ABSTRACT
Despite awareness that lifestyle behaviors—such as a nutritional diet and regular exercise—play a critically important role in achieving health, individuals struggle to achieve these things on their own. The roots of health and wellness coaching (HWC) emerge from multiple fields outside of healthcare. In the 1980s, Thomas Leonard began life coaching as a practice and worked to codify, popularize, and globalize the discipline of coaching outside of the sporting world. All educational approaches focus on conveying information, or perhaps the teaching of skills for managing health conditions. While health and wellness coaches do at times provide information or resources, education is never their dominant function. A successful HWC engagement depends upon trust and privacy. Health coaching can play a pivotal role in the creation of the new narrative. Innovative models that partner education for self-efficacy with health and wellness coaching, like the PACT program for chronic pain, leverage our healthcare dollars and improve outcomes.
