What is Wellness Coaching?
Wellness coaching is designed to help you build coping skills for resilience, stress management, and work life balance. Coaching and therapy are different, so exploring the similarities and differences to understand what the two services and to make an informed decision around the type of care that best fits your needs at this time.
Wellness Coaching Is
About building resilience
Gaining skills to prevent crisis
Finding solutions to manage stress
Partnering together to make shifts
Making use of clinical interventions to enhance wellbeing
Wellness Coaching Is Not
Therapy, counseling, or blowing off steam
Crisis management or intervention
Long-term intensive care
Oriented around diagnosis
Psychoanalysis, sufficient for working through trauma, or story work
When Therapy is a Better Fit
When individuals are experiencing severe risk factors such as: suicidal thoughts, interpersonal violence, substance abuse, or aggressive behavior
When individuals are experiencing a significant decline in ability to function (focus, task completion, emotional engagement, etc.) at work, home, or in other spaces
When individuals have a need to work through grief, suffering, and/or traumatic experiences
When Coaching is a Better Fit
When individuals are able to maintain awareness of their mental and emotional state and can maintain healthy engagements in relationships
When individuals are experiencing minimal, mild, or moderate disruptions at work, home, or in other spaces, but have desire and ability to give attention and presence
When individuals have a desire to make progress towards some kind of learning, development, or personal goal
The Mental Health Continuum
The mental health continuum is something that academics and professionals use to describe a range of states that we find ourselves in, with languishing at one end and flourishing at the other. Depending on the season and circumstances we find ourselves in, we can can find our mental health state shifting from one position to another as our situations change along with our capacity to manage them.
The mental health continuum is a useful tool that can help us identify the kind of support that would be most beneficial for us, whether that might be therapy, coaching, or even both.
Let's break it down:
Individuals who find themselves in a "stuck" or "strained" state typically show mindsets or behaviors that cause minimal, mild, or moderate disruption in functioning at work and/or home. These states in the "Wellness Boost Zone" may find therapy, coaching, or both as beneficial services.
If you are experiencing serious or severe disruption to your ability to function at work and/or at home, you may be finding yourself in a "slump" or "crisis" state. Seeking out a trained clinical therapist could be helpful as well as the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
