Health Coaches Near Me

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FAQs:

What is a Health and Wellness Coach?

Health and wellness coach partner with clients seeking to enhance their well-being through self-directed, lasting changes, aligned with their values. In their work, health, and wellness coaches display unconditional positive regard for their clients and a belief in their capacity for change, honoring the fact that each client is an expert on their own life while ensuring that all interactions are respectful and non-judgmental.

What is Health Coaching? 

Health coaching is the use of evidence-based skillful conversation, clinical interventions, and strategies to actively and safely engage clients/patients in health behavior change. Health coaches are certified or credentialed to safely guide clients and patients who may have chronic conditions or those at moderate to high risk for chronic conditions.

What Does a Health Coach Do?

A health coach gets you “unstuck” by helping you figure out what’s keeping you from reaching your health goals. Your coach regularly checks in with you by email, phone calls, or in-person meetings, usually over the course of at least three months. During those conversations, a health coach asks questions to get you thinking about how you can overcome challenges.

The most common obstacle people face is their own thoughts about themselves and about change. Through motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, health coaches help people work through some of their thoughts. People find out what’s blocking them from following through with the changes they’d like to see.

What are the Responsibilities of a Health Coach?

A health coach is responsible for evaluating and improving clients' health and wellness. The responsibilities of a health coach include assessing clients' health, coaching clients on how to improve their health, and developing health care plans. As a health coach, you should have an optimistic disposition, good conflict-resolution skills, and possess the ability to effectively communicate. Ultimately, a top-notch health coach should be committed to improving the health of clients, exhibit good team working skills, and have self-confidence.

- Conduct initial consultations and evaluations of individuals.

- Providing guidelines to reduce or eliminate unhealthy behaviors.

- Developing and conducting seminars for clients and other employees.

- Developing health care plans tailored to each client's needs.

- Working with other health care providers.

- Supporting clients in their recovery or rehabilitation.

What's the Difference Between a Health Coach And Nutritionist?

While health coaches can specialize in nutrition, they have different roles and credentials than registered dietitians (RDs).

RDs are licensed and regulated by state licensing boards, for example, while certified health coaches operate under a different national board certification by the NBHWC. RDs can prescribe dietary interventions and recommend supplements, while health coaches cannot.

Both health coaches and nutritionists use action plans and motivations to achieve results, but they differ in their education and overall approach. For starters, a nutritionist is someone who typically has studied nutrition through a four-year degree program and offers advice specifically about nutrition. On the other hand, a certified health coach is more holistic and offers a much wider range of support. 

Though food does play a role, health coaches also consider lifestyle factors, such as movement and stress management. Ultimately, they help clients make small, sustainable shifts in their daily routines that both achieve the desired result and help them feel their best.

What’s the Difference Between a Health Coach and a Personal Trainer?

When you desire to live a healthy lifestyle, you normally seek the assistance of health coaches. Health coaches can help you make lifestyle changes by examining your overall health circumstances and then helping you determine the lifestyle that is ideal for you. This is typically accomplished through client-focused techniques such as long or frequent conversations between the coach and the client. While health coaches are concerned with holistic health, personal trainers are primarily concerned with physical health. They offer personalized advice and workout regimens to help you reach your fitness objectives. Personal trainers help improve your physical health by guiding you to become more active, fit, and strong. They are also the ones who assist you when you’re injured or need to undergo rehabilitation.

Is There Evidence that Coaching Works?

Coaching is effective for people managing a variety of health conditions. According to a recent study, coaching “results in clinically relevant improvements in multiple biomarker risk factors (including systolic and diastolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, fasting glucose, body weight, body mass index, waist circumference, and cardiorespiratory fitness) in diverse populations. Coaching has also helped improve health-related quality of life and reduced hospital admissions in patients with COPD. No wonder some doctors’ offices are offering it, some insurance companies are paying for it, and private companies are even starting to offer coaching to their employees to lower their healthcare costs.

Where Do Health Coaches Work?

A health coach can work in several different locations. They can be self-employed with their own coaching practice, meaning they’ve built their own business and roster of clients. These health coaches must spend some time attracting clients, either through self-promotion or being listed in a coaching directory. Health coaches can also work in clinics. Working alongside physicians, health coaches help support and facilitate the physicians’ orders for the patients. A health coach can also work for a company assisting with corporate wellness programs to develop employee well-being and health programs.

What Health Coaches Can Do to Improve Their Client’s Well-Being?

Here are health coaching techniques to use during and between sessions with their patients to improve their well-being. 

1. Providing information

This is perhaps one of the most used health coaching techniques to help improve a client’s well-being.

2. Providing support on their wellness journey

Just a reminder—it is the client’s wellness journey, not the coach’s. Clients get to choose what is important to them, if and when they feel right making changes, and how to best achieve those changes. 

3. Helping them to modify behaviors they want to change

Some behaviors have direct or indirect negative impacts on a person’s health and well-being. After getting to know your client, understanding why they came to you, and gaining an understanding of who they are and the context in which they live, you can work with your client to identify behaviors they are ready to modify or new behaviors they feel ready to adopt. 

4. Supporting them in trying things for the first time

For many of your clients, maybe trying something completely new for the first time, and getting out of their comfort zone may frighten them. As a health coach, an important role in supporting them in trying things for the first time like going on a walk with them or spotting them at the gym and many more.

How Much Does it Cost to Hire a Health Coach?

The cost to hire a health coach varies by region, specialty, and the way coaches structure their services. Usually, health coaches work at an hourly rate of $50 to $200. Newer coaches usually charge less than more experienced coaches. Those with experience, specialties, and additional certifications and/or licenses usually charge on the higher end of the spectrum. Many coaches offer package rates that include a specific program or offering that matches your ongoing needs, as well.

What is a Holistic Health Coach?

A holistic health coach uses an integrative approach to lifestyle, diet, and fitness changes to help clients achieve their health goals. Most importantly, holistic health coaches look beyond diet and exercise to evaluate and create an overarching plan based on a client’s psychological, spiritual, social, and physical goals.  

In a traditional medicine model, patients often see a series of specialists, each of whom may treat one specific symptom or issue. A holistic health coach takes a different approach. While a holistic health coach does not treat or diagnose, they can complement traditional medicine by creating a wellness plan for the whole person. The holistic approach honors the reality that the body is a complex and interconnected system of many parts that can benefit from sustainable client-led solutions.

In general, health and wellness coaches have the skills, training, and passion to help improve health outcomes by crafting personalized plans for their clients. Health and wellness coaching is an effective strategy for individuals battling obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Holistic health coaches, in particular, have many tools in their arsenal, including: 

1. The power of positive psychology: By focusing on a person’s strengths (not weaknesses) to encourage behavioral change, a holistic health coach can help a client maintain a positive and healthy mindset while working toward health goals. 

2. Skills to promote habit reversal: A holistic health coach encourages clients to make healthy choices to reverse bad habits and promote healthy eating, increase physical fitness, manage stress, get plenty of sleep, and more. 

3. The ability to motivate: By encouraging their clients to prioritize self-care, holistic health coaches help them visualize and work toward achieving their goals based on their unique experiences.

4. Supplemental services: Holistic health coaches also often take supplemental certification courses to provide other services, such as counseling, gut health support, nutrition support, yoga, healing touch, or reiki.

The Four Pillars of Health Coaching

1. Pillar one is Mindful Presence. 

Mindfulness is the process of focused, nonjudgmental awareness in the present moment,13 mindful presence than being the practice of mindfulness in relationship to another person, requiring intentional consciousness at multiple levels. This process requires regular practice of mindfulness by the practitioner to bring it into the therapeutic encounter.

2. Pillar two is Authentic Communication. 

This area draws from and builds upon communication frameworks such as motivational interviewing, appreciative inquiry, and nonviolent communication and synthesizes them into this cohesive summation with the following four aspects:

- Deep listening describes hearing what is being communicated through and between words, body language, and emotions. It involves the use of multiple ways of knowing for both coach and the client.

- Curious inquiry is a nonjudgmental practice of open-hearted exploration without goals or expectations.

- Perceptive reflections mirror the client and what is heard or perceived but the coach always checks the “truth” of the reflection with the client. This is an opportunity to offer observations and insights with empathy instead of pity, sympathy, or judgment.

- Silence is a critical and often unacknowledged aspect of impactful human communication. Practitioners need to be comfortable with silence themselves to be sensitive and responsive to the effective use of silence with a client.

3. Pillar three is Self-awareness. This is moment-to-moment mindfulness applied to the self—physically, mentally, and emotionally. To be clear with the client, a coach is required to be constantly aware of which feelings and reactions arise internally, so they can manage the responses they are having appropriately during the session and attend to any personal issues that need to be addressed outside of the session. This means a good health coach recurrently commits to a lifelong practice of personal development work using whatever tools, skills, and resources are necessary over time. In other words, health coaches must continually “walk their talk” with their own well-being to be effective in supporting and nurturing the well-being of others.

4. Pillar four is Safe and Sacred Space. The creation of an environment of safety, as it is perceived by the client, is critical for the development of a trusting, connected, and productive health coaching relationship. This is a variable and ever-changing issue, and what is required for the client to feel safe is relative to the time, the content, and the relationship. The coach always must have a fluid awareness of safety. The acknowledgment of the sacredness of the relationship and process, even if not spoken about to a client, brings in respect for every individual's innate capacity for growth through his or her higher self and allows for the mystery and miracles of healing that as humans we will never fully understand.

Principles of Health Coaching

Health coaching is a specific patient-centric process that has five basic principles as highlighted below:

1. Offering Self-Management Support

This is the most important aspect of a health coaching program as it entails health care outside the hospital setting. A health coach aims to train patients in seven areas of self-management support as enlisted below:

- Educating the patient through relevant information

- Educating with disease-specific expertise

- Encouraging healthy habits

- Communicating problem-solving proficiencies

- Helping in dealing with the emotional turmoil of chronic disease on the patient

- Assuring regular follow up

- Encouraging patients to be dynamic in self-care

2. Link Between Physician and Patient

On various occasions, there may be a loss of the expected close connection between the physician and patient due to a lack of proper communication. For instance, the physician may prescribe medications; however, the patient might miss one or more doses, which can affect the overall prognosis. A health coach acts as a link in such situations and closely monitors and operates within the challenges faced by the patients.

3. Facilitating the Patient to Steer Through the Health Care System

Many patients require a facilitator to consult and connect with in various health care services. A health coach can assist the patient during the whole process.

4. Emotional Support

Dealing with chronic conditions can be overwhelming for patients. A health coach develops a bond with the patients and provides much-needed emotional support to the patients.

5. Seeing patients regularly

A health coach regularly visits the patients and addresses their concerns. This time that is devoted to patients is typically more than most physicians can achieve in their regular clinical practice.

The Different Kinds of Coaches

Health Coach

A Health Coach provides a form of personalized care, meaning that the client has a choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered based on what matters to them and their individual strengths and needs.

Health & Wellness Coach / Wellness Coach

A Wellness Coach specifically enables you to achieve a positive mindset around health and well-being, empowering individuals to become an expert in how they react, interact, and move through life, understanding the factors that may disturb a state of homeostasis.  

Life Coach

a Life Coach helps the client clarify their goals, identify the obstacles that are currently holding them back, create strategies and positive action steps to overcome these obstacles, and create healthy habits for sustainable change.

Fitness Coach

A Fitness Coach is committing time to further understand the client’s goals in greater depth. They will create strategies to help overcome the client’s problems and identify any underlying issues that are preventing the client from achieving their goals. A Fitness Coach will be knowledgeable in the anatomy of the body and be able to positively identify physical issues caused by a person’s posture, movement, or even how they perform certain exercises.

Nutrition Coach

a Nutrition Coach can provide generalized advice according to the client’s goals. They will have a good understanding of nutrition and how certain types of food can affect the body. They can provide guidance, education, and accountability to their clients, like all types of coaches.

Mindfulness Coach

A mindfulness coach will help one practice mindfulness daily irrespective of whether they're going through joyful or challenging moments. They will help you build a satisfying practice of perspective, wisdom, kindness, and self-compassion.

Integrative Coach

An Integrative coach helps lead clients to achieve change and development in their lives.

The Types of Health Coaches

A Holistic Coach focuses on how the mind and body work together for better health. They look at what is getting you stuck on an emotional level. By finding the underlying causes of your health issues, they can help you unlock the path to comprehensive health solutions. For instance, a client may be having a hard time sticking to their diet because of emotional issues. You will gain awareness of unhealthy patterns. The client will get to dive deep into the emotions driving their behavior. Through self-awareness and emotional healing, the client can break through to healthier habits. 

A Wellness Coach works with clients to bring overall balance into every area of their lives.  Clients will find the areas that are most out of balance and work to achieve greater wellness.  These areas include social, physical, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, environmental, and occupational.

A Weight Loss Coach is committed to holding you accountable for your weight loss goals. They will help you lose weight and keep it off forever. They help clients experience a total transformation with mind, body, and spirit with support, accountability, and love.

A Nutrition Coach helps you learn what foods to eat to change habits to better control chronic conditions. This works for many health conditions including weight loss, anorexia & eating disorders, and Celiac disease. Crohn’s Disease, food allergies/intolerance, IBS, nutrition during pregnancy & lactation, vegetarian nutrition, and other health conditions. 

A Bodybuilding Coach can help you get your body in shape for your next competition. Many of Hollywood’s superstars work with a bodybuilding coach to get in shape for their movie roles. They also work with individuals to teach members how to live a sustainable lifestyle built around their specific and unique goals. 

A Cancer Coach helps clients learn to face the reality of their cancer diagnosis and make changes toward a healthy life and mindset. They will help you find resilience and to regain your power after a challenge in life. 

A Mindset Coach helps clients to overcome mindset blocks and transform their life and career. By looking at your limiting beliefs, they help clients move farther and faster than they ever thought possible. 

A Conception Coach helps anyone trying to conceive naturally and who wants to know more about identifying their fertile window and maximizing their chances of conceiving.

A Menopause coach helps women who are experiencing the symptoms of perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause. They help women navigate the physical, mental, and emotional shifts.

A Sex and Intimacy Coach helps couples to explore their desires, create greater intimacy, and let go of shame & stress. Sex coaches are trained professionals who help people with sexual, intimacy, and relationship issues. Sex coaches address problems such as sexless marriage, low libido, and sexual dysfunction.

A Fitness Coach helps you get active and be healthy. They help keep you accountable and moving forward in reaching health goals even in trying times like holidays!

Care Coordinators act as a middleman between the patient and the medical team to manage a patient’s care. They monitor and coordinate patients’ treatment plans, educate them about their condition, connect them with healthcare providers, and evaluate their progress.

A Stress Management Coach supports ease, flow, and productivity while reducing stress and anxiety. They can assist with work-related stress such as long massive responsibilities, work hours, competition, and economic pressures. On the personal side, they can assist with money, work, economic challenges, family, relationships, and health.

Corporate Wellness Coaches are brought into a facility or corporate office to help people either improve or maintain their health. Bringing in a corporate wellness coach offers huge benefits to the employer because it helps reduce the cost of healthcare as well as absenteeism, and they can positively contribute to performance and productivity.

A Diabetes Coach helps clients to overcome obstacles with cutting-edge nutrition and lifestyle changes so they can lose weight, stabilize blood sugar, and reclaim the time and energy to live full lives, on the least diabetic medication.  

Benefits Of Health Coaching

The benefit of health coaching is having someone in your corner to help you through it, and research shows it works. One study found that people who went through three months of health coaching significantly improved:

- Blood pressure.

- Cholesterol.

- Glucose (blood sugar).

- Triglycerides (blood fat).

- Body weight.

- Cardiovascular fitness

A health coach can help when you feel like nothing you’ve done on your own has worked. Or give you a boost if you’re feeling overwhelmed, discouraged, or like you don’t have enough time.

A health coach can help people see they have strengths they can use to start making changes. We help them see the possibilities based on their unique situation and abilities so that it’s simpler and easier to make sustainable changes.

A health coach also provides

- Accountability: Knowing that you have to check in with another person about your progress can give you the push you need to move forward.

- Encouragement: Health coaches act as cheerleaders to pick you up when you’re having a not-so-good day.

- Unconditional support: A health coach doesn’t judge your actions. They help you come to your own conclusions about what works and what doesn’t in reaching your goals.

Six Reasons Why You Need A Health Coach

A health coach can provide many layers of support that will ensure you are able to eliminate the confusion that comes with weeding through diet trends and health overhauls, to assist you in creating long-term sustainable change while keeping you on track if (or when) you lose hope, momentum, or focus.

Here are six reasons why you need a health coach.

1. Relief

Working with a health coach can quell these feelings of being defeated and frustrated and replace them with relief. Not only will you be led in an effective direction with where to focus your attention concerning your health, but you will also have someone cheering you on along the way.

2. Expertise

Health and wellness coaches are trained to look deeper into your health (often through scientific testing) than you or a personal trainer may know how to do. A wellness coach is essentially trained to be a detective when looking into your behaviors, chemistry, and lifestyle. 

3. Reflection

Working with a health coach can provide you with the space to see these challenging feelings and emotions as they arise as well as a supportive place to work through them gently and gracefully. As with any big transformation, having someone to reflect for you—from an objective perspective—can do wonders for creating more awareness and mindfulness within the landscape of your mind.

4. Accountability

When you share your health goals with someone, it inherently fuels your excitement to achieve what you want for your health—even amid the obstacles on your path. A health coach can provide consistent accountability. While all accountability is helpful, working with someone who is witnessing you every step of the way and is aware of both your habits and blind spots can do wonders for accelerating your success.

5. Time Management

A health and wellness coach will help you to create structure, and time blocks, and prioritize your highest needs within your schedule. Once you collectively move some things around, see where you are out of balance with your time management, review your priorities, and set some clear goals, your health coach will help you create an ideal schedule to work within to support your health (and life) goals.

Signs of a Good Health Coach

A good health coach always:

- Puts you in the driver’s seat to figure out what you want and how to make it happen, realistically, step-by-step.

- Respects you and your priorities without judging or pushing you to do things that don’t feel manageable or interesting.

- Helps you anticipate and overcome obstacles.

- Helps you identify solutions you may or may not have considered before.

- Guides you to build problem-solving systems you can apply, on your own, as new goals and challenges arise in the future.

What To Ask Potential Health Coaches About

 When seeking out a health coach to help you reach your goals, it’s important to ask detailed questions to determine if they will be a good fit for you. These questions should cover the following:

- Their general philosophy of coaching;

‌- Their prior successes, perhaps including testimonials from past clients;

-‌ Their education and certification;

-‌ How they plan to work with you in a way that complements and brings out your strengths;

-‌ Whether they have particular experience with what's troubling you;

-‌ How they work with health professionals, how they feel about Western versus alternative medicine, and how they approach problems that require an MD’s input.

How to Find the Right Health Coach Near Me

Finding the right coach is crucial, as you want to find someone who reflects your own personal goals, values, and life vision.

To have a good coaching relationship, it’s also great if you’re a personality match and you communicate well with each other. It’s important to be understood and to also understand how your coach is trying to help!

You can start with word-of-mouth recommendations. Reach out to your friends, family, or colleagues to see if they’ve worked with someone they loved. 

Check with your local wellness center, natural foods stores, or other health and wellness spaces to see if they have recommendations.

You can also check with your insurance company to see if they have some recommended coaches that might be covered by your insurance. You may also want to check that your chosen health coach has an insurance plan covering their business.

You can also hop online for quality recommendations in specialized coaching directories.

If you’re comfortable with the idea of working with a coach over the phone or via videoconferencing, you can also do searches online for coaches who specialize in something specific and who match your interests and goals exactly. 

Sources:

Sofia Health

NCCHWC

NBHWC

Wikipedia

Cleveland Clinic

MBG Health

Harvard Health Publishing

HWCC

Coursera

MITM

CNM

Zander Fryer

Chopra

AFPA

NPTI

BetterTeam

NIH

News Medical

Forbes Health

 

The content herein is provided for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Medical information changes constantly, and therefore the content on this website should not be assumed to be current, complete or exhaustive. Always seek the advice of your doctor before starting or changing treatment. If you think you may have a medical emergency, please call your doctor or 9-1-1 (in the United States) immediately.