Empowering Change: A Look at Health & Wellness Coaching
Health coaching is one of the fastest-growing fields in health and wellness, helping people not only make changes but sustain them. A health coach partners with clients to explore goals, uncover motivations, and build strategies that support whole-person wellbeing. Coaches can come from a variety of backgrounds—such as healthcare, fitness, education or entirely different fields—but they all share a passion for helping others.
Emory Health & Wellness Coaching instructor, Madison Campbell, MS, NBC-HWC, CSCS, started her path through nonprofit agencies, organizational psych and leadership, and then exercise science. She found that even before she became a health coach, she was acquiring the skills needed to become one. “Throughout, I was doing coaching work and building skills, but I didn’t name it as such. What ‘blew the doors off’ once I found it was the deep recognition that, here, we were practicing some central truths: that knowing the What was important but not nearly enough. Lasting wellbeing and change—things I’d been working on my whole career—hinge on people finding, embracing, and navigating their own Whys, Hows, and choices in their own big, beautiful contexts.”
Essentially, clients must explore their own reasons for change. Health coaches tune in to what a client says and help them uncover their underlying motivations and challenges. Still, the term, “health coach” can evoke different ideas of what exactly a health coach does. The heart of the profession is often misunderstood.
Instructor, Lisa DuPree, MS, NBC-HWC, ACSM-EP, notes that “one of the biggest misconceptions is that health coaching is only about nutrition and exercise. Those are usually part of it, but coaching is really about the whole person, including mindset, daily habits, self-care, confidence, priorities, and how all the pieces of health and wellness fit together.”
Campbell echoes this, adding that coaching is not just “glorified goal setting” or “cheerleading,” but a skilled partnership. “The client’s clarity, capability, and confidence grow not because we hand them a really great plan, an hour to talk about it, and weekly reminders and templates. It happens because we help them build their own [plan]”.
Allowing clients to build that plan is a fundamental aspect of being a health coach. DuPree shares, “A lot of students start out thinking coaching is about giving people the answers or telling them exactly what to do to be healthy and reach their goals. What usually surprises them is how powerful it can be to really listen and ask the right questions.”
She adds that, “when you give clients the space to explore their own thoughts and ideas, they’re so much more likely to make lasting changes. It’s a shift from being ‘the expert with the plan’ to being a true partner in the change process.”
That shift can be difficult to achieve. People often go into health coaching with the idea that they can provide their own answers to clients, but it is the clients who need to develop their own solutions. Health coaches must learn quickly that their role is to support their clients, not fix them.
Campbell describes this evolution, which she often sees in aspiring health coaches, “from being a passionate Helper or Fixer – something that typically brings people to coaching to begin with – to suspending that urge almost entirely and leaning instead into curiosity, acceptance, and active support of the client’s own agency, answers, and worldview.”
For those considering pursuing a career in health & wellness coaching, Campbell has the following advice: trust that inner pull. If you’re on the fence, “Follow that whisper, or shout, that brought you to the fence,” she says. “Coaching is both a spirit and a craft. You can learn the science, structure, and presence that make it effective—and those skills will never go unused. Deep coaching skills will change how you communicate, collaborate, see and solve problems, and work in any domain, not just health and wellness.”
Becoming a health & wellness coach is more than just a credential—it’s a gateway to a new way of seeing and supporting others. As Campbell puts it, “Think of it as stepping through a portal into a new or expanded way of seeing, and one that keeps shifting, refracting, and revealing more every time you turn it in your hands.”
For anyone ready to help others create sustainable change—and maybe transform themselves along the way—learn more about how to become a Health & Wellness Coach.