Georgia started her career by student teaching a health class. She had just graduated from ECU with a bachelor’s degree in Physical Education. Georgia recalls: “we had learned all about the different sports and how to teach physical education to the kids”. When she went in on that first day to help teach the health class, she realized she had only had one lesson on teaching health! The class was hard for Georgia to teach; it was difficult to come up with lesson plans for the students. School did not prepare her for this health side, although this was an important aspect too. This is when she fell in love with health education.

Through the years, she worked at a Health Department focusing on a variety of different topics such as tobacco use prevention, employee wellness, and others. However, always wanting to work on a college campus, when she saw a posting at ECU for peer health education, she went after it. After moving up the ranks, Georgia’s role now takes on a variety of tasks for her department depending on the day, and she is now looking forward to planning their 11th annual cancer event on campus. Her journey to health education and health coaching took her through many turns and walks of life, and has brought her where she is today.

Georgia recently went through the three-day health coach training at ECU in May of 2018 with 21 of her colleagues. They are working together to create a comprehensive model that uses health coaching skills in their practice. For Georgia, the biggest takeaway from the training was authenticity. She plans to “care for the client as soon as they walk through the door, no matter who they are”. She knows she is not there to solve peoples problems. For her, it’s all about “helping people figure out what their own wants and needs are and helping them find their own path with that”. She understands that some people “just want to be heard before making a change instead of going to someone who wants to be the savior”. She plans to help clients help themselves.

Georgia, eager to become a certified health coach, is also very excited to teach a planning class in the fall and “watch the students light bulbs go off”. She even hopes that one day, ECU will have its very own semester-long health coaching class because she believes more people in the health field should know about health coaching.