Become a Health and Wellness Coach
By Eric Hammer
A health and wellness coach is one of those new age touchy
feely kind of jobs that is still somewhat ill defined. The job
is not nearly as formalized as becoming something like a dietitian,
which involves licensing and specific courses. Instead, health
and wellness coaches tend to be people who offer a variety of
pieces of advice without necessarily having any specific area
of expertise.
The idea is really simple. In our busy lives, we increasingly
need someone to talk to about how to live healthy lives. This
is not necessarily a dietitian who has a much narrower mandate
than a health and wellness coach. You will advise people on how
to use meditative practices to remain calm, when to sleep, how
to vacation and what it means in general to live well and healthily.
You’ll need to be someone who loves working with people
and who is genuinely empathetic in order to work in this field.
You should also be in good physical and emotional health yourself
in order to set a positive example for your clients.
How Much Can You Make?
Health and wellness coaches along with the related profession
of life coaches (more on that in a moment) are all the rage these
days. Therefore, if you hang out a shingle, you can expect people
to come to you for advice. Most health and wellness coaches seem
to be charging around $50-$75 per hour, though some do charge
less and some charge as much as $175 per hour. The amount you
make in a year will really depend entirely on how much work you
put into your business since you are in fact self employed.
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As previously noted, health and wellness coaching is closely
related to another new age trend, calling life coaching. Unlike
health and wellness coaches however, life coaches focus more
on a person’s spiritual well being and on helping their
clients to figure out what it is they want to do with their lives.
You can often roll life coaching into the field of health and
wellness coaching or it can also be a substitute to the field
(the advantage being that a life coach doesn’t necessarily
need to be in physical good shape – just emotional good
shape).
In all cases though, you can make extra money as a health
and wellness coach by giving seminars at local schools and community
centers where you offer broad, general advice to a group of people
rather than on a one on one basis as most health and wellness
coaches usually do.
Keep in mind also that you need to be a good listener as well
as a good speaker to do this job since you need to tailor individual
plans to your client’s needs.
Qualifications / Requirements
In most states, there are no formal requirements whatsoever
to become a health and wellness coach, which leads many charlatans
to hang out their shingle and take money for offering nothing
but common sense advice. That said, there are a number of schools
that teach the art of being a health and wellness coach and which
offer "certification" under their own brand of certification
for the job. There is also the National Wellness Institute that
accredits schools for this discipline, though their accreditation
has no government sanction of any kind.
First Steps
Start by reading more about being a health and wellness coach.
Take a course in the subject and understand how this works thoroughly.
Then, take a job working under an existing health and wellness
coach to learn the trade from the inside. Once you have done
that, you can strike out on your own.
Resources
International Coach Academy: Wellness Coaching
– One of the many schools available online to become a health
and wellness coach.
Coaches Training Blog: Wellness Coaching Careers
– This is an excellent resource to learn more about the
business of being a health and wellness coach.
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