Ideal Partnerships

What happens so often is that we work so hard to build up our wealth, but we sacrifice our health during the process. We want to have both!

Today Let’s Dive Into Ideal Partnerships.

There are all sorts of ideal partnerships in life, from romantic partnerships to business partnerships, sports partnerships, but have you ever thought about health partnerships before?

What I mean by health partnerships is that you take responsibility for your health and work with several practitioners. I know for many people, you are taught from childhood that you get sick, and you go to the doctor, and the doctor makes you better. It is not the doctor’s responsibility to make you better. You need to work in partnership with your doctor and take responsibility and not give up all your power, and not put all that responsibility on your doctor.

What is even better is that you don’t have to wait until you get sick to go to the doctor, but you do need to actually step into taking responsibility for your health and do as much as you can so that you do not get sick and don’t have to go see your doctor as often. You should still  see your doctor to be running your labs every year, but you don’t have to go as often because you are not getting sick because you are taking preventative action.

How Do We Start Taking Responsibility For Our Health?

By learning how to be in partnership with your doctor, or with someone like myself, a health coach and healing practitioner, or other healers that you have in your circle. This way you have several people in your life all working together to help you be healthier. When you do this, not only can you optimize your health, but you can also go out and do the things that you want, because you wake up feeling energized, and that energy lasts throughout the entire day. You no longer have any brain fog, you don’t have joint pain, you’re not needing an afternoon nap.

How amazing is that?? To be able do what you want, and get it all done in one day because you have that good energy, and you feel amazing!

However, when you have things going on with your health, it will be slowing you down. You’re not feeling as great. You have no energy, maybe you have joint pain, maybe you have stomach pain or gut issues going on, and all of that hinders your ability to be able to focus and get everything done, because your mind is elsewhere, especially when you have issues because of the gut and brain connection. That can cause brain fog, headaches, etc. etc.

When we take the attitude that our health is our greatest asset, and we treat it like any other asset, our house for example, we take the garbage out, we vacuum, we clean, and we fix things. Another example is with our cars, we service it, we get oil changes etc. etc. Your body is equally important as your car and your house. When you treat your body as such an important asset, and you look after it, and you do that in partnership with people that can guide you, so that you do not have to learn everything on your own, that health partnership will allow you to live your best life.

Are you here to live your best life? Is your health worth that to you? It should be!

How Do We Leverage Our Partnerships?

Let’s talk about how leveraging partnerships improves your chances of achieving your goals for so many reasons!

Whether your goal is to be losing weight, or your goal is to optimize your health for longevity, the reality is that in the world today the average North American spends about ten years at the end of their life in a nursing home. That is no longer a quality of life. Ten years is a long time! What if you could have those ten years back and live those years fully by not having to be in that nursing home?

Well, that is where health partnerships get you there. If you want to have those ten years back, like I do, then keep reading this article. If you know of others who are wanting the same thing, please feel free to share this article with them. For some people they may not have thought about having a health partnership, and be proactive in their health, and taking those ten years back. People may not realize that the average person is spending ten years in a nursing home.

With partnerships you have:

• Increased accountability
• Support – as you aren’t alone, trying to figure out the path for yourself. With support you will feel supported and relax along your health journey.
• More ease, you are using less effort, you’ll feel inspired to stick with your protocol / program that you have. With a health partnership you are more able to ask questions along the way, compared to just dealing with your doctor. You can ask more questions, do check-ins, to reach out when maybe you are having a bad day and you need a little extra support. Our medical industry is so overwhelmed that our mainstream medical doctors do not have the time to do that for you, but that is the role I provide, and other health coaches and integrative health practitioners offer. We are here to connect and support you in between doctor’s visits.
• Access to more resources, including a larger network of people who know people that can help you.

For example, when you work with me, and are on some prescription medications that you want to come off,  I cannot guide you in coming off those drugs, because I am not trained in doing that. However, I have a colleague who is a Concierge Pharmacist, her name is Dr. Melissa Balizan. So, I would refer you to work with her, so that she can guide you through that process of weaning off those prescription drugs. Then we would work together to make recommendations for you on natural remedies that you can be using that have far fewer side effects.

If you have an addiction, I’ll refer you to my addictions Master Coach, Tricia Parido. Addictions is not something I have worked with. I have worked with clients who have addictions and I have referred them to Tricia. She is fabulous and this is her area of expertise.

No one of us can know everything. There is just too much information in the world for anyone of us to know everything. We all have our specialties.

I have built a network of other healers around me so that when I have clients that need something that I cannot offer, I know who to refer you to.

If you have kids, are you are struggling with their behaviours, or are they struggling in school, I can run the lab tests to find out if they are deficient in vitamins, and minerals. They might have imbalances in their gut, there may be food sensitivities involved. The labs I run can help us figure out if any of that is involved on the nutritional side of things, but I will also be referring you to my colleague Jaci FInneman, of No Problem Parenting. I call her the “Child Whisperer” because she is fabulous with working with parents in improving relationships and communication with their children. Parenting doesn’t have to be a battle, instead it can be a joy.

Are you healing from breast cancer and need some support and community of others who have gone through it, I’ll refer you to my colleagues at The Breast Connection. I was instrumental in bringing those four women together, and in late 2021 they formed a group called The Breast Connection, and they help support people going through Breast Cancer. Three out of the four ladies have gone through breast cancer themselves, each one has their own story to tell, and one of them is a massage therapist, who has also written “The Mastectomy Guide”, because as a massage therapist she was seeing so many patients who had mastectomies, and there were no resources or support for them.

As an integrative health practitioner, I cannot work with cancer patients without the consent of their oncologist, but I can refer them to The Breast Connection and to that community for support.

How To Get To The Root Cause Of Your Symptoms.

Now if you are wanting to get to the root cause of your symptoms and truly understand what is going on with your body, I can run lab tests for you and provide a wellness protocol that you can share with your doctor. By bringing your doctor into the partnership they will have information from those labs, which they don’t typically run, or have access to, and then you would continue to see your doctor for regular blood work etc. etc. Now you have a nice, well-rounded look at exactly what is going on inside your body.

Your doctor uses their blood work to look for disease, look for anything that is out of range that they need to be helping you with. They can diagnose disease or “illness”. I don’t diagnose anything. I am simply looking for the deficiencies and imbalances in your body that are showing up on the tests that I run. When we understand that, we know how to support the body in coming back into balance. Once your body has come back into balance it will heal itself. That is what the body is supposed to do.

However, our modern world has us getting out of balance, because of high stress, poor sleep, poor nutrition, and then the body is too deficient to be able to bring itself back into balance. When we understand those deficiencies, we can help your body come back into balance, and then our body will heal itself.

Another area where partnerships are powerful is in situations where your doctor is suggesting you lose weight, or change your diet, or do more exercise, or get more sleep, or lower your stress, but you have no idea how to start, that is where I can partner with you and your doctor and form an ideal partnership for you. As I said earlier, your doctor is probably run off their feet, and they are limited to 15 minute appointments, so they can tell you what to do, but they don’t have the time to teach you how to get started, help you change your habits, or provide you recipes.  I can do that for you and that is how medical doctors and integrative health practitioners can collaborate in partnership with you, to ensure your results.

In addition to that, you have greater access to more information when you work in partnership. It helps get you out of the “tunnel vision” mode. You know how it is when we are working by ourselves, or thinking by ourselves, we are kind of in a silo and we are not necessarily thinking of all the possibilities or solutions. When you work in partnership with others that just opens another world of possibilities that you may not have known. You cannot possibly know everything. You have your area of expertise, and I have mine, and your medical doctor has theirs. When we bring all of that together that is when we can open up more possibilities and choices for you.

What Else Can Having a Partnership Help With?

Working in partnerships also create the ability to save money as you get to the root cause more quickly and resolve it. While you might think this is costing a lot of money right now,  if you can resolve the issue quickly and get back to feeling amazing again, then you can get back to living, making more money for yourself as opposed to dragging it out,  while you feel crappy for longer. Without a partnership you are looking for solutions all over the place, here and there, and you’re trying to figure it all out on your own, when in the end you are spending more money and more time trying to resolve your health issues to which you may or may not get the answers you need. It’s not just about the money but also about the time, and what is your time worth to you? Do you want to be spending your time being miserable or do you want to spend your time doing things you love?

When you work in partnership you become a higher level of value to your family and community because you have increased resources to draw upon. If you have loved ones who are having health issues and you have gone through them, and worked in partnership, now you can refer people to healers that you have met, to your family and friends.  Plus, you have learned a lot along the way, so you may have some resources, remedies, suggestions, recipes or whatever that is based on your experience that you can share with them as well.

Partnerships can be looked at in another way too – the idea of focusing on your physical health, mental health, and mindset all in partnership is perhaps a relatively new concept, but an important one to discuss. Your mental health is impacted by your physical health. Just as your physical health is impacted by your mental health.

How Does Your Mental Health Impact Your Physical Health?

The thoughts that you have, and where we put our focus, amplifies. When we are living in a fear based state, that causes stress, and stress causes our immune system to be shut down and grow weaker. That can play havoc on our gut health, on our sleep, and more. 90% of all doctors’ visits are related to stress.

We used to be told that if your mother and your grandmother had breast cancer, you’d get breast cancer too. However, we now know that isn’t true, and that is due to the science of epigenetics, which is new science in the last 10 years. What we know to be true today, is that our genes, are only 5 to 10 percent of the equation. The other 90 to 95 percent of the equation is in the environment we create inside our body. It is created by the food we put into our bodies, toxins that are getting in, what we are drinking, the lack of things we are putting in, and if our diet is nutrient deficient, not getting enough Omega 3s, (our anti-inflammatory essential fatty acid). We could have inflammation going on. All these things are impacting the health on the inside of our body which we never stop and think about. Yet 90 to 95 percent of our health outcomes are impacted by the environment we create inside our body through our lifestyle factors.

Now that is actually really powerful as that means you have a lot of control over your health outcome. What it also means is that it isn’t necessarily true that just because your grandmother and your mother had breast cancer, that you will get breast cancer as well. You can choose how to create an environment inside your body where that cancer cannot grow, and where inflammation levels are at normal levels, versus chronic levels so the inflammation doesn’t trigger cells to turn on your genes  that are pre-disposed to that breast cancer.

With this knowledge you are literally in the driver’s seat. We didn’t know that before, and we thought it was hereditary, and we thought it was all based on genes alone. We heard repeatedly growing up that if your sister, your mother, or your grandmother had breast cancer you would get it to, and all that did was play havoc with our mental health, because where we put our thoughts matters. When we are living in that fear of those thoughts every day running in the back of our minds “I’m going to get breast cancer. I’m going to get breast cancer.” That is going to eventually cause that breast cancer to happen.

We can manifest positivity in our life with our thoughts, just as we can manifest things, we don’t want by dwelling on them. This is a very important message! Just because someone else in your family had certain illnesses, doesn’t mean you are going to get them.

You can choose to change your thoughts “I am not going to get that because I choose to take proactive action with my health and learn how to do that.” That is the thought process that you want to have. That is empowering! That is freeing!

Our thoughts really do matter, and on a simpler notion you have probably heard someone say, “I always have bad luck.” Well guess what? If you keep telling yourself, “I always have bad luck”, that is what you are going to make happen because you keep focusing on that.  If you switch that around and start telling yourself “I always have good luck.” You can then start to see what happens.

I honestly do not even like saying these words out loud, because I don’t want to be planting them into my mind. So, I will be talking to myself after I finish writing this article that “I have good luck. I have good health. Etc. etc.” By creating awareness around the thoughts you are having, you notice yourself saying something negative that you don’t want to have happen, that you don’t want to dwell on, you can just say “Cancel, cancel, cancel!” Then you can reframe it into something positive. It can take a little bit of practice, because first we have to become aware of our thoughts. We must notice how we are talking to ourselves. What are we saying to ourselves every single day? Start to pay attention and catch those negative thoughts that are making you make things happen that you don’t want to happen. Then we need to work on changing those thoughts to positive things that you do want to have happen.

Connection Between Our Physical Health, Mental Health, Mindset, and How We Talk To Ourselves

There is a very deep connection between our physical health, mental health, our mindset, and how we talk to ourselves. We need to look at all of this at the same time in partnership, and not treat them separately, because one impacts the other.

I mentioned earlier the gut and brain connection through the vagus nerve, if our gut is not healthy and not in balance then it is very hard for our mental health to be in balance. Serotonin and dopamine are made in our gut. In fact, 90% of serotonin is made in our gut. Serotonin and dopamine are ‘feel good’ neurotransmitters. If our gut is not in balance and working at optimal levels that means it cannot necessarily produce serotonin and dopamine at optimal levels, and therefore we are not feeling our best because we are not getting enough of our ‘feel good’ neurotransmitters. That can impact our mental health, and we then go to the doctor and tell him we are not feeling good, and we might come out with a prescription for an anti-depressant, or an anti-anxiety drug, an SSRI. The doctors haven’t had the time in 15 minutes to ask you more about what is going on in your life, and in your lifestyle, and understand how your lifestyle may be impacting your gut health. When we address the gut health, we can rebalance the gut before having to go on to a chemical treatment.

Let’s start with rebalancing our gut health, and in that process, we can improve and boost our mental health. Can you see how our gut and our mind are in partnership? We need to look at them both when we are working on our health.

Coming Up

In my next blog I will be sharing more with you on the importance of the partnership with your medical doctor, health coach, or integrative health practitioner, and why you need both in life as well as some questions that you can be asking your doctor. Sometimes we just don’t know what to ask, so I have put together a list to help you.

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