Her work: Licensed Wellcoach. She’s been licensed since January, after more than a year of training and practice. “It’s pretty rigorous. To get your certification, you have to pass written, oral, and practice exams, and the program is only open to wellness professionals: nurses, doctors, and people like me who have a degree in wellness management.” Unrelated to Wellcoaching, she and her husband are local distributors or Tahitian Noni Juice.

What is Wellcoaching? “It involves diet, exercise, and training and wraps everything together to give people the tools to do it themselves, with me as their coach rather than their personal trainer. Clients come to me at their wits’ end because they’ve tried everything that is available to get control of their health. What I do is tailor a program just for them that combines nutrition, stress management, exercise, and realistic, time-oriented, reachable goals. It’s more personalized than a cookie-cutter program for just anybody.

The road to becoming a wellness coach: “I knew I wanted to be in a service profession, like a teacher.” She studied to teach math, but “if you don’t enjoy your subject, you can’t be an effective teacher. My passions were in health, exercise, and well-being. Then wellness came to my attention, and I’m really happy it did. I’m still in education. Now I teach people about health.”

Should an individual’s struggle with weight control be attributed to a lack of discipline or a lack of time? “A little of both. Values have become so twisted (work comes first, family second, and God third) that it’s easy to lose touch with a good, consistent routine. ‘I can’t exercise or eat right. I have to go to work. I have to get the kids to soccer practice.’ With so much going on, a person’s health and well-being gets placed on the back burner, and everything suffers. What’s necessary is to prioritize if you want to be a healthy, successful person in the long run. People move around more to day and have different lives than their parents did. They lose the touchstone that keeps everything focused. Life and career coaching give them a touchstone again and helps them sort through their thoughts to find what they really want to do with their lives.”

Where she’s from: Roatan, “a very, very small” island off the north coast of Honduras. “I was born in Florida, but I lived in Honduras most of my life. My family had an ocean freight transport company down in the islands. Roatan was a pleasant place to grow up, a really nice environment. There wasn’t any traffic there when I was growing up. Everyone walked or rode bikes. My brothers and sisters who still live there are trying to help maintain that innocence and that lifestyle for their children.”

How long she’s been in Chattanooga: “Five years. I came here because I wanted to attend Southern Adventist University. My then-boyfriend came here to visit, we got married on November 20, and we call this our home now.”

What is Tahitian Noni Juice? “It’s a healthy beverage people take all over the world.” Made from fruit produced in French Polynesia, “it’s high in antioxidants, boosts the immune system, and is good for blood pressure, diabetes, and regulating all the systems in the body. Some people have found that it helps with their allergies and even overcoming an addiction to nicotine. It’s beneficial for several things.”

What she enjoys about Chattanooga: “The friendliness. People are open to learning more about things, especially wellness. My husband and I are getting into outdoor sports, and Chattanooga is a great place for that. I like it that Chattanooga has variety like a big city but is still small and familiar.”

In her leisure time: “I play the piano a lot, and I exercise a lot. I also teach aerobics at a couple of gyms here in the area. And we’re always planning and having get-togethers with friends.”

The best advice she ever received: “Be a go-getter, essentially. My dad didn’t give that explicit advice, but he always supported me in whatever I wanted to do. Both he and my mom really encouraged me to take on leadership roles in church and at school, and whenever I’d be hesitant or feel that I couldn’t do it, they’d tell me, ‘Of course you can do it. This is who you are. This is what you do.’ As I got older, that really encouraged me to take charge of my career and find things that suit me, that I enjoy doing, and that allow me to fulfill the important responsibility we have to serve others in this life.”