The battle is to implementing change in our workplace. It can be hard to make decisions that deliver real results. In a survey conducted by Aviva, 65% of employers said that they regonised that it is more important than ever to look after employees health. However, in many cases this view did not appear to be evidenced by action.

We argue that we should aim far beyond just being content with an absence of illness in the workplace as an optimal target for health and wellbeing. This is just the tip of the figurative iceberg (see fig 1). And whilst everyone can become ill from time to time, we believe that through coaching and education, everyone deserves to understand how to positively influence their health, wellbeing and daily physical performance using evidence based techniques.

This myriad of physical and mental symptoms can all be addressed through a process of coaching behaviour and integrating physical activity into our lifestyle. By respecting the natural resistance of our behaviour to change, we can design and implement a plan of action that will successfully modify our ‘bad’ habits long term. Failure to respect this will result in short term change at best and re-enforce a negative association with adjusting. We all have friends, relatives and colleagues who have tried have tried and failed on multiple occasions to change get healthy and ‘lose weight’, only to get some short term change and then yo-yo back to where they once were. It’s this ‘change everything at once’ approach that sets up the failure. Try this a few times and eventually that person won’t want to even start a new attempt for fear of failure.