AI and Health Coaches: Helpful Partnership or Existential Threat?

In this leading-edge presentation, Dr. Meg Jordan presents a provocative inquiry about the accelerated pace and encroachment of relational AI into the coaching and therapy professions. Well-researched with colleagues who were founding members of the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching (NBHWC), Dr. Jordan will take participants through the astounding journey of AI’s development to the current and future iterations that require innovative leaps on the part of helping professions in order to remain relevant and well utilized.

Objectives

• Understand the emerging role of AI in health coaching
• Recognize risks of AI overreliance on health coaching or mental health chatbot apps
• Develop strategies for balancing AI and human connection
• Strengthen awareness of NBHWC competencies that relate to self-awareness and psychological safety.

Instructor’s Goal

We are told that AI is a powerful, exciting technology that will help you with everything from client tracking and research to discovering resources and admin charting. And at the same time, we are witnessing how AI is disruptive and terrifying as it replaces human labor at an accelerating rate, and how the current chatbots are laced with bias and regularly hallucinate. But we’re also told by tech titans that AI “is only getting smarter and not going away,” so my goals is to find ways to develop a partnership with AI that makes our lives easier. Let this workshop spur us to use AI to higher level of thinking and functioning and advanced health coaching.

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Instructor Bio

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Professor Meg Jordan, Ph.D., R.N., CWP, ACC, NBC-HWC, is core faculty member, where her focus is preparing graduate students to be catalysts for positive change in health care, wellness, and health promotion. Dr. Jordan is a clinical medical anthropologist, an award-winning international health journalist, behavioral medicine specialist, RN, National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, author, and President of Global Medicine Enterprises, Inc. In 2018, she was awarded the William B. Baun Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Wellness Institute (NWI) for her contributions to the field of health and wellness and to NWI.

Her areas of expertise include integrative medicine, behavioral medicine, health promotion, wellness, and fitness. As a medical anthropologist, she specializes in the study of multidisciplinary models for integrative medicine (healing circles) and the emergence of health coaches as novel agents in health behavior change. Dr. Jordan is a shared first author of the peer-reviewed National Training and Education Standards for Health and Wellness Coaching: The Path to National Certification. In 2012 she received a grant from Aetna Foundation to bring a unique model of Integrative Wellness Coaching to public housing residents. She is founder of American Fitness Magazine, and author of several books, including The Fitness Instinct and How to Be a Health Coach: An Integrative Wellness Approach.

 Former director of Integrative Practice at the Health Medicine Center, she has a clinical practice as a behavioral health specialist and is a certified coach with the International Coach Federation. She serves on numerous editorial review boards and professional membership boards. She is past co-president of the National Wellness Institute (NWI), on the executive board of the National Consortium for Credentialing Health and Wellness Coaches (NCCHWC), and the Leadership Council of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine. She received the Circle and Leadership Service Award and earned one of the first Certified Wellness Professional (CWP) standings from NWI.

The Integrative Health Studies M.A. program was recognized for Academic Excellence in 2011 by the National Wellness Institute after she reconfigured and restructured the curriculum. As a cardiac rehabilitation director, she helped establish the nation's first hospital-based wellness center in Los Angeles, and later, as a hospital trustee, at ValleyCare Health System in northern California. Dr. Jordan is former health news commentator for NBC Today show and was host of Global Medicine Hunter® radio and TV in US and Canada. She was a governor appointee, serving on the first California Governor's Council for Physical Fitness and Sports. She is a sought-after keynote presenter both in the U.S. and internationally. In 2016, she presented at the CDC in Atlanta, among other integrative health conferences. Her hobbies include racing sailboats on San Francisco Bay, music, film, and hiking.

Related Academic Program

M.A in Integrative Health Studies