Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change: Book Review
This paper offers a structured review of Michael Arloski's 2007 book Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change, examining its core arguments about lifestyle, psychology, and wellness principles. The review summarizes the book's key themes — including Maslow's hierarchy of needs, wellness mapping, and the coach-as-ally model — before offering personal reflection on self-actualization and the author's experience with coaching. The paper also critiques the book's limited engagement with Christian values and considers how the book's tools, particularly wellness mapping and shoulder-to-shoulder coaching, can be applied in a life coaching practice.
- Summary of Key Themes: Overview of Arloski's wellness coaching framework and Maslow
- Personal Response and Connection: Author's personal experience with self-actualization and coaching
- Reflection and Christian Worldview: Critique of book's limited Christian values perspective
- Application to Coaching Practice: Applying wellness mapping and shoulder-to-shoulder coaching
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What makes this paper effective
- The review balances objective summary with personal experience, giving readers both an overview of the book's content and an honest evaluation of how its ideas resonate in practice.
- The critique of the book's lack of Christian orientation is specific and substantive, using direct quotations to pinpoint where a values-based framework could have strengthened the material.
- The application section moves beyond abstract discussion to identify concrete tools — wellness mapping and shoulder-to-shoulder coaching — the author plans to use in professional practice.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper effectively uses direct quotation paired with personal commentary. Rather than simply paraphrasing, the author cites specific page numbers and then elaborates on why each passage matters, demonstrating engagement with the primary source at both the textual and experiential level.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into four labeled sections: a content summary, a concrete personal response, a reflective critique, and a practical application section. This structure follows a scaffolded reflection model — moving from description to personal connection, then critical evaluation, and finally professional application — which is common in graduate-level reflective writing assignments.
Summary of Key Themes
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 truly serves as a good primer on how to think about wellness coaching.
Arloski explains that lifestyle choice is what determines or affects one's health more than anything else. Health information can provide 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 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 create 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 ensure that those needs are being met.
Personal Response and Connection
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 true this is, because during periods when I struggled in life it was mainly because I lacked fulfillment in specific areas — social areas, self-esteem areas, or even basic security areas. When I recognized that my struggles toward self-actualization stemmed from these deficits, I began to focus on satisfying the needs I was missing. How could I make myself feel more secure? What could I do to have more of a social life? What could I do to receive positive recognition for my achievements?
When I examined 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 steps to address these issues, and simply by doing so I was moving toward higher degrees of wellness. The coach's role is to help a person see this, as I suddenly saw it. The coach can help to clear away the noise, focus attention, and provide the support and framework for reassessing the way one looks at life. My own coach helped me to realize this, which is why I connected so strongly to this idea in Arloski's book — I had personally experienced it directly. I had been through that stage of feeling lost and unfulfilled, believing wrongly that I did not 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 for why I had not delivered.
References
Arloski, Michael. (2007). Wellness coaching for lasting lifestyle change. Whole Person Associates.
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