Phases of Life Transitions Coaching

Dr. Sandra Schiff is the president of Health Mate, Inc., a business in Southeast Michigan that provides individuals with various consulting, training, and coaching services. Dr. Sandra Schiff has personally served as a Life Transitions Coach, a role designed to guide individuals through significant changes in their lives.

Life Transitions Coaching helps people establish and fulfill their life goals in more effective ways. The coaching process consists of three phases: Beginning, Creating, and Maintaining. It requires full commitment from the individuals seeking coaching and the coaches themselves. An individual must fully engage in the process by keeping scheduled appointments with the coach, setting weekly goals, and reporting progress.

Phase 1, the Beginning phase, establishes the transition the individual is currently making, taking into account opportunities, personal strengths, and potential challenges. This phase typically takes one to three sessions to complete and requires the individual to provide the coach with information about the transition, identify needs and values using tools provided by the coach, and establish initial goals pertaining to the transition.

Phase 2 is the Creating phase, which requires the individual to create a vision and plan and then begin carrying it out in daily life. This phase typically lasts one month to six months and asks the individual to explore options for the future, create a vision and mission statement, and come up with specific tasks for achieving the established goal. With the help of the coach, the individual creates both a long-term and a short-term plan for achieving goals during this phase.

The third phase, Maintaining, requires the individual to maintain the plans created in Phase 2. This involves planning tasks to complete between sessions, identifying successful completion of tasks, and planning for any obstacles. This phase lasts from one month to six or more months.

Cooking Vegetarian Meals for Everyone to Enjoy

Dr. Sandra Schiff, president of Health Mate, Inc., a company that provides individuals with various consulting, training, and coaching services, believes strongly in the importance of mental and physical health for all the individuals in a community. In addition to walking and biking regularly, Dr. Sandra Schiff loves to cook and maintains a vegetarian diet filled with creative recipes.

Vegetarian recipes can be satisfying and healthy for all types of eaters. Reducing meat in the diet reduces the consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, and vegetarian meals often provide a greater amount of dietary fiber and other important vitamins and minerals. Although it may seem challenging to some, a few helpful guidelines can make vegetarian cooking an easy process for any experienced cook.

Balance is an important detail to take into consideration when cooking vegetarian meals. Creating a meal that combines the right amounts of protein and fiber leads to feeling satisfied without overeating. Combining foods of different flavors and textures in a vegetarian dish excites the palate. Another strategy for cooking savory vegetarian meals is adding chewy or crunchy foods like seared tofu or nuts. Because of the extra chewing involved, the meal feels more filling and can even mimic the chewing of meat.

Slow roasting vegetarian food improves the taste and flavor of meatless meals, as it reduces the amount of water in vegetables, which originally consist of 80 to 95 percent water. A vegetarian lasagna sauce made with slow-roasted tomatoes is a savory choice for those accustomed to ground beef lasagna. The inclusion of so-called umami ingredients, which are high in glutamate, also gives vegetarian meals an appealing taste without the use of meat. These ingredients include asparagus, tomatoes, and seaweed as well as soy foods like tofu and edamame.