Wellness coaches support their clients to set and achieve personal goals for their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. In addition to the traditional skills of coaching, wellness coaches apply proven assessments to enable their clients to understand their current wellness status. The wellness coach supports the client to develop and apply strategies to make healthy choices amidst a myriad of unhealthy and readily available alternatives.
The discipline of wellness coaching holds some potential to help reverse the worrying trend of preventable non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and heart diseases in Africa. These diseases share risk factors such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, harmful alcohol use, tobacco use, and poor stress coping mechanisms. These risk factors can be modified through sustained human behavior, which is the focus of wellness coaching.