Wellness Wholeness and Changing One's Life

Wellness Book Review

Summary

The key points made in Arloski’s (2007) Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change are that wellness is determined by lifestyle, psychology, and principles. In order to promote wellness, a coach must be an ally of the individual and promote lifestyle changes that facilitate wellness objectives. The book covers everything from defining wellness to models of wellness to the role that preventive health plays in wellness, how to coach wellness, why a wellness coach should seek out coaching, how to implement a lifestyle improvement model, how to create a wellness map, and how health and medical coaching contribute to wellness coaching. The book covers so much ground in short order that it really does serve as a good primer on how to think about wellness coaching.

Arloski explains that choice of lifestyle is what determines or affects one’s heath more than anything else. Health information can provided people with details about what a healthy lifestyle looks like, but coaching is really needed to help keep a person on task, focused, centered, motivated, and moving forward with lifestyle changes that need to be implemented but that may require some assistance. Coaching helps because intrinsically, Arloski (2007) argues, it is about wholeness and wellness.

The book also explains that one-on-one interpersonal skills are needed to help with creating wellness plans for individual clients. Wellness coaching is about mapping the course of changing one’s life. Its psychology is rooted in the idea of self-actualization from Abraham Maslow: everyone has needs—physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, and esteem needs. Only when all of these needs are met can one attain self-actualization. Part of the coach’s job is to help the individual make sure those needs are being met.

Concrete Response

One important idea in the book is that “when we coach someone towards higher levels of wellness we are, in fact, helping them discover increasingly effective ways of getting their basic needs met” (Arloski, 2007, p. 6). I have personally experienced how this is true, because I saw that during periods when I struggled in life it was mainly because I lacked certain fulfillment in specific areas of my life—social areas, self-esteem areas, or even basic security areas. When I saw that my struggles toward self-actualization stemmed from this lack, I began to focus on satisfying those needs I was missing. How could I make myself feel more protected? What could I do to have more of a social life? What could I do to be recognized in a positive way for my achievements?

When I looked at my life from these perspectives I began to realize that I was already moving toward self-actualization simply by analyzing and reflecting on my life and my needs. I was ready to take the steps to address these issues, and simply by doing that we are moving toward higher degrees of wellness. The coach’s role is to help a person to see this, as I suddenly saw it. The coach can help to clear away the noise, focus the attention, and provide the support and framework for re-assessing the way one looks at life. My own coach helped me to realize this, and it is why I connected to this idea in Arloski’s book, as I had personally experienced it directly. I had been through that stage of feeling lost and unfulfilled, believing wrongly that I didn’t need recognition or friends; but in the end I was only trying to fool myself, for my real self knew what it needed and I was making excuses as to why I hadn’t delivered.

Reflection with Insight

The book is not exactly situated in a Christian framework, but it does make reference to Christ’s forty days in the desert fasting as a way to underscore the value of retreating from the world: the point is that although the book does not give a precise Christian context for coaching, it does at least acknowledge that Christ provided an example of soul-searching that can be used to help guide a client through a period of self-discovering. That said, the book does not offer any clear focus on Christian virtues or anything of the like.

It does point out that lifestyle changes require one to look at one’s life and not just at one’s lifestyle per se. For instance, Arloski (2007) writes that “foundational work on one’s self requires a good, hard look at one’s life, not just one’s lifestyle” and that introspection and reflection are good ways to do this (p. 55). However, I felt that the book could have benefited from a Christian orientation, as the application of a Christian worldview would have helped to anchor the perspective of coaching for lifestyle change in the best example of a lifestyle designed for a purpose. Arloski (2007) states that “values need to be clarified” but there is no clarity on what values should be promoted (p. 55).

When coaching it is often the case that a client needs some insight that the coach has which the client lacks. If the client trusts the coach, the coach can deliver life-changing advice—and the Christian perspective can really play a big part in making that life-changing insight hit home. Arloski (2007) talks about conscious awareness but there is no substantial talk about what the ultimate awareness should be. Should people try to live for something, for some greater purpose? For something in this world or for another? I would have liked the book to consider these questions more deeply. But the book is mainly focused on helping the client set the course.

Application

One of the ways this book can apply to me as a life coach is that it talks in general about how a coach can help a client keeping “all of your wellness coaching in the context of personal growth and development” (Arloski, 2007, p. 130). The key is to help them tap into their potential so that they become hungry for self-actualization. When they begin to see results, they will want more. They will want to keep going, to keep thriving, to keep that energy up.