Why Your Health is a Personal Development Issue

This guest post is by Mike Reeves-McMillan of Living Skillfully: Change Your Life.

As a hypnotherapist and health coach, I get three main kinds of clients.

1. People who want to change their behavior, their thoughts and feelings, so that they can be healthier. They want to lose weight, or exercise more, or (very commonly) stop smoking.
2. People who want to overcome emotional issues such as phobias, anxiety, stress or depression.
3. People who want to deal with physical symptoms such as skin problems, pain or irritable bowel syndrome.

At first, you’d wonder what these three types of people have in common.

What I’ve come to realize is that what they have in common is a determination to improve their lives. What they’re all looking for, whether they know it or not when they come in my door, is personal development.

For example, my stop-smoking clients. I had a lovely lady in the other day who’s turning 74 next year. She’s smoked since she trained as a nurse in the 1960s. Now she’s decided it’s time to stop. She’s over it.

That, my friends, is personal development. Because what happens when you make that kind of change in your life is that you gain a new confidence in yourself. You gain a new sense of control, a new perspective.

Another stop-smoking client of mine, a divorced mother of two in her late 30s, was smoking, in part, as an act of self-harm. Stopping involved changing how she thought and felt about herself. It was part of a global change in her life, from the dark place she’d been in since her childhood to a new and more powerful way of being in the world and being true to herself. Becoming a non-smoker, for her, was not just getting rid of a bad habit or an addiction, but getting rid of a negative mindset.

And the same is true of my other clients. Overcoming fear, sadness or that helpless feeling you get in the midst of overwhelming stress makes you a very powerful person. If you can do that, you can do all kinds of scary things.

What about changing your body’s responses by changing how you think? A lot of illnesses (more than we usually realize) are stress-related or at least made worse by stress. When we shift out of a stress mindset and when we reconnect to our own bodies and stop dividing them from our minds, it’s like pushing in an electric plug. Power starts flowing.

Health is not just medicine

I have immense respect for conventional scientific medicine. I always make sure that any client with a physical symptom has had it checked by a doctor before I’ll work with them, not just for my own protection and theirs but because I simply don’t have the diagnostic resources that are available to a medical professional. But where Western medicine, as it’s often practiced, falls down is that it treats a biosystem, not a person.

In its place, medicine is wonderful and does things that no other treatment can do. But a while ago, out of interest, I looked at the 20 most commonly prescribed drugs and asked how many of them treated symptoms that can also be addressed by better stress management, good nutrition and exercise. The answer? At least 19.

There are three things that a pill will give you that stress management, nutrition and exercise won’t:

1. (Usually) more rapid results.
2. Undesired side effects.
3. Reliance on the doctor and the pharmaceutical companies for your health.

And it’s the third one that I want to focus on here. If you improve your own health (in the very broadest sense, the functioning of your mind-and-body in the world) through your personal participation in a process that requires effort and attention, that cost in effort and attention is repaid many times over by the increased sense of agency you get. It doesn’t matter if you had a coach help you with information and planning and motivation; clearly, you did it. You made the change. But taking a pill is an inescapably passive act.

Sadly, all too often it’s only when there’s no viable medical alternative that we look to what we can achieve for ourselves. My mother farms dairy goats, and she used to sell milk to a man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer some years before and given 6 months to live. He had done his research and found a diet that claimed to help in reversing cancer (the goat’s milk was part of it). I have no idea whether it was what he ate or how he thought that cured him. All I know is that he rode a big BMW motorcycle, had a handshake like the bite of a mule and was the healthiest-looking 70-year-old I’d ever seen. Cancer survivors in general tend to love life, but he had an additional reason: he’d taken responsibility for his own cure when the doctors couldn’t do anything for him.

Health is a personal development issue, because to take action for our own health we have to believe in ourselves and our own ability to change. And once we start taking that action, not only will we feel better than we’ve ever felt before, but we’ll have the inner strength to achieve more in every area of life.

So: what health action have you been thinking about taking? What healthy change might you make in your life? And how can you apply personal development principles to bring that change into reality?

Mike Reeves-McMillan is a hypnotherapist and health coach who blogs at Living Skillfully: Change Your Life. His themes for 2011 include connecting to your body and challenging yourself.