Health & Wellness Coaching Certificate

This course explores foundational topics used in health and wellness coaching, such as nutrition needs, chronic illness, physical activity guidelines, and substance use and reviews how health promotion and education theories are used in motivating clients to initiate health behaviors. Students will learn to navigate the client-directed approach of motivational interviewing to establish a coaching relationship of trust and support, establish vision, work through ambivalence, create SMART goals, and empower sustainable behavior change. This course teaches skills needed to be an effective health and wellness coach.

This course applies health and wellness coaching skills through the coaching process. Students explore essential principles and learn all aspects of coaching from preparation and client interactions to termination and ethics. This course combines theory with practice, enabling students to support clients in achieving health goals and includes a lab component with supervised coaching sessions.

Few adults or children in the U.S. meet physical activity recommendations. Yet, community settings provide a variety of opportunities for population-level physical activity promotion, including schools, workplaces, and churches. Through this interdisciplinary course, we will explore population levels of physical activity, physical activity measurement, the role of physical activity in prevention and treatment of chronic disease, and settings and strategies for community-level physical activity interventions.

This course covers development of nutrition education programs for selected population groups with an emphasis on educational techniques utilized to inform special populations of changing nutritional needs. The course discusses population groups such as ethnic minorities, the elderly, the pregnant female and the athlete.

The course provides a foundation for the whole person approach to health and healthcare through exploring the major groups of complementary and integrative therapies and becoming familiar with the fundamental and applied sciences that underlie our understanding of how complementary and integrative approaches work. Students will be supported in cultivating a holistic understanding of self and others through somatic, psychological, and spiritual explorations using the Enneagram as a framework.

This course focuses on considerations in planning, implementing, and evaluating comprehensive health education and health promotion programs at the workplace, including individual and organizational assessment, program planning, and evaluation with a focus on unique strategies and considerations for the occupational setting to support healthy employees and healthy workplaces. Students will also explore work as a social determinant of health.