Wellness Coaching, Essay Example

In this study conducted by Brice et al., individual wellness coaching support services were offered to 26 peer providers that worked within a vast array of community-based services related to health and wellness concerns. The purpose of this study was to provide wellness coaching to help peer providers manage and/or improve health lifestyles and habits in order to better people’s employment status and to thwart obstacles related to health that often impacts the tenure of peer provider employment (Brice et al. 42). Two challenges participants reported included physical and emotional burdens pertaining to working as peer providers such as paperwork—completing progress notes electronically–and having to drive for face-to-face contacts, which was cumbersome especially when the drive was quite long. The stress of these various challenges periodically impacted the participant’s physical health status despite the fact that they are not the central concerns of wellness coaching.

One of the sample goals in this study is improving diet and nutrition in order to enhance human health. This goal is measurable as the client with this sample goal vows to lose five pounds per month over a three month period by consuming vegetables at least three times a week in addition to going on twenty minute walks at least two days a week (Brice et al. 43). Quantifying sample goals enables the participant to measure whether or not diet and nutrition spawns beneficial results with regards to human health.

After business school, she worked for large, multi-national companies such as Pepsico. She also owned her own business in the jewelry business. She experienced her first episode not as early on as most people do. At the age of 35, she was highly suicidal and she had actually attempted suicide. In the Japanese culture, suicide was an honorable way to die, so death was not scary to her and she felt it was her only option. She had lost a friend to AIDs and her niece was born with an undeveloped brain, so her episodes were catalyzed by unfortunate events that she was experiencing in her life. She needs meaning in her life, and selling jewelry to the rich and famous did not give her meaning. At the age of 40, she joined the Peace Corps, so she left the business world for the non-profit world. She experienced another episode in which she was highly suicidal, so the State Department sent her back to New York where she had ample services for her to get serious help. It is interesting how she discursively frames her behaviors through a cultural prism, as she states that if an individual in the Japanese culture needs medication and mental health services then they are viewed as crazy, which is why she initially refused medications and mental health services.