Episode 185 | Jun 18, 2026

60+ Ways Health Coaches Build Successful Careers

What does a successful health coaching career actually look like? In this solo episode of Health Coach Talk, FMCA founder and CEO Dr. Sandra Scheinbaum tackles one of the most common questions aspiring and practicing coaches ask: “How will I work as a health coach?” Rather than focusing on job titles alone, Dr. Sandi paints a broader picture of a profession filled with opportunities to serve people in meaningful ways across healthcare, business, education, technology, community programs, and beyond.

“Health coaching is a platform. It is a roadmap to so many different ways that you can help people.”

Dr. Sandi

Drawing on years of experience training health coaches and watching FMCA graduates build unique careers, Dr. Sandi shares more than 60 ways coaches are putting their skills into practice. She highlights opportunities in functional medicine and primary care practices, chronic disease management, caregiver support, cognitive health, workplace wellness, community health, and specialized niches ranging from menopause and gut health to executive burnout and healthy aging. Throughout the conversation, she also shares examples of graduates who transformed personal experiences, including caregiving, chronic illness, teaching, and corporate leadership, into coaching specialties that allow them to make a meaningful impact while building careers aligned with their passions.

For health coaches, the episode offers an important shift in perspective. Rather than asking what jobs are available, Dr. Sandi encourages listeners to consider what problems they care deeply about solving and which populations they feel called to serve. As healthcare continues to evolve and people seek more personalized support, she makes the case that health coaching is not limited to traditional employment pathways. Whether working within established organizations, collaborating with other professionals, or creating entirely new opportunities, coaches have the ability to shape careers that reflect their unique strengths, experiences, and vision for helping others. 

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Episode Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Welcome to another episode of “Health Coach Talk.” This episode is going to be different because it is just me. I am doing a solo episode, and it’s to address a question we hear so frequently and that is, how will I work as a health coach? What jobs are available? What can I do with my health coach certification? So, that’s the topic for this solo episode. So, if you are not a health coach or thinking about becoming one, perhaps you want to work with a health coach, perhaps you are a doctor and you run a company, you are thinking about taking on a health coach, referring to a health coach, it is my hope and intention that I will inspire you and perhaps you will see areas that health coaches work that you hadn’t considered. So, let’s get started, and I am calling this 60 plus ways that health coaches can work. And this is also the title of a Substack article. So, if you want to learn more, want to get this article, you can refer to my Substack, and we will link to it.

So, there are so many different roles that health coaches can do, and it is only limited by creativity and imagination, because this list is not by any means comprehensive, exhaustive. There are other areas that I may not have mentioned. There are areas that don’t even exist yet, but health coaching is a platform. It is a roadmap to so many different ways that you can help people. So, you don’t start out with the premise that I’m going to find a job. You start out with who do I want to serve? So, I broke this into categories. So, let’s get started.

So, there are healthcare roles within a clinical setting. So, we are the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy. So, you can consider being a health coach in a functional medicine practice. Many practices employ coaches as employees or independent contracting with coaches. You can do one-on-one coaching, you can lead groups. The second is you can be part of a primary care practice. Now, what you may want to call yourself is a lifestyle educator. This is an area where insurance reimbursement is possible. You may specialize in chronic care management. Yes, there is a Medicare code for chronic care management, and you can conduct those sessions.

How about specializing? You can be a cardiology coach, you can be a pre-diabetes coach, a diabetes coach to help people reverse diabetes. You can coach patients who have cancer, you can be a cancer survivorship coach, about an autoimmune support coach, a perimenopause coach, a menopause coach. I know many graduates of FMCA who are focusing on this area. About men’s health, you could be a men’s health coach. Chronic pain support, these folks really need a lot of support. How about a sleep circadian rhythm coach? You can be working in functional medicine practices in more conventional practices focusing on lifestyle.

And then you can focus on how about supporting families, caregivers, and focusing on coaching people who are undergoing life transitions. Caregiver support coach, who cares for the caregiver? Coaches, you’re ideally suited for working with this population. How about parent-focused health coach? Parenting is challenging, and you can focus on the health of the family, the whole health. Family system, you can focus on kids’ health. Teen wellness coach, family systems health coach. How about the sandwich generation? For example, if you’re a menopause coach, this is an area that you might specialize in or the empty nest transition period, you can specialize there. For a couples health coach, you’re not doing therapy, you’re not doing couples therapy, family systems therapy, you are focusing on all health. And many people, many couples, families choose to work together.

You can be an infertility coach, big demand, pregnancy coach, new moms coach. These are groups who are really often very available to changing their lifestyle, often for the first time. What about a sexual health coach, intimacy coach, dysregulated child coach? Again, you can specialize in kids with ADHD, adults with ADHD, learning disabilities coach. My original background was in learning disabilities. And you can, again, focus on the issues that might be really lending themselves well to lifestyle change.

Let me give some examples. We have a graduate who cared for her mother with dementia. Now, she runs a coaching practice for caregivers, focusing on the importance of self-care and burnout, setting boundaries. And then we can move into cognitive. How about mental health or brain health coach, Alzheimer’s prevention lifestyle coach, signs of cognitive decline coach? Many of our graduates go on and get specialized training in the Dale Bredesen Protocol for Alzheimer’s, and this is their specialization.

You can be an anxiety coach. Again, you’re not a therapist unless that is your background. But there’s many studies showing the benefit, huge benefit of health coaching for people with anxiety, stress, who really are needing self-regulation strategies. How about an addiction coach? And then workplace. Workplace corporate wellness can be your area, particularly if this is your background. So, a corporate wellness coach, executive burnout coach. Finance. You can focus on the financial world, or legal. Again, if you have that background, then you can go into these organizations.

What about coaching the whole organization, organizational well-being coach? So, let’s say you’re a former HR professional, and you could now run corporate wellness programs. So, you’re bringing coaching into leadership teams in these organizations. Community and social impact. This is growing. Community health coach, a faith-based coach. You can work with religious organizations and become a faith-based coach. First responder coaches. This is a population that really needs the support of a health coach. Veteran, our veteran community and active duty as well. The VA has had a program, Whole Health, for years where they work with health coaches. Prison, reentry wellness coach, public health program coach.

Now, I’m describing some of these options, these areas of specialization that may…you might say, is there a job? Am I going to see a LinkedIn listing? Perhaps not, but you can go out. And who do you know? Who can you get to know, how…where you can educate them about the value of a coach and maybe you start on a trial basis.

So, for example, you can be working in community programs, helping people access better resources, healthier food, for example, helping them manage chronic conditions, build better habits. Further, even more creative, we can go into more specialized niche coaching. So, you could become a functional nutrition coach. We have a course in functional nutrition, and that can be where you specialize in eating psychology. Again, I want to say that you are not stepping on the toes of a clinical psychologist. You are not doing psychotherapy, working with eating disorders, but an eating psychology coach, helping people with emotional eating, helping people with lifestyle change around attitudes towards food. That could be a big area.

A culinary coach, a cooking skills coach. We have a fair number of our graduates who have a background and perhaps were trained as a chef, or you’re just interested in food and that’s always been a passion of yours. You can become a culinary coach. You can be a gut health coach. What about a longevity and healthy aging coach? We hear so much about longevity these days. Financial health coach. So, we may think of how we handle our finances as separate in our lifestyle, but if that’s your background in terms of financial planning, for example, then this wealth management. So, it’s your whole health that you can help address.

But what I always really advocate for is finding partners, finding colleagues so that you can partner with them, and then pretty soon you’re doing online courses together. You’re doing programs, community lectures, and you are sharing referrals, referring back and forth to one another. I’ve done this personally, and I have seen it work time and time again. You can get really creative.

So, moving on. How about technology-focused? You can be a remote monitoring coach. We have more and more wearables. You can be a wearables coordinator coach. Often this technology can be overwhelming and you can be the coordinator between your clients and their providers. You can be an AI health coach. In other words, you’re not the robot. You are the human who is humanizing AI. You’re making AI work for you, not seen as against you, and you can help people sort out all this data. Similarly, you can be a direct-to-consumer health coach. And that’s an area where you’ll be able to see people making great progress. They will be relieved because often it’s the Wild West out there with emerging technology of direct-to-consumer labs. And you can, as a health coach, help people make sense of all of this information on this lab data. For example, you can help them see what is legitimate and what might be some tests that they should avoid.

Creativity really shines and having the courage to take some risks. So, we have many graduates who have created group programs, online courses. They have been retreat leaders. They have worked in wellness spas. They have been authors, quite a few of our graduates. Some have partnered with other graduates to write a book. They have been keynote speakers. They have learned how to use media. They have podcasts. Quite a few of our graduates have been on podcasts or started their own podcasts. So, you can run group programs. You can look at where in your community is there a need. Senior centers are one where there’s often a big need. You can lead these retreats. You can, again, build online courses.

So, these are entrepreneurial paths. So, the choices range from working in a medical setting, functional medicine, integrative medicine, primary care setting, specialty clinical practices. But if that’s not you, you don’t want to work for somebody, a growing number of people are finding that they can build their own business. And building your business means mastering telling people what to do, telling everybody what to do, and making personal connections. And I have done this my whole career starting up, and I was a learning disabilities tutor. I made connections with those teachers so that they were referring people to me. And so, it grows from there. You can start with one if you want to start your own business. All you need is one client, and then they will refer friends and family and neighbors, and you will go from there.

But the reason I am focusing on having a specialty is because then you are known. So, for example, the declutter coach, you can focus on decluttering. And that would be an area that…it could be in your home. We have a graduate who now become known as the decluttering coach. She is a whole health coach, but she’s focusing on going into homes or helping people declutter and mental, digital decluttering. We all have inboxes filled, and people get overwhelmed. And so, you can really broaden your thoughts about what you might be doing as opposed to just focusing on nutrition or helping people with movement or sleep. You can help them with their environment.

Another area that is growing is a detox in terms of toxins in the environment. So, you can help people who are really needing to not only declutter their homes, but look at all of the products, all of the items in their home that might be creating illness for them or perpetuating a chronic condition. So, helping people have a toxin-free home as much as possible, again, it would be 100% toxin-free. And that’s another area of coaching that is important, and that is helping people ease off because there’s so much information coming at us. Everything feels unsafe, the air, the water, the furniture in our home, in our personal care products. We feel like we can be immobilized with fear. And so, a coach can specialize there as well.

So, helping people to become aware of better products, what options are out there, giving them suggestions, for example, for air purifiers, better water sources, using glass instead of plastic, we’re overwhelmed with plastic. So, helping them make those choices, personal care, help creating more awareness of what might be in their skin care, their makeup, their nail polish, for example.

Mold is another one that you may have many people who are suffering from mold. The buildings now, it seems to be getting worse in terms of building in a moldy environment. And you can team up with people who specialize in mold testing, environmental home mold testing, help people to get the right test to distinguish what’s authentic from what might be hype, to focus on mold remediation, and also help them with the emotional impact because it is often very overwhelming and extremely stressful. So, one of the areas that I think coaches shine is stress, helping people to really find a way to quiet themselves, to shift their thinking so they’re not overwhelmed with the stressors that are coming at them.

There are many examples that we have that our coaches, whether you have a healthcare background or not. Think about a teacher. A teacher becomes a health coach and now creates programs for kids, for schools. We have people who’ve gone into schools and created programs. Maybe you’re focusing as a teacher on emotional resilience, maybe on building healthy habits, not just for the child, but for families. We have somebody, a former student, who ran a Montessori school and she studied with us, and she’s creating…her mission is to take that school and it is a family center for healthy habits. In fact, her grandfather also went through our program. And that, I like to say, there is no age limit because if you’re listening and you are inspired, saying, I’m too old, you at any age, you have so much wisdom to share and you have a calling at any age to be able to specialize in any of these areas.

Speaking of specialization, perhaps you’re a corporate executive, and you leave, your burned out, and you can now coach other executives on stress and performance. Maybe you’re someone who has had gut issues, autoimmune issues, and you want to build a practice helping others. We have graduates who were diagnosed with MS. They were able to reverse it with lifestyle change, with functional medicine, and now that is their area of specialization to support others with this condition.

You can be a caregiver. As I said earlier, perhaps you’ve experienced the facets of caregiving that are rewarding because you’re caring for a loved one, but can also be draining and can do your own illness. And now, you want to specialize in this area. Perhaps you want to specialize in grief and loss. Some of these that I’m mentioning, you may want to take additional training. You may want to get additional certificates, but it’ll give you a way to stand out, but most importantly, it is you’re passionate about an area. You really want to serve people in this area. That’s going to come across, and you will be able to shine as a health coach.

So, ask yourself. Instead of asking what jobs are available, like you’re going to find, like in the old help wanted ads in the newspaper, I’m old enough to remember those. There was actually…they were divided by help wanted men, help wanted women. We’ve come a long way. But instead of asking what jobs are available, ask what problem do I care deeply about solving? What population do I want to serve? So, people are struggling with changing their habits. How do I improve my health? How do I navigate life transitions? There’s so much information out there. They’re bombarded. And if you may be feeling, hey, I can just get all this from AI, there’s been a lot of studies that showed people want a human being. So, AI can be your assistant, but doesn’t replace this human interaction. And that’s what you provide if you’re a health coach.

So, if you’re thinking about becoming a health coach, this is a good time. If you’re thinking about expanding your work, and we get people who have no background in healthcare or have a background in healthcare, that doesn’t really matter. But you focus on who do you want to serve, in what capacity? And this is something that I want any listener who is thinking about becoming a health coach to consider, as well as if you are somebody who wants to hire a coach, whether it’s you want individual coaching, group coaching, whether you are in a position to refer to a coach or hire a coach. There are so many areas where health coaching will really change people’s lives for the better.

So, this is the end of my solo episode. Stay tuned for more episodes of “Health Coach Talk.”

Woman: Thanks for listening. And stay tuned for more episodes of “Health Coach Talk.” Are you ready to continue your own health coaching career journey? Visit functionalmedicinecoaching.org to learn more about our Health Coach Certification Program. Functional Medicine Coaching Academy Incorporated is providing this podcast as a public service, but it is neither medical advice nor a statement of policy. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation. Views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own. Discussions are not medical advice. Be sure to consult your practitioner for your healthcare needs.