What does it mean to be a Wellcoach®?
When we founded Wellcoaches in 2000, we planted foundational values and qualities into the meaning of being a Wellcoach®, embodied and expressed by our twin registered trademarks: Wellcoach® and Wellcoaches®. As the Wellcoaches team and community has grown and matured to 15,500 strong in 50 countries, the meaning of being a Wellcoach is brighter, stronger, more impactful, and influential than ever.
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Coaching Excellence
A good place to begin is our deep commitment to coaching excellence in every moment of every coaching session.
Being a Wellcoach means first and foremost - delivering enlivening, resonant, generative and high-impact coaching sessions that expand minds and change behaviors in ways that last.
Our Wellcoaches core coach training program is beautifully choreographed to enable confident coaching in a most engaging, efficient, and affordable way.
At the outset, we developed a rigorous coaching skills exam to earn the Wellcoaches certification, far beyond national standards, serving as our continuous feedback loop for training excellence and ongoing innovation.
The Wellcoaches membership program keeps up an excellent pace year after year, translating new classes and courses into professional development, continued learning, and ever-growing impact.
Empowered by our deep and exceptional bench of 30+ expert coach trainers and mentor coaches, being a Wellcoach means bringing excellence to everyone we touch.
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Coaching Psychology Manual
Scientific Excellence
In the early 2000s, the Wellcoaches team was among a small handful of coach trainers globally that began integrating the best of science into coaching competencies, tools, and processes.
A team of ten Wellcoaches faculty worked for eight years to build the first peer-reviewed Wellcoaches Coaching Psychology Manual, published by Wolters Kluwer and endorsed by the American College of Sports Medicine.
Being a Wellcoach means learning from the pioneering leaders of coaching excellence who started the field and "wrote the book."
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Our manual has become the field's manual, having sold 50,000 copies. Every year, 4,000 coaches buy our Wellcoaches manual. The third edition is underway.
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Being a Wellcoach means being out in front in translating science into coaching excellence.
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From 2010 until now, 23 research teams have studied the Wellcoaches protocol delivered by Wellcoaches coaches, and published significant health and well-being outcomes in peer-reviewed journals, bringing evidence to support all Wellcoaches-certified coaches.
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Being a Wellcoach means dedication to excellent coaching outcomes.
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Competency Excellence
Two prominent psychologists, Joe Ciarrochi and Steve Hayes, developed a bold, new framework that every Wellcoach can apply. Their framework distills clinical and positive psychology interventions into six psychological change processes: self, attention, motivation, cognition, emotion, behavior. Wellcoaches competencies are thus broad and deep, and keep expanding, marking our excellence.
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Prominent scholar (emotional intelligence, leadership, coaching) Richard Boyatzis recently published a coaching study with medical students demonstrating that a coach's competencies (personal capacities rather than tasks and knowledge) predict positive coaching outcomes. Wellcoaches emphasizes personal capacities as a foundation of excellent coaching.
For a Wellcoach, inspiration, vision, compassion, creativity, generativity, wisdom, well-being, and growth are WHO WE ARE not just what we do.
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Well-being Excellence
While scientific models of well-being abound, what's generally accepted is that well-being of mind, body, work, and life are an interdependent human (and planetary) system of health (objective metrics) and well-being (subjective states).
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Being a Wellcoach means appreciating that all humans share the common purpose of well-being, whatever you pursue - performing eye surgery, designing bridges, writing code, teaching students, fixing power lines, leading a corporation, planting trees, raising children, cleaning teeth, or coaching others.
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Drawing on self-determination theory, well-being excellence means setting a compass in the direction you want to take yourself (better health, well-being, professional or leadership development, etc). The coaching journey integrates your experiences well along the way into a better self.
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Wellcoaches also models Jack Bauer's profound scholarly work in defining the transformative self, which pursues thriving and development in four ways - happiness, love, wisdom and growth:
Being a Wellcoach means to enjoy life's gifts and pleasures, to love people and work (do what matters most), to generate wisdom (diversify perspectives and increase objectivity), and to grow (actualize and integrate the potential in each moment).
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Leading Excellence
A key reason why the field of health and well-being coaching has accomplished what it has over the past two decades - integrating science and well-being into coaching, bringing together stakeholders, establishing national standards, curating important research, shaping the roles and impact of coaches, reducing burnout, and moving coaches into medical practices - is because CEO Margaret Moore is a Wellcoach, and volunteered one third of her time to building the field since 2009.
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Today, Wellcoaches leaders, faculty, and coaches contribute in many ways to field-building and field-leading at a critical moment of our field's history.
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We set trends, not follow them.
Being a Wellcoach means moving the field forward as leaders, every day.
Career Excellence
Wellcoaches coaches have vibrant opportunities and coaching careers in private practice, employer wellness, digital health, and healthcare. Employers seek out Wellcoaches coaches because our coaching excellence stands out in a crowd of coaches.
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Wellcoaches coaches help each other with career opportunities, one of the many reasons why the Wellcoaches community contributes to the excellence of every one of us as coaches.
Being a Wellcoach means standing out for coaching excellence.
I am a Wellcoach. We are Wellcoaches. We mean coaching excellence.