hire an experienced business coach. Often these are people who worked in business for decades and then retired, later starting a coaching practice to share their hard-earned wisdom with others.

Why life coaching works

The main reason life coaching works is that you’re hiring someone with greater experience than you in a certain area. Your coach can quickly identify patterns that may not be clear to you. Then your coach can help you devise and implement solutions. When this works well, it’s a very high-leverage relationship. It’s one of the fastest ways to solve challenging problems. Businesses often hire outside consultants to help solve important problems, and life coaching is basically the individual equivalent of business consulting.

While I’ve never done any formal paid coaching myself, I’ve done plenty of informal coaching sessions with friends and family members and also online with visitors to this site. In addition to my own growth experiences, I’ve read about 1,000 personal development books, I’ve communicated with thousands of people regarding their growth challenges, and I’ve talked with many others who work in this field. Consequently, I have a lot of experience recognizing patterns. There are many problems people are working on that I’ve (1) already solved, or (2) know how to solve in a variety of different ways.

Similarly, a good life coach will have superior knowledge and experience in the area(s) in which you want to improve. A coach can use all of this expertise to help you solve specific problems efficiently. This is essentially a variation on the principle of overwhelming force. A problem that may seem daunting to you might be a fairly simple matter for an experienced coach.

The real challenge of life coaching is for your coach to help you implement the solutions to your problems. Coming up with solutions is easy. Your coach will probably identify some good solutions during your free trial session. Implementing those solutions is the hard part. That’s where good life coaching really shines. Your coach can work as a guide to help you stay on track, leading you safely through the quagmire of mistakes, blind alleys, and delays.

When you work with a life coach, your coach’s mindset will gradually rub off on you. This is a great thing when you find a coach whose mindset already contains the solution to your problem. For example, this year I decided to become a raw foodist, and one thing that helped me achieve this goal was to communicate with other raw foodists, some of whom are professional raw food coaches. Through osmosis I gradually adopted enough of the raw food mindset to make the change.

When to hire a life coach

A good time to hire a life coach is when you have a fair idea of what you want to be doing, but you’re having an unusually hard time getting it done. Perhaps it seems like you’re getting bogged down in obstacles instead of making steady forward progress. Also, you can imagine that there exist other people who’ve already solved your problem or at least know how to solve it. Would it be worthwhile to pay someone a few hundred dollars to help you solve this problem once and for all? Consider the lifetime benefits before you decide.

Perhaps the most important factor in successful life coaching is the willingness to change. If you aren’t willing to change, a life coach can’t force you to grow. You need some motivation and drive to work with a coach, something you care about deeply enough. Think about how the coach of a professional sports team would respond to an unmotivated, underperforming player. The coach might try some pep talks and motivational techniques, but if those don’t work, the player will likely be cut from the team, replaced by someone else who’s more motivated and driven to succeed. You must provide the drive, and your coach can help you steer toward your goals.

I don’t think it’s necessary (or wise) to use the same life coach indefinitely, but something in the range of 3-6 months can certainly generate some positive results. With a good coach, I’d say you should be getting noticeable results within the first month. If you’ve gone a whole month and have nothing to show for it, cut your losses.

Since I know people are going to ask me, I’m not personally interested in offering life coaching services. I enjoy doing occasional sessions with people I know, but formal one-on-one coaching doesn’t appeal to me right now. I think I can have a more positive impact through other media. While blogging isn’t as deep and personal, I know the articles on this site are effective at helping people, and I can reach a lot more people via blogging than I could ever reach via coaching.

If you think life coaching could be helpful to you, give it a try and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out, you can always quit and try someone else.

Steve Pavlina, StevePavlina.com

This graphic is an opportunity for you to really get your life straightened out, literally!
It was put together to help you see your lifestyle in context and in relation to achieving your goals and give you a real picture of what it looks like.

Notice, that there is a reason why so many people have had to structure with maintaining their health while living a hard charging life to achieve their goals. It’s because there was a missing idea, a big concept many people tale about but have little understanding around.

That concept is Your Lifestyle, or what is becoming known as a PerformanceLifestyle.

You see, if you have lost your health as a foundation of your life, you can count on the fact that your lifestyle is not supporting you and certainly won’t support the performance so many of us depend on each and every day as we engage with a very busy and demanding world.

Without that foundation, you won’t be moving forward in a position of strength, (follow the arrow), you will be pulled backward into trying to restore your health and caught up in the worlds of “alternative health” and traditional medicine to deal with your dis-ease. Unfortunately with all the good than can come from disease management, and various modalities, none is more proven than your lifestyle.

If you get your health go for too long, you reach the world of death and disability. By why head in the wrong direction when you can be moving forward with a greater concentration on your lifestyle to achieve your goals.

Health is a given, not a goal.

All health and wellness ideas need to be learned, but then applied or built into your lifestyle. We refer to Performance Lifestyle as a concept, because whenever you learn a health and wellness concept, you want to understand it in the context of how the act will enable you to function and perform better.

That is what inherently motivates, not chasing health all day; we live healthier so we can perform better, and performance is a lifestyle!

Just ask any athlete.

They don’t need to be convinced to live relatively healthy. If they don’t stay healthy, they can’t perform and that can cost them lots of money. How about you? What’s it costing you not to be performing the way you are capable of?

You see, learning and applying PerformanceLifestyle principles, practices and lifestyle strategies in your life is the key to sustainable success and frankly is what makes success possible for a great many people.

Success training alone does not do it. As important as success training is in your life and business, it is how you achieve your life and business, even sporting goals that determines whether or not you will stay energetic, healthy, free of disease, and fit and that is a matter of lifestyle.

Your lifestyle bridges the gap between your health and success. The question is whether or not your lifestyle is in alignment with the fundamentals of successful living, or what we refer to as the 12 Principle Rights of Transformation & Achievement.

Are you living an overwhelming unmanageable life? Overstimulated, under recuperated, over fed, undernourished, super-busy but physically inactive that promotes the overweight condition and health complications?

If so, that’s why you want to get free of hidden lifestyle challenges that are holding you back and start living a PerformanceLifestyle. When you get your lifestyle working for you, based on PerformanceLifestyle principles, health will again become closer to a given, and you can focus on your real goals.

That’s what The Lifestyle Method for Achieving Your Goals is all about.

Then it happens.

Something is holding you back, “leashing” to you the past, only to repeat it. It’s the same old story. For some reason, a reason you can’t quite put your finger on, you just can’t move forward the way you had planned over and again in your head. You have all the information at your fingertips, you paid big time for it, but still, it’s hard to move forward.

All the realities of your lack of personal performance kick in, as you face the hidden lifestyle challenges; your true condition.

What are the hidden lifestyle challenges?

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #1: Personal energy debt

Ever feel exhausted and unable to accomplish even routine daily activities? You’re overspent. That’s personal energy debt, the hidden variable that undermines all health and performance improvement, and your success. There is no challenge more undermining or “hidden” than this one, because nobody will be able to do anything for you, except, educate you on how to get your energy back, through lifestyle changes and very few people know how guide you. It’s a challenge.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #2: not enough support

Living as if everything depends on you will eventually lead to hitting the wall and many other lifestyle challenges that make it difficult to achieve your goals, and could even lead to disaster. You know the feeling when you have so much going on, you are barely hanging on. That’s a challenge!

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #3: lack of energy balance

It’s 10:00 AM in the morning, and you don’t enough energy to get through the day, meanwhile the people around you are telling you, “you need to get more balance in your life“. Do you even know what they even mean or where to start?

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #4: unsupportive story

Your personal story has been written from childhood and serves as the framework for how you view the world around you. What happens when you have developed an internal story that does not support you today, prevents peace of mind, and make even the simplest tasks (let along the big ones), more challenging then they should be? You’ve got to change your story, and that’s a challenge.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #5: motivation

Something is driving you— the fear of negative consequences or the draw of a positive outcome. How does it make you feel when you are running away from negative consequences, probably not good and what happens to your motivation when fear burns you out. You’re challenged that’s what.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #6: confusion

Can you see the real causes of your current situation? If not you are confused and nobody likes to feel confused. It’s a major challenge when you can’t figure out the next most important step and are unable to focus on it.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #7: overwhelm

These days, it’s so easy for us to zoom around in too many directions and lose track of what we want to achieve. This is called overwhelm, and it’s very disconcerting to say the least. A definite challenge.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #8: trying to perform at high levels all the time.

If you run at top speed all of the time, you’re bound to stall and hit the wall. It’s a challenge if you’ve set things up where you have to perform at high levels 7 days a week. Can you do it? Probably not.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #9: under recuperated

This is a big hidden challenge: Man o man, you’re told you need to start taking naps and sleeping more, yet the minute you do, you start feeling groggy and less productive. Go back to hidden challenge #1, but for now, you had better learn how to recharge your energy. If not, you are going to be majorly challenged!

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #10: overfed, undernourished

You are full, but unfulfilled and dealing the withdrawal of foods that are meeting your needs and overwhelming your body with toxic substances. You are probably overweight and unhealthy and you know it. That can really impact you during your day and make it hard to move forward.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #11: busy, but physically inactive.

You are putting out a ton of vital energy, but not using much of the energy you’ve consumed and your body is deconditioned. Overweight is likely, but not feeling strong is what’s really getting to you. It’s a challenge because you don’t have the endurance you need to sustain and succeed.

Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #12: lack of clarity

You are a very capable person, but you just don’t know where you are headed. If you did, you would be more on purpose, be able to set better boundaries, and know your next steps. You’d also be taking better care of yourself, likely too. Not knowing where you are headed or how you are going to get there is the ultimate, hidden lifestyle challenge!

You no longer have to wonder about what’s holding you back; it’s almost always one of these challenges that limit your capacity to function and perform well amidst new stresses, that are getting the worst of you when you could be giving the best of yourself with the support of a new and improved lifestyle.

Are you ready to resolve and evolve beyond the hidden challenges that hold you back? Are you ready to move forward in a position of strength?

You can as a member of The Lifestyle Coaching Center.

Learn how to live with vibrant health, more peace of mind and the energy you need to achieve the success you deserve…

PerformanceLifestyle is about a proactive stress management and energy enhancement so you can measurably improve your quality of life.

It is the premise of Lifestyle Coaching.

Performance Lifestyle as mindset and a skill set was developed over two decades by leading psychology, energy management, nutrition , fitness and lifestyle coaching experts all collaborating on creating a balanced health and success solution that supports you in every area of your life.

In a relentlessly demanding world that can easily ware you down, constrained by your capacity; the twelve “Principle Rights” are the preeminent life skills that any and every individual can apply to change their situation, transform and achieve.

These are the 12 Principle Rights of PerformanceLifestyle:

Understand Your Present Situation

Do you feel connected to the real causes and dynamics of your current situation? Are you aware of the challenges that hold you back and prevent you from moving forward in your life? When you fully open up and understand your present situation you build the acceptance and foundation required to promote healthy change. The truth that resides deep inside will set you free – allowing you to achieve new levels of success and well being!

Discover What’s Driving You

What are the motivations driving your life? You have conscious and unconscious needs that drive your positive and negative thoughts and actions. Now you can discover the cause and effect of your ongoing drive to satisfy your needs. Learning what drives you helps to lead you away from destructive behaviors and towards actions that are securely based in productive revitalization.

Streamline & Simplify

The speed of our culture increases every day and the chaotic life demands can cause you to lose your focus on achieving your desired goals in a healthy manner. Learn how to restructure, simplify and systematize your life—getting more done in less time by focusing your energy on what really matters. Streamlining your life will help direct the proper attention and energy to your most precious asset; you.

Resolve. Evolve. Achieve.

Tell a More Optimistic Story

Your personal story has been developing since childhood and through your ancestral history. The story you tell and how you tell it serves as the framework for how you view and interact with the world around you. How you tell your story is also a factor on how others perceive you. Learn how your story impacts your lifestyle. Learn how to drop the weight of the past get real and expand your optimism so your story helps you manifest what you really want.

Build a Supportive Team

Building a lifestyle where everything depends on you will lead you nowhere and only fuel an unhealthy future. Nobody can do it alone. Learn how to create and nurture a supportive team of personal and professional relationships that understand, accept and empower you to live with positive accountability and reinforced energy. Your success can be powered by the positive influence and support of others who share your life and business goals. Building that team is an important element to your lifestyle success.

Break Free From Energy Debt

Do you often feel exhausted or unable to accomplish even routine daily activities without any explanation? That uncomfortable drain you feel is called “personal energy debt” and is one of the primary hidden variables that undermines your health, performance and success. Energy debt causes you to act out and compensate the tired feelings with poor lifestyle behaviors. Learn the life skills you need to identify and break free from the negative impact of energy debt.

Eat Nutrient Rich

Do you want to stop the cycle of junk food cravings, unnecessary hunger and emotional weight gain? When your body lacks what it nutritionally needs to succeed you set yourself up for dietary failure.  Every day we are “sold” foods that simply deny us any real health value. Learn about the incredible benefits of eating nutrient rich foods—for better health, higher performance energy and a great facilitator of “natural” weight loss and overall weight management.

Activate & Strengthen Your Body

Fitness is not just about working out and “hitting the gym”. Healthy fitness is about managing activity, momentum and routinely activating and strengthening your body. Learn how to ditch the overly-regimented exercise programs in exchange for a personal activation plan that enables you to have the strength to meet and exceed your desired lifestyle demands. Learn how to challenge and energize yourself physically and make fitness a fun and rewarding exercise!

Resolve. Evolve. Achieve.

Recharge Your Life Force

Imagine a lifestyle where you have the exact amount of energy you need on tap and when you need it most. Learn the most amazing secrets behind energy regeneration and how easy and effective it is to automatically recharge your internal batteries at almost any time or in any situation. Learn to recuperate and recharge your energy so you have the ongoing power you need to meet your goals each day and power up your life.

Own Your Schedule

Time is one of our most precious gifts in life and too often we treat our own schedules as poorly as we treat ourselves. Learn what it means to “own” your personal and business time around your weekly capacity to perform well. Your schedule should support a healthy lifestyle – not destroy it. By taking full ownership of your schedule you can more effectively operate at your optimal energy capacity every day. Actively learn how to monitor and manage your schedule around your own energy levels to minimize health risks and maximize your productivity.

Live In Balance

Learn how to create a renewed and sustainable harmony in your life. When your life is operating in personal balance then you have the established foundation to achieve your lifelong goals without sacrificing your health and well being along the way. Living in balance and harmony is not an event but a process and an awareness and requires that you have the ability to articulate what needs to adjust and get your needs met. There are four levels of balance and countless nuances to be managed for ongoing peace of mind, to perform at your highest level and truly enjoy your life. Get your foundation right.

Declare Your Direction

Defining and sharing your goals, objectives and personal vision with others is an important process that connects your present situation to your future achievement. Learn how to build and execute a personal performance plan that dynamically adjusts with your life and direction but always maintains a clear and committed focus on your real goals. With a truly focused direction and healthy PerformanceLifestyle powering the way, you hold the key to living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind and the sustained energy you need to achieve all the success you deserve.

I spent time in Santa Rosa California at the Truth North Health Center, and underwent a 10 day fast as part of the process. It was a fantastic experience.

Although a working vacation (worked at least half days) I found sufficient enough recuperation time, including the “relief” my body experienced from abstaining from food for 10 days (takes allot of vital energy to digest food) to be just what I needed to rejuvenate from my depleted state.

First of all, why undergo a fast? It’s to make up for a poor lifestyle, or simply to handle those times when too much stress causes your lifestyle to go awry. It’s a reboot of sort, a chance for your system to clean house, reset and recharge.

Why would I “fast” for 10 days?

The reasons were simple:

It wasn’t because I had a poor lifestyle; it was because I needed rejuvenation. Low energy was causing me to over consume even nutrient rich food. This can happen at times when life happens. Exhaustion or fatigue is the number one reason why weight fluctuates; when personal energy is low all other aspects of your lifestyle get thrown out of balance and for starters you will find yourself consuming more food.

a) It was first and foremost about rejuvenation for me – it had been too long since I had a truly rejuvenating vacation, not a trip, but a vacation where my body could restore itself and get free of personal energy debt. Personal Energy Debt is the hidden variable that undermines all health and success efforts. You can’t see it, but essentially, it’s a feeling like you are hitting the wall with very low energy vital energy reserves, and I’m not referring to food calories.

b) I was tired of eating. I need to reset my system, and restore my desire to eat. I was literally full, and tired. Before I left, I was coping with an unusual stress by eating more nutrient rich foods than usual when I really wasn’t hungry, but burnt out and frankly you get to a point where you start eating “whatever” when you are in that state. I am no different.

No I may not have been clogging my arteries with the standard American diet, but I was certainly gaining weight; basically from the stress hormones themselves and the excess food. It is good to be eating around true hunger these days.

c) I wanted to lose some weight and fast, and the best way to do this, especially when you are already eating a nutrient rich diet, is to fast, which ultimately recharges your metabolism as you increase your vital energy reserves and you consume the stored nutrient reserves around your waist all at the same time. It’s a miracle to witness what you body will do when you give it the chance to thrive, with conditions that promote health and the time and energy to restore itself to a state of health.

d) Last but not least, I wanted to break my routine to rejuvenate my spirit and regain my outlook and vision for what I’m doing and were I’m headed with my team. That just takes space and time and usually a new environment.

Here’s what happened.

While working, I lost 25 pounds and dramatically increased my personal energy. I don’t have the after results of my blood test, as I need to wait for about 3 months or so for the body do complete it’s housecleaning.

What did I learn from this?

As we say in PerformanceLifestyle training, it’s not what you know that matters, it’s how you live. I know that to lose weight fast, one of the best ways to do so is to FAST. Medically supervised water only fasting is of course the best, where you enter into a fast correctly and re feed correctly with the monitoring of trained professionals like they have at the True North Health Center in Santa Rosa California.

In my case, I did what I needed most, which was to change my environment and give my body the conditions it needed to thrive and my biggest need was not to not eat food, it was to rejuvenate and restore my personal energy reserves first and foremost. In that process, I gave my body time to consume the excess nutritional reserves I had stored on my body.

Not eating food, is a big part of restoring your body given you do not have to digest food constantly. All that energy can now go to restoring your system and powering you. Believe me, you have plenty of stored food on your body to the tune of month, maybe two or longer.

I did eat the entire time; I just didn’t take in new food, I consumed what I already ate before I got there.

You will notice that not only am I 25 lbs lighter, I look brighter. That’s not make up, it’s increased personal energy and less stored fat.

Do you have to go on a fast to lose weight fast?

No, you can resort to juicing (which is not technically a fast) and simply eat the healthiest nutrient rich diet possible with a high nutrient density and a low calorie density and you will lose weight fast, but with a fast just takes things to a whole new level, especially if there are complicating factors like too much stress and health complications involved.

I simply fine this age old practice very rejuvenating.

This can become a lifestyle routine. I have already planned the next time I will get a rejuvenation period like this and fasting will be part of it.

Here’s the video of my first juice following my fast.

You can’t imagine anything tasting so good!