Wellness Coach Certeficate

Who is the wellness coach?

You can help people achieve their goals.

Just as a sports coach can help an athlete develop and excel at a sport, a health and wellness coach can help anyone excel at living their life, even — or especially — if they have chronic medical conditions. The coaching process is similar to talk therapy in that it involves two people discussing ideas and issues, but it is different in that the person who is being coached is in the driver’s seat, creating their goals and the strategies on how to arrive at these goals.

People tend to hire health coaches to help them with a wide variety of health issues, such as weight loss, stress reduction, the management of chronic conditions, improving diet and exercise, tobacco cessation, addiction, adjusting to a life-altering health event, like a heart attack. There is an overlap between what a health coach does and what a life coach does. Still, a life coach’s domain is much broader and includes career issues, executive coaching, and professional effectiveness.

Coaches use motivational interviewing techniques

A key technique utilized by coaches is motivational interviewing, in which a coach asks open-ended questions intended to help the client elicit his or her own reasons for change. Instead of the doctor saying, “You need to lose weight,” a coach might ask, “How might your life be different if you lost the weight that you’ve been trying to lose?” The concept, which has been proven effective in many research studies, is that people who are changing for their own reasons, on their own terms, are far more likely to succeed when compared with someone telling them what to do — which is less motivating and is more likely to instill resistance to change.