So, you are passionate about helping patients to attain a better state of health. And you think you have what it takes to coach patients to have a better state of health and healthy wellness culture. Whether you are considering becoming a wellness coach or you have made up your mind already, you need some tools and the knowledge to go about it.

Read on to learn how to take the decisive steps to begin a journey of being a wellness coach.

Take a Wellness Coaching Training Course

Wellness Coaching Courses are designed to train the prospective expert coach to have the required skills to provide coaching service to patients. The course required to prepare you to become a wellness coach can be learned from a University, a Polytechnic, or through online portals like Udemy and Coursera.

You can use the training objectives as seen in the course prospectus of Georgetown University’s School of Continuous Studies are as follows:

• Study of the key concepts of Wellness Oriented Coaching
• The Psychology of Behaviour Change
• Fundamentals of the most common Health Challenges/Diseases

These should give you an idea of what the training covers.

As in many endeavors, you have the choice to specialize in specific wellness coaching aspects or you can choose a broader academic content that will provide more opportunities for work.

If you chose an online platform, you might have had the opportunity to learn the fundamentals, and next you should decide to have a certification.

Get a Certification to Qualify you to Practice

A certification in wellness serves as proof that you know what you’re doing. Having a certification will give you something to show to your future employers to consider you for employment.

Whether you’re considering the option of volunteering as a wellness coach or work privately, you will need certifications. If you’re considering starting a business around managing your wellness coaching services yourself, a posted academic achievement can create trust.

Patients that will need your service may need assurance that they’re talking to an actual professional that others trust too. And the training should help you

• Make people change by encouraging mindfulness with motivational skills.
• Know how to interview clients and help them to maintain optimal health after recovering from a poor health state.
• Know how to carry out health coaching sessions for individuals or groups
• Know how to manage personal relationships and have some knowledge of business management.

Preparing for certification can serve as a way to make you think about what to expect on the job as it makes you fully ready to start the job too.

Start Your Dream Job as a Wellness Coach

Knowing about the job and doing the job can be different worlds of experience. You can imagine that you will feel some pressure when you begin. Thankfully, you’re not working as a doctor in an internship where things are more complicated.

Just as intern surgeons need to grow in confidence before they can perform more difficult surgeries on their own, you should allow yourself to grow in greater experience on the job.

Building a portfolio of work experience with a bigger organization can help you soar in confidence if you decide to switch to run your service. Another good way to prepare for a real-world job is to read plenty of case studies in course materials.

Conclusion

In summary, if you want to know how to become a wellness coach, it means you love people and you genuinely want to help them promote their health. Then, you have to have the skills to help you become a good coach.

Get the proof to show doubters that you have the skills and then start helping people to be healthier by working in a job for another organization or in a business that you own.

Health and wellness are often used together and maybe sometimes interchangeably. However, there are slight differences between health and wellness. In this article, we will discuss some of the differences between health and wellness. So, read on to know what it means to be healthy and what wellness entails.

What is Health and the Wellness Difference?

Health is defined as the state of being free from illness or injury. Also, health is that which describes a person’s mental or physical condition. So, one can be in good health, we say that the person is healthy. Or when someone has a poor or bad health condition, we say they are sick.

Health can be local or global and there might be times when someone may not know that their health is already deteriorating. For instance, someone might say they are healthy but the doctors may discover worrying issues with an internal body organ. In some cases, health can be reported based on a local part of the body.

Sociologists have observed some problems with the definition of health which is why there are slight differences in the definitions. The Constitution of the World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.” The constitution further restates the notion of the complexity of definition based on the presence and absence of diseases.

The position of the World Health Organization people tends to lean towards the idea of accepting that health definition cannot be complete. Therefore, there should be attention to the promotion of health. In effect, this leads to placing value on total wellbeing rather than the mere absence of disease.

A broad perspective on health often leads to the subject of wellness.

What is Wellness and the Difference from Health Definitions?

The World Health Organization defines wellness as the “optimal state of health of individuals and groups.”  

The definition further explains that “there are two focal concerns: the realization of the fullest potential of an individual physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually, and economically, and the fulfillment of one’s roles and expectations in the family, community, place of worship, and other settings.”

Wellness definitions are not without criticisms as well but have less of it compared to the definition of health.

The key difference between health and wellness is that in defining health the focus is on the state or condition, whereas, wellness entails the processes and ways to enhance good health and maintaining wellbeing.

Wellness tends to move a step higher from the notion of subjective definition of health to a more objective one. While discussing health and ways of maintaining health need to include promoting a healthy lifestyle, wellness already encompasses these steps and the processes as the main content of its definition.

Conclusion

In discussing health, it is best to follow the wellness approach to ensure that you attain the optimal state of health. After all, there is a world view that prevention is better than cure. And the wellness approach to healthy living best addresses ways to enhance wellbeing and or prevent a bad state of health.

The relationship we have with people and the pattern we interact or converse with people is referred to as social wellness. Social wellness relatively has to do with the nurturing of a healthy and supportive relationship with others. Having genuine connections with others in society through our conscious actions is important in creating a balance in our social lives.

From when we were born, our early relationship foundation aids us to learn and live and relate well with others in our communities.

Some qualities are inherent but we learn how to interact with others as well as how to express ourselves and carry out different healthy habits that qualify us to be important members of society.

Tips on How to Cultivate Behaviors that Promote Social Wellness

Make it a habit to care for you (self-care).

There is a common saying stating that you can’t give what you don’t have. Taking proper care of yourself embraces some basic needs like having enough sleep. Doing things like mouth washing, engaging in exercises regularly to keep fit, bathing as well as avoiding activities like smoking and over-drinking shows a high level of social wellness habits.

Seeking skills to manage stress through enjoyable activities that are self-soothing helps in maintaining an active social living.

Nurture and Rekindle Healthy Relationships

We all get caught up in different challenges of life and as no one is perfect, we sometimes fail to maintain good relationships. The good relationships we keep provide that much-needed support when we are faced with different challenges. In the face of challenges, we know a friend in need is a friend indeed.

Maintaining healthy relationships with friends who love and accept us for who we are is important for our social wellness.

Practice Self-appreciation and Appreciate Others as well

Society needs more positive energy than negative energy as this keeps every individual happy, healthier, and more hopeful.

On a more consistent basis, we should encourage and appreciate the positive attributes we possess and also learn to appreciate and compliment others we care about and feel comfortable with when they are around us. This simple act goes a long way in fostering a healthy social life.

Connect with others

Our social connections might help to protect our health as well as prolong our lifespan on earth. Research has been able to show that the links we create with others be it our family, friends, neighbors, our romantic partners can have effects on our health. Hence, looking for ways to get entangled with others is deemed a necessary tool that enhances social wellness.

The pathway to social wellness

The route to social wellness is one we can discover by ourselves and it gives us the power to promote our relationships with others. By doing this, we are allowed to learn empathy for others and cultivate active listening skills. You can begin your journey by doing the following

• Joining a club or organization
• Practicing self-disclosure
• Keeping touch with supportive friends and family
• Practice self-reflection of your social needs. What are the things you enjoy doing? What part would you want to improve on?

Conclusion

The kind of relation we promote plays a huge role in the way we experience the world hence the need to foster a healthy relationship for better social living.

Good health cannot be compromised if you must realize a happy and successful lifestyle. Whether it be in your workplace, or at any level of living. Whether you work from home, or you have retired from work or you’re focussing on taking care of your family, having a healthy culture can help you to have a more fulfilled life.

Here are 6 tips you can follow to help you build a culture of health.

Use Technological tools to help you aid, track, and enhance your healthy lifestyle development

These days smartphones and wearable devices are being used in tracking and managing health information. New applications are being designed to ensure that medical attention reaches patients faster.

Technology can enhance your healthy lifestyle in useful ways and for some use cases, tech tools can be lifesaving.

An example tool is the Philips HeartStart Home AED Defibrillator, which can help save the life of someone with cardiac arrest at home if used within 5 minutes of the incident

Plan and Implement the Health Culture Strategy with Team Inclusion

When you work with the whole group, you create a sense of ownership and increase the rate of compliance with the plan agreed upon. As John C. Maxwell puts it in his book, teamwork makes the dream work.

It is a good leadership approach to have the team form a strategy that is a representation of what would work best for everyone in the group.

Assign Leaders within the Organization to Champion the Execution of the Accepted Strategy on Health Culture

The good health policy that you might have agreed upon for your organization may not yield the expected results without good leadership. Assigning roles and responsibilities will ensure that the implementation of health policies does not suffer.

The health club leader in your group should lead by example and can be a role model to group members. It will be easier for a true role model to influence positive group behavior towards the health culture you’re trying to create. But an “I don’t care” attitude might be the case if the leaders don’t care about wellness.

Invest or Save for Resources and or Equipment that will Aid the Ease of Implementation of your Personal or Organizational Health

Health is wealth! You cannot focus on work and other areas of your life without prioritizing healthfulness and healthy living. So, what can you do? At a personal level, you can start budgeting or save towards acquiring resources and tools.

Saving for emergencies can be a way to be ready if you’ll need to spend money on your health or that of your family member. Whereas an organizational strategy might be to demand regular health and fitness reports, you can make a personal commitment to checking your weight, or heart rate.

Also, be mindful that tools that you can use at home to get health information do not replace doctor’s examinations you might get from regular check-ups.

Be Practical and Goal Oriented

Build your health culture around the most important health problems or risk that your people might face. Whether you are working on a personal plan or group plan, it has to be focused on what is presently necessary to mitigate against or work towards enhancing your healthy lifestyle.

The overall approach should be designed to meet your goal. At best, if you should work from external frameworks, you can select the aspects that will fulfill the goals of your organization first.

Create Partnerships and Relationships that will Make your Gains Sustainable

On a personal level, partnership entails working with a sort of community health group approach to health as relates to present health challenges. Virtual groups that work on fitness together and creative conferences helped many people to look after aspects of their mental and physical health.

Your organizations can take advantage of the group spirit to gain offers and partnership deal with gyms or other health-related services. Useful relationships can help you make collective and individual health gains that will last for a longer-term.

Conclusion

The discussion on building a culture of health has mainly focussed on corporate health. However, a health culture should be a personal business that everyone should look after, as well as what should matter for groups and communities. Whatever thought is put into building a culture of health should be creative and aimed at promoting overall health.

Let us imagine for a second that wellness culture is a living entity that we can culture in a lab or plant that we can plant its seed in a field. Then we must nurse it or provide and maintain the conditions for it to grow and keep living.

This article will discuss how to create a wellness culture in one part and on the other part how to maintain wellness culture just like how to plant a tree and make a plant survive.

Creating a Wellness Culture

Identify the most important problem that can potentially undermine your wellness and take the bold step to fix it: This is like knowing which crop you want to plant and then actually getting the seed and you sow it.

Maybe you need to buy into a meditation program to clear your mind from emotional trauma or de-stress, or paying for a gym ticket to start your journey to build your strength or muscles.

Other concerns might be you need a massage to relax well, need to make new friends, or you might need to see a doctor for a general check-up. Notice that you need to make commitments or some form of investment to start.

At this stage, you know you have to overcome the hurdles of excuses or conditions that would have discouraged you from starting. Set core beliefs or ground rules that should guide you through the course you have chosen.

How to Maintain the Wellness Culture

So, you have started a program that you have determined will help you achieve your wellness goals, or you intend to begin one now. How do you ensure that the efforts you have invested in so far will last? What should keep you motivated to keep going?

Promise yourself that you will be motivated to do the actions for a longer-term

As you may know, the biggest challenge in maintaining the good gains you might have set your mind to make is a deviation from the plan. A lot of limiting factors stand in the way. These can be in various forms that you must overcome; tiredness, pain, and sometimes you stopping after small successes.

As long as you have set to do the actions for a relatively long timeframe, you would have a higher chance of turning your gains into habitual wellness culture that will last a lifetime.

Remind yourself of the Self-love mentality

If you convince yourself that you love yourself and you do, you’ll find that you’d always strive to complete processes that will fulfill your goals and benefit you or avoid what you ought to avoid.

Having a love for yourself will breed self-respect and trust in your ability to keep ridding your mind of negative energies that will stand in the way of you reaching your set goal. Just like you have to remove weeds from your crops to let them grow, you know how to remove the limiting factors against your wellness now.

Conclusion

As discussed in this article on creating and nurturing a wellness culture, you might have noticed that the place of affirmation and personal determination are important factors. You may be motivated to work well in a team to help you maintain your wellness culture too.