Monday's Message 3-08 Cancer and Coaching

Coaching for Cancer Patients

Physicians and their therapeutic staff are focused on treatment and side effects of that treatment to affect the best possible response. Often the cancer patient’s and their family’s mental, physical and spiritual distress is overlooked. For these people in distress, coaching offers major benefits, helping them cope with anxiety, stress and family decisions. Over 50% of cancer patients and their families experience some level of anxiety, stress and confusion. These conditions can adversely affect the family and the patient’s response to treatment and the amount of side effects they suffer. Coaching helps improve compliance with the difficult cancer treatment and cuts down on the patient’s anxiety and stress. Lack of family support or understanding of how to give support are major contributors to the anxiety.

How to make good decisions can be clouded in this whirlwind of treatment. Coaching can help remove barriers to receiving the best care and post treatment care. Coaching helps everyone to identify their core values and intentions and gives them tools to face this trauma with focus, clarity, ease and grace. Being able to be in coherence with your values and intentions in this time makes stress and anxieties melt away. Patients are often grieving the things they perceive they are losing and coaching can help people see what they have and have had.

The process of taking small sweet steps each day relieves anxiety and allows the patient and their family to focus on more immediate day to day concerns rather then the overwhelming negative picture they have.

After treatment, re-entry into the normal world can be fraught with pitfalls and a personal coach can help make this a soft landing. Nobody nor family lives through cancer and says their life hasn’t been changed. They are different people and need help in re-establishing relationships. Cancer patients become more compassionate and aware of other’s problems. They get out of unhealthy jobs and relationships. They discover they have another chance at life and they want
to live it as happily as they can. A coach can do this with you.

Happy Living