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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Every Way to Make Money | Become a Health and Wellness Coach