What is health and wellness coaching?
Health and Wellness Coaching (HWC) uses principles of behavior change to help you envision your best and healthiest self and to make empowered choices to turn that vision into reality. Maybe you want to improve your relationships, or lose weight, but every time you make some progress in these areas, you end up sliding right back to your old ways and feel stuck. Maybe you want to change careers, but you experience anxiety just thinking about the process and have no idea what first steps to take. That’s where coaching comes in.
The following are areas that Health & Wellness Coaches can help you address:
- Weight management: create and live a balanced and sustainable life
- Life satisfaction: find meaning and live out your purpose in all aspects of life
- Stress management: build strategies for resilience, calm and emotional well-being
- Chronic disease: prevent or reverse chronic disease with lifestyle changes you pick at a pace that is comfortable and realistic for you
- Self care: learn to prioritize yourself and develop an personalized tool kit to keep you thriving, not just surviving, all of life’s challenges
- Change: navigate life transitions with ease, such as changing careers, dealing with grief and loss, becoming an empty-nester, or going through menopause and accepting your aging body
- Relationships: set boundaries and improve communication
- Sleep: gain energy and mental clarity, and even lose weight with better sleep
- Holistic care: achieve overall health by seeing how different areas are interconnected
- Mental Health: learn to notice early signs of anxiety and depression and use tools to handle it before it becomes problematic and severe
Who are health and wellness coaches?
The best trained coaches go to accredited schools to receive a certification from the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaching (NBHWC) which is a sister organization to the National Board of Medical Examiners. Academies that are approved by the NBHWC contain a curriculum that includes training not only in motivational interviewing, goal setting theory and psychology, but also different types of diets, nutrition, food preparation, functional medicine principles and understanding of chronic illness and autoimmune disease.
Many coaches come to this career with much empathy because they themselves have overcome difficult life and health changes, and yet are inspired because they have experienced how coaching for behavior change can radically improve wellbeing. They want to help others to do the same. They exist to form a partnership with you and empower you into action using evidence-based techniques that increase motivation for lasting change.
How is Lemonaid Health Coaching unique?
Our coaching program is strongly based in the empirical scientific principles and methods of Behavioral Medicine and Positive Psychology. We require that our coaches all have university degrees in addition to their coach training and board credentials. Our coaches start by assessing your stress, quality of life, goals, strengths and values – even if you’re not exactly sure how to put them into words. You and your coach will get clear on your vision of an ideal future and make a plan together to achieve that vision. Coaches use SMART goals which is a method for setting and tracking goals that have a higher probability of success and achievement. Our coaches will keep you accountable for meeting your SMART goals while also providing a safe place without judgment.
You’ll meet regularly with your coach, one-on-one, to make sure you’re staying on track with the plan you originally made. You’ll talk about what’s working and what you’re struggling with, or maybe whether some adjustments need to be made. The goal is eventually to have you self-empowered, maintaining consistent healthy habits and perhaps no longer needing a coach.
Coaches understand that often an individual’s health and wellness needs and goals go deeper than prescribing a new medication. Doctors and nurse practitioners alone cannot make the public healthier and cannot be solely responsible for fostering that motivation with their patients. If you are a member of the larger Lemonaid Health Service, then Coaches can use an integrated approach since we work closely with our medical providers if you have a particular health condition.
Our current program has specialty tracks that take very seriously the current struggles of our time, such as a pandemic fatigue and burnout, and the major mental and physical impacts of stress and anxiety of the past few years. To that end, we use a trauma-informed approach that promotes psychological resilience.
Lemonaid coaches will meet with you regularly over phone or video call, and you can also check in via secure messaging anytime you need to in between your regular meetings.
