Wellness Coaching Helps Seniors Thrive And Survive
Wellness Coaches are certified professionals from diverse backgrounds and education who work with individuals and groups to achieve self-determined goals related to health and wellness. They help people build skills such as self-motivation, self-awareness, confidence, and resilience. The goal is make these changes sustainable.
Wellness Coaching: A Positive For Seniors
Seniors, especially those living in skilled nursing homes and assisted living developments thrive and survive with wellness coaching. For many, their health, fitness, and cognitive ability are compromised or in decline. Coaching helps the elderly live happier and healthier lives by shifting the focus away from fixing what is broken, to living your best day every single day until the end.
Programs like this have emerged because seniors are living longer and defying predictions of total cognitive and functional decline.
Wellness Coaching: A Day In The Life
At the first meeting, the coach measures the senior’s health and wellness in an hourlong session, assessing common problems such as loneliness, pain and distress. The coach also asks about the seniors’ families, friendships, and spiritual life.
Next, the wellness coach helps the senior set goals for the year, for example, it could be physical, social, intellectual or spiritual. These goals become the focus for the senior’s medical team, and the seniors follow up with their coaches every three months to stay on track.
Specifically, this form of coaching recognizes that despite the frailties and difficulties that come with aging, seniors have lives worth living.
Wellness Coaching: One Inspirational Senior Story
Esther Adler, a 93-year-old poet, writer and former Hebrew school teacher, moved to an skilled nursing facility in 2012, a few years after her husband died. She set a goal to “be a productive person” but didn’t know exactly how.
After learning about her background in an extensive intake interview, the Wellness Coach invited her to start teaching Hebrew to patients on the skilled nursing floor. Adler discovered their memories were too short for language lessons, and started teaching Bible lessons and prayers instead, a practice she has now continued for three years.
Adler, who also spends time in writing poetry and helping neighbors through hospice, has proved resilient amid physical setbacks: She broke her pelvis last year when she tripped in the lobby of a hotel room in Poland, the night before the premiere of a documentary about her life.
“They thought I would never walk,” Adler said. “Here I am, I’m walking.”
Conclusion:
Watch this informative video on Wellness Coaching: