Coaching with Stefan
Health & Taking Back Agency
When you want to look after yourself differently — but you’re tired of starting, stopping and being told what you should do.
Perhaps you’ve told yourself you’ll start again on Monday.
You’ll eat differently. Move more. Sleep better. Slow down. Spend less time on your phone. Find some space for yourself.
And perhaps you’ve started before.
Sometimes it lasts. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes you push so hard that eventually you stop.
There is no shortage of people telling us what we should be doing with our health.
But perhaps the place to begin isn’t another set of instructions.
Perhaps it’s becoming curious about you.
Recognition before explanation
You might recognise…
- “I keep starting and stopping.”
- “I know what I should be doing. I just don't seem to keep doing it.”
- “I look after everybody else better than I look after myself.”
- “I don't feel as clear-headed or energetic as I used to.”
- “I've become so focused on how I look that I've stopped noticing how I feel.”
- “I want to exercise, but every time I start I push too hard and eventually give up.”
- “I'm getting older and I'm thinking differently about looking after myself.”
- “There are things about my health I can't control. I want to understand what I can influence.”
- “I'm tired of somebody else always telling me what I should do.”
You don’t need another person judging how well you’re doing.
Sometimes you need somewhere to understand your relationship with your own wellbeing.
A lived connection
For me, it started with how I looked.
As a teenager, I remember watching an episode of Keeping Up Appearances. Something about a character sitting watching television, eating jam tarts and becoming increasingly overweight stayed with me.
It made me reflect on how I had looked as a pre-teen.
I became more conscious of what I was eating.
As I grew and my eating habits changed, I lost weight.
It made me start paying attention.
Then health became something much more serious.
When I was entering my teens, my dad became seriously ill following an infection contracted after a routine hospital operation.
What followed were years of hospital visits, biopsies and long-term medical treatment.
Watching Dad live through that made me curious about health and the different ways people might support themselves alongside appropriate medical care.
It contributed to my later curiosity about massage, meditation, food and other approaches to wellbeing.
Watching my Dad taught me something I understand much better today: we cannot control everything that happens to our health.
But it left me curious about the things that might still be within our influence.
I became curious about how things made me feel.
I’ve been curious about food for much of my life.
Not simply:
Is this good for me or bad for me?
But:
How do I feel after eating this?
Why does something make me tired?
Why do I sometimes feel a high and then a low?
What seems to affect my energy?
For many years that curiosity didn’t lead to dramatic changes. I generally tried to eat a balanced diet and got on with life.
My curiosity also led me to experience and train in Indian Head Massage and Holistic Massage.
Meditation became important during the breakdown of my first marriage. At first, it simply gave me somewhere to quiet the many competing voices in my head.
These were things I explored, not medical treatments or expertise I offer to somebody else.
Eventually, I became tired of starting and stopping.
In my 50s, I wanted to find a way of showing up for myself regularly.
For years, the pattern had been familiar:
Start. Stop. Start. Stop.
Rather than pushing myself harder, I began looking at the rhythm of my whole day.
Sleep.
What happened before bed.
How I woke up.
Food.
Meditation and prayer.
Movement and exercise.
Technology.
How I felt before doing something and how I felt afterwards.
I began experimenting gradually with what seemed to work for me.
I called my own personal approach my Biological Reset Button.
It was simply a name for my experience, not a method or set of steps for anybody else.
It wasn’t about transforming the way I looked.
It was about finding a way to keep showing up for myself.
Something had changed.
When I was younger, appearance had been part of what made me think about health.
In my 50s, the measure became different.
I noticed how I felt when I looked after myself — and how I felt when I didn’t.
When my routines slip, I notice that I can feel more tired, less alert and less clear-headed. I can become snappier and lose some of my calm.
What brings me back isn’t primarily a mirror or a number on the scales.
It’s remembering the feeling.
The feeling after exercise.
The feeling after prayer or meditation.
The feeling of waking in the morning.
The feeling before bed after giving myself time to digest, step away from technology and unwind.
Looking good can still matter to me. But I’ve come to see it as a by-product of feeling good, rather than the reason I keep going.
How do I feel?
Taking agency doesn’t mean controlling everything.
Bodies change. Illness happens. Genetics, circumstances, accidents and things outside our control can affect us. Sometimes we need doctors, medication, treatment and professional support.
Taking a more active interest in our wellbeing doesn’t mean believing we can prevent or fix everything ourselves.
For me, it has increasingly meant becoming curious about the things I can influence while accepting that there are things I cannot.
What is within my influence — and what isn’t?
Your way of looking after yourself may look nothing like mine.
I’m not offering my diet, exercise routine, meditation practice or Biological Reset Button as the answer for somebody else.
Coaching here is a space to explore questions such as:
What does feeling well mean to me?
What do I notice about myself?
What keeps me starting and stopping?
What am I doing because I genuinely value it — and what am I doing because I think I should?
What happens when I push myself too hard?
What might showing up for myself look like?
What is within my influence?
These are invitations to notice, not a diagnosis or a plan somebody else chooses for you.
Coaching is not medical care.
This space does not replace a doctor, therapist, dietitian, physiotherapist or other appropriately qualified health professional, and I do not diagnose conditions or recommend medical treatment.
If something requires professional healthcare, coaching should sit alongside that care — not replace it.
A conversation first
Perhaps you don’t need to start again.
Perhaps you could begin by noticing where you are.
What feels good.
What doesn’t.
What keeps getting in the way.
What you’re trying to change.
And what looking after yourself might mean if it wasn’t measured only by how you look or how perfectly you follow a plan.
What would it mean to show up for yourself?
A conversation with Stefan. Just somewhere to begin saying what you are carrying and hear yourself think.
Nothing needs to be decided.