Wellness Coaching Overview
What is wellness?
Wellness is a holistic concept of health that is neither singular nor static. Most people have their own idea of what wellness means. Furthermore, that meaning changes over time, whether because of age, injury, circumstance, or life development.
However you may choose to define wellness at a given moment, it is important to recognize its three basic components:
What you think: your thoughts
What you do: your actions
What you feel: your emotions
Due to the individual and dynamic nature of wellness, one of our first objectives when working with together is to find a current and relevant definition of wellness for you. We’ll do this by looking at your strengths, interests, aspirations, values, priorities, etc., creating a wellness vision that captures the essence of what’s important to you!
Wellness represents a positive alignment between what you think, what you do, and what you feel
What is wellness coaching?
Wellness coaching is based on the principles of applied coaching psychology; an interdisciplinary approach that draws from a number of evidence-based theories, such as: cognitive-behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, positive psychology, and self-determination.
The “coach approach” is:
- Client-centric: What do you want?
- Future-focused: What do you want in the future?
- Action-based: What can you do?
- Deliberate/intentional: What will you do?
- Supportive: What can I do to help you succeed?
- Self-determination (Deci & Ryan)
- Positive psychology (Seligman, Peterson)
- Motivational interviewing (Miller & Rollnick)
- Transtheoretical model (Prochaska)
- Constructive development (Kegan & Lahey)
- Psychosocial development (Erickson)
- Multiple intelligences (Gardner)
- Emotional intelligence (Goleman)
- Attribution theory (Weiner)
- Flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi)
- Deliberate practice (Ericcson)
- Self-regulation (Bandura, Mischel)
- Personality modeling (Schwartz, Myers-Briggs)
Wellness coaching is an alternative or complement to traditional talk therapy in that the primary focus is on helping clients identify and practice specific behaviors connected to desired outcomes
Why work with a wellness coach?
Although there are countless specific reasons one may have for working with a wellness coach, these can all be boiled down to just two.
You want to:
Improve, do more of, or get better at something
Reduce, do less of, or prevent something
Almost anything can fall into one of these two categories, meaning there is no limit to what you can work on with a wellness coach!
- Improve discipline
- Improve concentration
- Improve mindfulness
- Improve self-esteem
- Improve social skills
- Improve resilience
- Improve physical activity
- Improve eating habits
- Improve organization
- Improve scheduling
- Reduce stress/anxiety
- Reduce screen time
- Reduce social media use
- Reduce distractions
- Reduce interpersonal conflicts
- Reduce emotional reactance
- Reduce dependance
Wellness coaching is ideal for those who are doing “well-enough” — in the gray area between ‘floundering’ and ‘flourishing’
