How PAM Life Coaches Support Users’ Mental Health

How dedicated coaching can take your mental fitness to the next level.

There are lots of things you can do to support and enhance your own mental health, like get into a meditation habit, improve your diet or establish an exercise routine. But one sure-fire way to strengthen your mental health is to treat it very much like a sport or skill, and with PAM Life dedicated coaching you can take your mental fitness up to the next level. Our coaches use a tried and tested method known as Motivational Interviewing, or MI, to drive people just like you to make positive changes in their lives.

You might have heard about MI being used to treat medical issues like diabetes, or perhaps resolve substance misuse, but don’t let that idea bog you down. You don’t have to be sick or struggling to reap the rewards of Motivational Interviewing. It’s just as commonly applied in some guise among friends, and in employee-manager relationships in the workplace. It’s a great way to discover and define personal motivation and mobilise action. It’s so successful a method of achieving results that we’ve adopted it as our main way to support users with their mental health. But how does it work?

For our coaches, empathy is vital. It’s very likely that in the course of a coaching journey, problems will come to the surface, generating anxiety and resistance to change. It’s important to us that we approach that sensitively, non-judgementally and with care. But there’s a key distinction that we make — we’re here to deliver accurate empathy. We have no interest in climbing down into the hole with you to wallow in a pit of anguish. Instead, we’re poised and ready to gain a genuine understanding of your situation and experiences, enabling us to elicit your motivations. This is very much a you-led process. Our coaches aren’t here to lecture or direct, rather listen deeply, understand clearly and guide you to conclusions you perhaps just hadn’t noticed yet.

Although we’re experts in coaching, we’re far from experts in, well, being you! It’s all well and good someone telling you that fresh morning air will lift your mood and an hour in the gym three times a week will boost your energy levels. But what if you work night shifts at a workplace a two hour commute away five days a week and have to drive out of town for extra-curricular activities with the kids on the weekend? Those recommendations, while true for some, in your case would be insincere and unhelpful. We’re not here to tell you you’re wrong and show you what we think is right. Instead, we’re here to guide you from a place of uncertainty to distilling your own purpose, motivation and drive.

Every year, a few days after Christmas, we see a raft of adverts denigrating plentiful plates over the holiday season and insisting that a worthwhile New Year’s resolution involves shedding those yule-tide pounds. For the first fortnight of the New Year, gyms are packed to the rafters, and then quickly those numbers dwindle as memberships are cancelled and habits wither. Rinse and repeat, year after year after year. A sales pitch, no matter how convincing, is unlikely to create sustainable change. Fortunately, our PAM Life wellness coaches are not salespeople. We’re an integrated network of experienced coaches with a recipe for success, ready to get in your corner and support you on your journey to better mental fitness.

There’s only so much we can reasonably say in a blog post. Remember, this isn’t about us, it’s about you! Start a trial and connect with a coach and let’s work out what we can do to help you take the first step to stronger mental health. And another step after that. It’s what we do best.