Do you think depression, anxiety or other mental health problems may be getting in the way of realizing your goals?

Is the lack of emotional wellness keeping you from improving and creating the life we have always dreamed of?

Well, you are in luck!!  Emotional wellness coaching is the answer!

What is emotional wellness coaching?

The purpose of emotional wellness coaching is to help people explore their desires, ability, reasons, and needs for making changes in their lives, and then take action to make those changes happen.

It is a process that facilitates sustainable behaviour change by shining the light on people’s unique skills, strengths, and resources, and helping people transform dreams and desires into achievable goals through effective action.

It uses a partnership model wherein the client is an active participant in their recovery plan.  At the same time, it provides expertise in supporting successful change and accountability to help the client stay on track.

What is an emotional wellness coach?   

Emotional wellness coaches draw on principles and practices from evidence-based therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT).  Extensive research backs the use of these interventions to treat conditions like depression and anxiety.

Coaches help their clients develop greater awareness in themselves and implement practical tools to manage their lives.  They help clients find ways of obtaining and maintaining stability, managing difficult symptoms, rebuilding relationships, finding a purpose for living by creating a clear plan of action, and using current strengths to reach future goals.

An excellent wellness coach provides guidance and support. Clients are not alone on their journey!  They empower their clients to get back on track and to help create a more rewarding, purpose-driven life.

Benefits of emotional wellness coaching

We all deserve to thrive not only survive or exist as a human being. Positive mental health is beneficial to everyone. An emotional wellness coach empowers people to a new level. Levels where their mental health and well-being flourishes!

When done right, clients can have higher productivity and creativity. They can get a more positive outlook in life,  improve their relationships with their friends, families, and partners, but also open doors for many opportunities in life. Which, in turn, leads to a better and more fulfilled living.

CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.  It has been proven by research to work for a range of mental illnesses like depression, anxiety and phobias.  It is one of the most commonly practiced forms of psychotherapy. 

CBT teaches how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours influence each other. For example, if you believe that people don’t like you (thought), you might avoid social situations (behaviour) and feel lonely (feeling).  However, CBT teaches you how to use these emotions and feelings to your advantage: a positive change in one factor (changing a thought or behaviour) can lead to positive changes in all factors.

Take a moment to consider how your life and relationships might be different and function more effectively if you adopted an alternate way of thinking.  Being trapped in a distorted, unreasonable, negative thinking can be a suffocating, isolating experience.  Our thoughts hold a lot of sway over how we feel about ourselves. 

Distorted thoughts are instances of wrong thinking we don’t realize are inaccurate.  They keep us trapped in shame, self-pity, fear and resentment.  By learning to identify our distorted, negative thinking, we can learn to answer the negative thoughts back and refute the.  Refuting negative thinking over time causes them to diminish and automatically replaced them with healthier ones. 

It starts with education, practising learned skills and strategies to help change your thoughts, feelings and behaviours.  Success involves learning to manage your emotions, build relationships with others, and coping with problems, distress, through acceptance and mindfulness. 

Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) is a specific form of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).  Both types of psychotherapy have strong research backing and have been proven to help a person who is experiencing depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and borderline personality disorder.

This approach was developed by Marsha Linehan to help people increase their emotional and cognitive regulation by learning about the triggers that lead to reactive states. And help in assessing which coping skills to apply in the sequence of events, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours to avoid undesired reactions.

DBT combines standard CBT techniques for emotion regulation and reality-testing.  DBT seeks to build upon the foundation of CBT but focuses more on the emotional and social aspects of living.  It was created to help people manage their intense emotions.

In DBT, people are taught two seemingly opposite strategies:

• acceptance (i.e., that their experiences and behaviours are valid),
• change (i.e., that they have to make positive changes to manage emotions and move forward).

DBT provides clients with new skills to manage painful emotions and decrease conflict in relationships. DBT specifically focuses on providing therapeutic skills in four key areas.

1. mindfulness: the practice of being in the present and acknowledging thoughts, feelings and behaviours as they happen, without trying to control them.
2. distress tolerance: the process of learning how to cope during a crisis, especially when it is impossible to change, and accepting a situation as it is, rather than how it should be.
3. interpersonal effectiveness: the ability to ask for what a person needs and to say no when necessary, while still maintaining self-respect and relationships with others
4. emotion regulation: the ability to manage emotions so that they do not control thoughts and behaviours.

Key differences between CBT and DBT are validation and relationships. DBT teaches you that your experiences are real, and it teaches you how to accept who you are, regardless of challenges or difficult experiences. The goal of all of these elements is to help the person build a life they feel is worth living.  They often find that their new skills and strategies become second nature—they are tools that last a lifetime.