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Running head: HEALTH WELLNESS COACH
Arloski Book Review: Health Wellness Coach
Adeste Sipin
Liberty University
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Abstract
This paper summarizes the main points from Dr. Arloski’s Wellness Coaching for Lasting
Lifestyle Change. It is a perfect book to educate future life coaches who might be interested in
health and wellness life coaching. The paper will explore what wellness life coaching looks like
and will include tools and specific ways to coach someone with stress. Furthermore, it will
include a personal reflection and ways to apply lessons from Arloski’s book to my personal life.
Keywords: Health and wellness, strategies, life coaches, wellness workbook
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Health and Wellness Coach
Dr. Arloski’s (2014) book, Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change is perfect as a
tool to train future and current coaching professionals who want to go into health and wellness
coaching. His wisdom, strategies, and advice make it easy for a health and wellness coach to
constantly refer back to this book to help them help their clients. While the book covers many
different topics, this paper will first define wellness coaching and what wellness coaches do. It
will then discuss some tools and strategies to demonstrate the usefulness of Arloski’s book for
heatlh and wellness coaches. Finally, it will include my personal reflection and how I will apply
it to my life as a coach.
Wellness Coaching
Like life coaching in general, a person who wants to be a wellness coach must have a
passion to helping people. This passion can help them develop skills, thus improving their
ability to help people “focus on developing [their] future, believe in [their] brilliance or potential
for greatness…, [and] looking at possibilities instead of problems and causes” (Arloski, 2014, p.
93). While wellness coaching shares these same basic principles, it differs in knowledge. With
wellness coaching, Arloski (2014) references Travis’s Wellness/Illness Continuum to help ground
the work towards wellness that coaches will engage in with clients.
The first step to working with a client as a wellness coach is to figure out where they
want to go or what they want to accomplish. Arloski (2014) says that one simple way to do this
is have a brainstorm discussion with clients. From these ideas, clarity on what to focus on will
emerge. Helping a client assess where they are now and where they want to go is imperative
because a coach will want to make sure that they would be the most effective person to help the
client reach their goals. If not, a coach should be able to provide referrals to provide the client of
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someone who would be a better fit for them (Arloski, 2014).
Wheel of Life
The wheel of life is used as a tool to also help assess where clients are and where they
might want to go (Arloski, 2014). It includes aspects like career, health/wellbeing, personal
growth/development, money, family relationships, friends, significant others, fun/recognition,
and environment. Essentially, completing this tool can give a client an idea of what their life
looks like right now. Furthermore, this visual can lead to vision casting conversations on what
kind of life they would want to have. From there, a coach can work with a client to decide what
to focus on first (Arloski, 2014).
Motivation
Before working on goals that came from the Wheel of Life, a good wellness coach will
assess and get a deeper understanding of their client’s motivation (Arloski, 2014). This is critical
because a coach may come to find out that while a client recognizes an aspect of their wheel is
low, they may not see any benefit to improving it. This may be due to mindset or a low level of
self-efficacy. Therefore, coaches should really understand where their client is at in relation to
the goal and help them rethink, reframe, and set realistic goals to help create and sustain
motivation (Arloski, 2014).
Change
From understanding where a client is, a coach can start right where they are to help them
start the process of change (Arloski, 2014). A client willing and ready to change, however, must
be established first. For example, a client might understand that they have to minimize stress or
else they will become at risk for cardiovascular diseases. Their mindset, however, might be one
in which they do not think they can do it. What a coach can do in this moment is help shift the
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mindset of the client by helping them face the health challenge and overcome it (Arloski, 2014).
Stress
Stress is something everyone can work on diminishing. If left unmanaged, people can
develop high blood pressure or gastrointestinal disorders (Arloski, 2014). Fortunately, Arloski
(2014) offers several ways to rethink about stress and tools to cope with it. One way a coach can
help a client reframe their perception of stress is to recognize that while it is a biological
response it can be used to help a person correct their path. When a person is experiencing stress,
a coach can help the client identify their stress triggers. Identifying these triggers can then signal
to a client to intentionally engage in coping mechanism to re-center themselves (Arloski, 2014).
Personal Reflection
I liked Arloski’s (2014) book because of the practical advice and tips it provides coaches
who want to go into health and wellness coaching. I chose these aspects of Arloski’s (book)
because they spoke the most to me. In other words, these were aspects that I found myself using
to assess my own health and wellness journey.
The Wheel of Life exercise taught me that while I may be doing extremely well in some
aspects of my wheel, I am not on others. Prior to seeing my doctor on January 25, 2018, I had
forgone seeing a doctor for over two years. I knew that it was something I needed to do but I
chose to overcompensate by focusing on other aspects of my life. Although my current wheel
shows an improvement in health and wellbeing, there are other aspects like family relationships
and friends that I know I have purposefully paid less attention to. The wheel of life pulls those
aspects in my life out from under the covers, so to speak, forcing me to contemplate on what I
am doing or not doing about it.
Doing something about those aspects, however, depends on motivation and change. I
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currently justify the fact that I am working full time, going to school full time, and the sole-
breadwinner as to reasons why I have let those other aspects of my life weaken. While looking
at the wheel however, I hear inside me a voice that yearns for my family and friendship
relationship to be better because I know it will make me happier. With that said, however, I am
still trying to find time to think through it strategically and to figure out what are small realistic
goals that I can start to implement to change those aspects of my life.
I think the main reason why I do not engage in activities that will help improve my
family and friendship relationships is that it stresses me out. Not to mention that I feel stressed
with everything that is already on my plate. School, work, finances, and romantic relationships
monopolize both my time and my stressors. I have come to realize, however, a connection
between my weight loss and family/friends. Having gained a lot of weight, the thought of
hearing comments about that when seeing friends or family is really stressful. Fortunately my
current weight loss has allowed me to start reconnecting with those relationships.
Application to My Future Career as a Coach
I have yet to fully commit to the idea of being a wellness coach. With that said, I know
that what I have learned from this book and this class will help me tremendously. For example,
currently I am the Academic Support Coordinator for the school of medicine. Part of that job has
me meeting with medical students both on a one-to-one basis and as a group. The goal of my
position is to help students optimize their learning strategies in an effort to increase their
performance on exams.
Through this book, however, I have learned that I need to take a more holistic approach
to their learning. One way that I think I can do this is by using the Wheel of Life tool. I might,
however, swap out career for school. In using this tool, I would explain to students that part of
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doing well is being healthy in all aspects of their life. I want to use this tool to help them get a
snapshot of what their life looks like today. Then we would have discussions about how that
impacts their education like their ability to focus when they are studying or the time they can
devote to studying. After that conversation, we can discuss small goals to improve the ones they
decide as pressing issues.
I also know the advice, strategies, and tips on how to deal with stress is going to be
helpful. Stress is pervasive and is a factor that I believe all coaches should be familiar with. As
coaches, whether it is wellness coaches, academic success coaches, executive coaches, etc. I feel
it is imperative that we are able to recognize when our clients are stressed and help them figure
out their stressors and how to cope with them. Not addressing stressors can really impede a
coach’s ability to help their clients achieve their goals. For my current job, specifically, I have
started having these discussions with students especially to help them minimize testing anxiety.
References
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Arloski, M. (2014). Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change (2nd ed.). Duluth: Whole
Person Associates, Inc.
