What is Health and Wellness Coaching?
Health and wellness coaching is an evidence-based approach that involves a set of skills to empower people to tap into their own inner source of motivation to restore and preserve their health and well-being. It is a patient-centred, collaborative intervention whose primary aim is to help and support individuals seeking healthy lifestyle changes to achieve their goals under the supervision of a health and wellness coach.
Health and wellness coaching is a customised approach to identifying and planning your health goals, self-monitor behaviours to increase accountability, using self-discovery or active learning processes together with content education to work toward your goals, and providing supportive resources as you move toward achieving your goals in a manner that works best for you, all within the context of an interpersonal relationship with a coach.
In general, health and wellness coaching can assist you to achieve healthy habits in areas such as:
- Managing and reducing stress
- Motivation and work-life balance
- Eating habits
- Regular physical activity
- Sleep
- Reducing or quitting smoking
Who is a Health and Wellness Coach?
A health and wellness coach is a healthcare professional with diverse backgrounds and education who is trained in motivational strategies, communication techniques, and behaviour change theory to help patients obtain skills and develop intrinsic motivation to create sustainable change for improved health and well-being. A health and wellness coach works with individuals and groups in a client-centred process to facilitate and empower the client to achieve self-determined objectives related to health and wellness. Some of the diverse backgrounds that a health and wellness coach can come from include:
- Nurses
- Nutritionists and dieticians
- Exercise physiologists, and fitness professionals
- Allied health professionals
- Community health and social workers
- Corporate health and human resource personnel
- Health and safety officers
- Meditation and yoga teachers
- Counsellors and coaching practitioners
- Chefs and so on!
Besides, many are attracted to this profession as a vocation and are prepared to acquire the knowledge and health literacy necessary to practice in this job. It should also be noted that whereas it is a profession in its own right, it can also be used in existing professions as an additional treatment with lifestyle and functional medicine recognising the possible benefits of a coaching approach.
How Does Health and Wellness Coaching Work?
Health and wellness coaches work with clients to improve their vitality, health, and well-being by engaging in behaviours that have been proven to prevent diseases and improve health including stress coping, fitness, nutrition, weight loss, sleep, mind-body and positive psychology interventions. The result of health and wellness coaching has enhanced the capacity for sustainable lifestyle change. Many individuals struggle with something that is harming their well-being, such as excess weight, uncontrolled stress, poor life balance, poor fitness, insufficient levels of positive emotions, low energy, or a medical condition. They find it hard to engage and invest in their health and well-being to promote vitality and avoid preventable diseases. Coaches assist individuals to overcome these difficulties and struggles, and build resources like self-motivation, self-empathy, self-awareness, new insights and perspectives, mindfulness, optimism, resilience, and confidence, and make changes that last.
The main dimensions of the work of health and wellness coaches include:
- Facilitating the acquisition of lifestyle knowledge and skills
- Promoting the building of psychological resources that allow lasting change
- Enabling a holistic and personalised integration of multiple lifestyle areas
- Facilitating a process of change
- Connecting to other resources and professional experts as desired or needed
- Functioning as wellness role models
Summary
Health and wellness coaching can be a productive intervention to cope with some of the specific chronic lifestyle-associated conditions and possibly to improve various aspects of behavioural change connected with increased well-being. It encompasses everything a person requires to achieve holistic health and well-being of mind, body, and soul. A health coach partners with clients, motivating them with self-directed wellness techniques and allowing them to discover their unique path to mental and physical well-being.
