For Coaches — “Before You Coach Their Wellness, Check Your Soil”

By Lisa Maria Haynes | Resilient Roots

There’s a moment every wellness coach faces—the quiet truth that you cannot guide anyone deeper than you’ve gone yourself.
And yet so many coaches rush into technique before tending the very soil they’re rooted in.

At Resilient Roots, we don’t start with meal plans or macros or wellness wheels. We start with you—the coach.
Your rhythm. Your breath.
Your relationship to your own body. Because your presence is the curriculum.
Wellness coaching is not “advice giving.”
It is co-regulation, emotional attunement, nervous system literacy, and trauma-informed curiosity.
It is the ability to sit with another human being and hold a mirror steady while they face themselves.
But you can’t hold that mirror steady if your own soil is dry, cracked, or neglected.

Your Soil Determines Your Strategy
Before you create a wellness plan for anyone, ask:

● Am I grounded—or rushed?

● Do I listen to understand—or listen to respond?

● Do I know my own triggers and how they leak into a session?

● Can I differentiate my client’s fear from my own?

● Am I caring for my emotional, physical, and spiritual body so I don’t coach from deficit?

Great coaching is not about perfection— it’s about awareness.

Coaches, Wellness Starts With You
If your energy is scattered, your coaching will be scattered. If your nervous system is activated, your client will absorb it.
If you haven’t tended to your own grief, burnout, or depletion, you will project it as urgency or judgement.
This is why the WELL Pathway™ matters:

Whole Body → Energy → Life Balance → Legacy.

It’s not a client framework. It is a coach framework.
Because your presence is the medicine.
Your regulation becomes your client’s regulation. Your balance teaches them balance.

When Coaches Re-Root Themselves, They Change Everything
When you coach from groundedness:

● Sessions feel spacious, not rushed

● Clients open up more

● Breakthroughs come from clarity, not pressure

● You stop trying to “save” clients and start empowering them

● Your work becomes sustainable and joyful

You can’t pour wellness from a dehydrated spirit.

So coach like someone who has tended to her own roots. Sit with clients as you sit with yourself—
with honesty, reverence, curiosity, and compassion.

Because at Resilient Roots, we believe expert wellness coaching requires more than skill. It requires self-honoring.

Coaches, water your soil first. Everything you build grows from there.