What a Copenhagen health coach does in the first five minutes, and why the habits she helps people build are meant to outlast the coaching.
A man told Riikka Jalasvirta that he wanted to exercise more because he knew it would be good for his health. In his own words, he felt “too lazy to go to the gym”. She noticed the word “lazy”. “Do you enjoy going to the gym?” she asked him. He laughed and admitted, without hesitation, that he did not.
So she offered him a different approach. Instead of “exercise”, which she says can evoke “obligation, effort, performance, gyms, or the belief that you need to have the time for a formal workout”, she suggested “movement”: walking, stretching, dancing, cycling, gardening, taking the stairs, carrying heavy grocery bags. Then she asked what form of movement he enjoyed. “Running and cycling outdoors,” he said, “with a laugh and a smile that completely lit up his face.” Five minutes after calling himself lazy, he was asking her to help him make a plan.
Riikka has a figure for why the five minutes matter. A study in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2010 tracked how long a new daily behavior took to become automatic. On average it took 66 days for a behavior to reach 95 percent of its peak automaticity, the point where it needs minimal conscious effort or willpower. Most people quit long before that, she says, the classic case being the New Year’s resolution made on January 1 and dropped in the middle of the month. “Long-term habits require consistency and repetition for the brain to rewire its old neural pathways and form new ones.”
Riikka is a Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach and the founder of Infinnate Holistic Wellness in Copenhagen. She works with individuals one to one, with groups through workshops and classes, and with organizations that need help supporting their staff’s wellbeing. The gym conversation is what the work looks like at its smallest. “It’s often the simplest, most basic questions (that no one has probably ever asked them before!), which can help a client understand their own thoughts, beliefs, emotions, feelings, and behaviors,” she says.
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The Root Cause and the Whole Person
Riikka’s approach starts from a premise she states plainly: the mind and body are deeply connected. The coaching targets “the root cause of imbalance”, she says, and “considers the individual as a whole (mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually)”. Sustainable habit building is one component of that approach, and it is the one she thinks people most often lack.
“We now have access to all the knowledge in the world, but if you do not (know how to) integrate it and apply it in your everyday life, then it will be difficult to attain the desired results.”
Riikka Jalasvirta, MSc, IPHM, Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach, Infinnate Holistic Wellness
She has a sequence for how change begins, which she attributes to Dr. Joe Dispenza: thoughts lead to emotions, emotions to feelings, feelings to mood, mood to personality, and personality to personal reality. Her own example runs the chain downhill. “I’m not good enough” becomes anxiety, then feeling insecure, then persistent low mood, then “becoming a self-doubting person”, and finally “a personal reality where you avoid opportunities and reinforce the belief that you’re not capable”. The gym conversation ran it the other way, and it started with a word.
Alongside Dispenza she quotes Tony Robbins: “People are not lazy. They simply have goals that do not inspire them.” Her reading of it is the basis of the coaching. “If your goals do not align with, and inspire, you mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, then you will likely face setbacks to maintain them over the long-term,” she says. What that looks like over six or twelve weeks is written down.
Week One to Week Twelve
Long-term clients work with Riikka for six to twelve weeks, following a structure she publishes on her website and tailors to each person. Week one is a holistic wellness assessment, visioning and a roadmap, to establish a baseline of the client’s overall health and wellbeing and gain clarity on their goals. Week two is about the client’s internal environment: their thoughts, beliefs, emotions and feelings, and “how change begins in the mind”.
The middle weeks (three to five on the shorter program, three to eleven on the longer) go deep into whatever themes the goals call for. Her list: nutrition, movement, rest, stress, relaxation, detoxification, career and purpose, habits and productivity, relationships, and creativity, fun and leisure. The last week is maintenance planning, to solidify a long-term plan “so that their new wellness practices can continue beyond our coaching sessions together”.
Whether a client arrives burnt out or stuck in habits that aren’t working, the structure does not change. “I apply the same template, but tailor it to their specific context, needs, and goals,” she says. She knows it is working by something smaller than a result.
The First Signs
Her client testimonials sit on her website, from individuals and groups around the world. Asked for the evidence that the work lands, she describes a moment rather than a metric. “The evidence that the work lands is the moment that I witness the first signs of self-empowerment as it relates to their desired wellbeing goal(s),” she says. It might be a conversation that lets a client see that “their past no longer dictates their present or future choices and possibilities”, which she says often comes with “a profound silence, stillness, laugh of relief, tears of joy, or even tears of grief”. It might be a resource recommended in a session that gives someone the courage to start a new habit. Or a question that makes them look at a behavior “they have never even previously thought about”.
“When the client themself begins to connect mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually to their desired change, they are essentially embodying it, taking ownership of it, and becoming one with it.”
Riikka, Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach, Infinnate Holistic Wellness
Change pushed on someone from outside, she says, “rarely works because it undermines the individual’s own agency”. Those moments are “the starting point for clients to become empowered leaders of their own lives”. She learned how people work inside large organizations before she coached any of them one to one.
Twelve Years Inside Big Systems
In addition to Infinnate Holistic Wellness, which she founded in 2023, Riikka spent nearly 12 years in the public and private sectors, including the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations, and has lived across five countries. Her field there was occupational health, safety, environment and wellbeing, the work behind the line on her profile about “sustainable systems that prioritize people, protect the planet, and strengthen business performance”. She holds an MSc in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics and a BSc in Geography from UCL, where in 2011 she won the Ron Cooke Essay Prize for the best physical geography research paper of the year. She currently works in the hospitality sector alongside her coaching.
She counts two things from those years that a coach who has only worked one to one would not have. The first is range. The institutions put her alongside people “of all backgrounds, ages, and walks of life”, and as a coach working internationally that sensitivity is what lets her “tailor my sessions and meet the client where they are at. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.”
The second is first-hand experience of what modern workplaces ask of the people in them. Her list is specific: “high expectations, time pressures, extremely high workloads, limited resources for support mechanisms, high stress levels, burnout, difficult personalities, and much more.” She had to find her own way through them. “Having gone through these challenges myself is therefore an advantage when working with individual clients, groups, or organizations who are currently experiencing or have recently gone through the same situation,” she says. That experience is also the basis of her case to employers.
More Burnout Than Balance
“More burnout than balance, more resignation than retention” is how Riikka has described, in her posts, the organizations she wants to hear from. Her argument to them is a business one. People are an organization’s most valuable asset, she says, and “research continues to show that investing in their holistic health is a competitive advantage with a high ROI in today’s business landscape”. An organization that prioritizes its employees’ holistic health and takes active steps to reduce its environmental impact “often means good business over the long-term”, and she notes that investors now weigh both with stricter standards.
The scale of the problem she is describing is on the record. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that 40 percent of employees worldwide had experienced a lot of stress on the previous day. The McKinsey Health Institute, in a January 2025 report drawing on a survey of more than 30,000 employees in 30 countries, estimated that investing in employee health could create between 3.7 and 11.7 trillion dollars in global economic value, and found that a fifth of employees reported burnout symptoms.
What she offers organizations is the move beyond short-term “wellness perks” toward “a long-term culture of wellbeing”, as she has written, one that “addresses root causes of ill health, promotes good health, supports individuals, and creates healthier teams, jobs, and organizational environments”. The holistic approach itself came to her through family before it came through any institution.
A Mother, a Sister and a Book
Riikka’s mother and sister are both Certified Nutritional Therapists, and she says they “helped me see the value of taking a holistic approach to health”. Another powerful influence she names is Robin Sharma, the leadership author, whose book The 5 A.M. Club she found “deeply eye-opening, impactful”, giving her “an entirely new perspective on time management, productivity, finding balance between work and personal life, and how to protect your optimism, courage, passion, and life zest in a world that can easily zap it from every direction”. The line of his she keeps: “Small daily, seemingly insignificant, improvements, when done consistently over time, lead to STUNNING results.”
The year of the UCL prize is one she remembers for another reason. It was awarded four months before her father died of brain cancer. “Balancing my university studies and grief due to my terminally ill father was one of the most difficult times of my life,” she says. “And receiving this award at such a challenging time was a moment I will always remember with gratitude.”
Where Riikka Is Now
This autumn Riikka has been meeting people in person. She took a stand for Infinnate Holistic Wellness at International Citizen Days in Copenhagen in September and at Copenhagen Health Week in early October, offering short discovery consultations and talking to individuals and organizations about what a health coach does. She has just completed a Yin Yoga teacher training in Copenhagen and will start regular classes in the coming month or so. In 2024 she ran an eight-week in-person, dance-focused program, and she has run nutrition workshops online and in person.
Her own habit, the one a colleague would call very Riikka, is powerwalking: 30 to 90 minutes almost every day since January 2022, “regardless of where I am, the weather, how I feel, or how busy I am”. It needs no equipment, no particular place and no gym membership, “and helps me feel great mentally, emotionally, and physically, every time. And that is why I prioritize it.”
Outside the coaching she is a singer, under the name Ria, and has been collaborating with other artists on recordings. She does not treat it as separate. “Good health and wellbeing is not just about reducing and/or eliminating what doesn’t serve us,” she says. “It is equally important to incorporate more of the things into our life that we love to do, and which bring us infinite amounts of joy.” Music, for her, is “a means of expression, and a source of profound healing through the vibrations and frequencies of sound”.
Over the next twelve months she wants three kinds of reader to find this piece: individuals looking for a coach who works on root causes rather than symptoms, groups who want to change habits together, and organizations that need help supporting their staff’s wellbeing. Her line for what comes next, as she wants it quoted: “Help empower individuals, groups and organizations to supercharge their vitality using a holistic approach that addresses the whole person and the root causes of imbalance through time-tested foundations, including nutrition, lifestyle, natural remedies, and the mind-body connection.”
And the sentence she wants people to remember her by: “As a Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach, my goal is to help empower you to supercharge your vitality: faster, and with more ease, clarity, and confidence than I did over 20+ years.”
Five Reflections from Riikka
Notice the word. “Lazy” was a clue about his alignment with the gym, and the start of a different conversation.
Movement, not exercise. The wider word finds the stairs, the garden and the grocery bags.
Ask what they enjoy. The simplest questions are often the ones no one has asked them before.
Give it 66 days. A new habit takes consistency and repetition before it stops needing willpower.
Add joy, do not only subtract. Health is also more of the things you love to do.
From the Diary of Riikka Jalasvirta, MSc, IPHM
Riikka Jalasvirta is a Copenhagen-based Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach and the Founder of Infinnate Holistic Wellness.
| Role | Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach, Mind-Body Practitioner, and Founder, Infinnate Holistic Wellness |
| Member of | The International Institute for Complementary Therapists and the International Practitioners of Holistic Medicine |
| Based in | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Previously with | The public and private sectors, including the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations |
| Also with | The hospitality sector, currently |
“As a Certified Holistic Lifestyle and Nutrition Coach, my goal is to help empower you to supercharge your vitality: faster, and with more ease, clarity, and confidence than I did over 20+ years.”
Editor’s note
Executives Diary features Riikka Jalasvirta because her answers describe the coaching at the level of a single question. The five-minute conversation about the gym is her own account, and the twelve-week structure behind it is published and specific. Her twelve years in large public institutions give her organizational work a basis in what she has seen, not what she has read. The editors were convinced by how consistently she returns to the client’s own agency as the point of the work.
Executives Diary, Editorial
