You may be someone who has suffered from and overcome a chronic health condition. Or perhaps you haven’t faced extreme challenges with your health, but just generally aspire to lead and live a very healthy life. Regardless of the reason behind your interests, the important point is that you have a passion for health. You most likely also have a strong knowledge base behind the things you do and why you do them to achieve and maintain high levels of health too. But, have you ever considered sharing this knowledge with other people? If you have (or even if you haven’t, for that matter) you should consider becoming a health coach.

What is a Health Coach?

In a nutshell, a health coach acts as a supportive mentor to clients who need a little help and guidance with reaching their health and wellness goals. Perhaps they’ve exhausted their options with their usual doctor, who isn’t trained in nutrition or alternative medicines and is looking for someone with a different outlook on the symptoms they’re suffering. Either way, the role of a health coach is to provide personalized, one-on-one encouragement and support around finding foods and lifestyle practices that work best for them and their goals. Here are some other great reasons as to why you should become a health coach.

Help Others While You Help Yourself

During your training to become a certified health coach, you will learn alot about healthy living and lifestyle. You’ll be able to start implementing your learnings as you go and see the benefits first-hand of these changes. Then, as you start helping others, you’ll learn even more about a wide-range of health issues that people are facing and will be able to apply these learnings to your own health and lifestyle too.

Share Your Health Knowledge

Many health coaches become coaches due to their own health struggles and successes. For example, I became a health coach so that I could share my journey in overcoming lyme and autoimmune diseases with others who may be facing the same struggles. Just being able to share my journey and my new knowledge of health was healing in itself, especially knowing that I could be helping even just one other person to overcome these diseases.

Flexible Lifestyle

If you’ve ever imagined yourself working as your own boss or taking your life on the road, becoming a health coach is the perfect career move for you. You see, as your health coach practice grows, you will be able to step away from your traditional 9-5 lifestyle (if you want to) and make your own schedule.

Create a Community

As a coach, you will start to cultivate a close community of like-minded people who are interested in creating genuine and long-lasting relationships. They may have shared the same or similar struggles as you and therefore will always be understanding and will inevitably share the same values as you when it comes to health and wellness. This can be a huge breath of fresh air, as the toll of living with a chronic illness that some cannot see from the outside can be extremely tough.

How to Become a Health Coach

If you’re feeling inspired reading this and think that this sounds like the perfect career for you, the next step is to sign up for a certified education program to assist you in becoming a health coach.

There are lots of good programs out there nowadays but I studied with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition (IIN) and I loved it. I found them to be the only school that explores more than 100 dietary theories, as well as covering so much more than just food and diet. Aside from the health aspects, they’ll also train you on how to coach people and provide you with training on how to run your health coaching practice as a business from the get-go. I believe that this well-rounded curriculum is really important in equipping you with all the tools necessary to help a wide-range of health issues that people are facing today.

But, if you’re not 100% sure if you should become a health coach yet or would like to read more about what a health coach does, check out my post on reasons why you should work with a health coach to see what else you could do for people. I really hope this post has inspired you to consider using your passion for health as a catalyst for this incredible career opportunity.