6. Improve personal, population and planetary health for all: go beyond surface change to deep change

Why do we fail to change unhealthy habits?

Our toxic culture stacks the odds against us from making healthy choices. Making bad lifestyle choices is far too easy. The Standard American Diet (SAD) provides ample opportunities for poor decision-making.  

We all struggle to develop healthy habits. Changing unhealthy habits over the long term most frequently fail, because we only address surface change (see table below). Knowledge, skills and good intentions are pre-requisite for initiating change but not for sustaining it.

Feeling indifferent, frustrated or hopeless about change, we cannot reach our highest levels of healthy well-being.  

To go beyond the limitations of surface change, we have to learn how to explore, understand and make deep change.

How can you make deep change?

These questions will help you reflect about your deep change issues.

A. Identify Deep Change Issues—why are you stuck with unhealthy habits?

How can you:           

• Understand better your thoughts, feelings and perceptions about change?
• Understand why you maximize your reasons to stay the same?
• Understand why you minimize your reasons to change?
• Identify gaps in your values between what you say and do?

B. Make Deep Change—what holds you back, and what propels you forward?

How can you:

• Shift your perceptions in favor of healthy change?
• Lower your emotional resistance by minimizing your reasons to stay the same?
• Enhance your motivation by maximizing your reasons to change?
• Address gaps in your values between what you say and do?
• Increase your confidence and ability to change?
• Create the passion and commitment to live a life of healthy well-being?
• Keep focused on achieving your goals?

C. Sustain Deep Change—what keeps you on course?

How can you:

• Develop the discipline to maintain deep change?
• Become accountable to yourself and others?
• Stay on track with the right motives?
• Manage negative feelings and impulses effectively?
• Overcome roadblocks to change and stop getting sidetracked?
• Learn from failures of your lapses and relapses?
• Develop the habit to sustain your gains? 

Excerpt from book-in-progress, Health Coach Buddies: Improve your health and well-being as you help others. A leadership initiative for building peer network power to launch IP3H movement.

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Curious to learn more about IP3H

This blog series addresses the macro, meso and micro strategies for building the network power needed to launch the IP3H movement. This calls for connecting leaders within and across organizations to align leadership mindsets to IP3H. This top-down leadership initiative is essential for accelerating the implementation of professional and social learning opportunities to build the IP3H movement.

This strategy is essential for mobilizing the social capital to scale up the IP3H movement and help reduce inequities due to unhealthy lifestyles. Health coach buddies (reciprocal peer coaching) is just one prototype of a scalable social innovation to IP3H.

Systemic transformation facilitates personal transformation

Leaders lead systemic transformation.

1. Improve Personal, Population and Planetary Health Concurrently IP3H are the co-attractors and drivers for cultivating healthy cultures.
2. Why Leaders Fail to Lead The greatest psychological barriers to IP3H are the constraints and mal-alignment of leadership mindsets.
3. Opening Leadership Mindsets to Systems, Design and Complexity Thinking are anecdotes to the limitations of reductionistic thinking, randomized controlled trials and evidence-based medicine. 
4. How Leaders Can Catalyze Transformation We need our educational leaders to develop age-appropriate lifestyle curricula and learning platforms for all children and adults with the vision of building the network power to launch the IP3H movement.
5. Design Peer Health Innovation Hubs and Ecosystems To reverse health inequities, the epidemics of unhealthy habits, the mounting burdens of chronic diseases and the demise of our planet, we need to design peer health innovation (PHI) hubs that create scalable coaching, learning and support innovations (such as health coach buddies) to IP3H.
6. Go Beyond Surface Change to Deep Change Changing unhealthy habits frequently fail because we only address surface change. To go beyond the limitations of surface change, we can learn how to explore, understand and make deep change.
7. Become More Self-aware of Open and Closed-mindedness To launch the IP3H movement, leaders must deepen their understanding and educate people about how the dynamics between open and closed mindedness affects our progress to IP3H.

Personal transformation facilitates systemic transformation

Leaders lead with their personal transformation.

1. Get a Health Coach Buddy (HCB) to Make Deep Change Working together with a HCB, you will learn how develop your own personal evidence about making deep change that overcomes the limitations of evidence-based guidelines.

2. Use the Health Coach Buddy Principles Five principles enable health coach buddies to collaborate and learn more effectively in working together.

3. Use the Health Coach Buddy Guidelines The guidelines provide peers with ideas about what not to say and what to say during their HCB sessions.

4. What does healthy well-being means to you? Healthy well-being is a dynamic lifelong learning process and not a static definition, like the WHO definition of health. 

5. and more to come