What is Wellness and Wellness Coaching?

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What is Wellness and Wellness CoachingWellness is a choice – a decision your client makes to move toward optimal health.

Wellness is a way of life – a lifestyle you design with your client to allow them to achieve their highest potential for well-being.

Wellness is a process – a developing awareness where there is no end point, but that health and happiness are possible in each moment, here and now.

Wellness is the integration of the body, mind, and spirit – the appreciation that everything your client does, thinks, feels and believes has an impact on your client’s state of health.

Wellness is your clients’ loving acceptance of themselves.

Wellness is a state of being, which is different for each individual. Wellness is achieved as each person reaches a healthy balance of a combination of things, including one’s physical, emotional, spiritual, vocational, intellectual, social and environmental health.

Wellness Coaching will be different for each individual as they work to achieve the highest level of wellness that is possible for them in each of these areas. For example, someone could be a marathon runner and have great physical health, yet because they spend so much time training, their relationships may be out of balance or perhaps they have no time to grow themselves intellectually. This person may not be totally well.

How can you help your client to achieve their highest state of wellness? By learning about each of the components of wellness, facilitating the growth of personal capabilities and individual strengths in each of the components to create the balance that is most beneficial to your client at this time in their life.

Wellness can also be best defined as a process. Life-long in duration, true wellness both promotes and supports a positive state of wellbeing. This includes optimal physical social and psychological functions.

Wellness also includes controlling both internal and external risk factors that contribute to or lead to diseases and negative health conditions. Since wellness is more of a process than a goal, in the end, the client essentially ends up feeling good about themselves. One key responsibility of the coach is to integrate mind, body, and spirit where the client is concerned.

Your client base will always be reflective of how health tends to move along a continuum from optimal health toward premature death. Your client’s position along this continuum will always be changing and in a state of flux and will be affected by multiple factors.

As a wellness coach, you will work with clients on everything from physical health, activity levels, nutritional patterns, personal demands, career goals, seasonal factors, and effective stress management. This is not an all-inclusive list but demonstrates the broad range of knowledge that is needed to be a wellness coach.

It’s important for the coach to understand that wellness and good health has more to do with attitude, adaptations, acceptance and overall lifestyles, than anything that medicine or health care provides. Ideally, we would like our client to know this, too. Therein lies the beginning of your understanding of what you face upon coaching different types of clients with different needs.

The position of your client along this continuum is determined by the activities they pursue and the client’s attitudes towards these activities. It’s important to also understand that these activities and attitudes coming from within the client can prevent illness and encourage or promote health, while at the same time, are capable of negatively affecting the client’s peace of mind or their physical well-being.

Because your client behaviors could be viewed as intrinsic to their health, they will also have to learn to assume personal responsibility for their health by developing the skills to be well and to acquire the knowledge to improve their wellness.

The educational aspect of wellness coaching is based upon empowering the client. In most modern, developed countries, the general population has taken an increased interest in their health care in ways that allow them to be involved in decision-making. This is in sharp contrast to the passive participation seen from clients in the past when medical approaches to wellness were more likely to be used.

More people have been encouraged to become involved and active in their healthcare and have begun to take control of some of the risk factors that threaten their wellness. But sometimes, your client will need help. They then look to you to be a managing partner while allowing them to take personal responsibility for their own wellness.

Your Wellness Coaching Career

Becoming a Certified Wellness Coach is the perfect addition for the fitness professional who wants to offer more all-inclusive wellness services to clients.  The time is now for you to enjoy this exciting and rewarding career, which offers you personal fulfillment while improving the lives of others.

Already started your Wellness Coaching Career? Learn more about becoming a Certified Corporate Wellness Coach. This niche market is exploding with opportunity!

Spencer Institute certification programs are open to anyone with a desire to learn and help others. There are no prerequisites.

That’s it for now.

Take action!

NESTA | Spencer Institute

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