Army Community, Army Spouse and Family Resources - Army Times

Mission: Family: Schedule your free personal health coach

Who among us isn’t looking for ways to make positive changes in our lives?

Some spouses want to lose weight before their service members return from deployment. Others seek to reduce stress or exercise more.

Would you be more motivated if you had a personal coach — for free?

Through Military OneSource’s Health Coaching program, you can arrange for a personal coach to help you to establish a health goal and a plan for meeting it. Anyone eligible for Military OneSource — active-duty, National Guard and reserve members, and their families — can use the program.

Coaching is done over the phone. You set up a schedule of times you want to be contacted, and that person will call and check on your progress in meeting your goal, said Barbara Thompson, director of the Defense Department’s office of family policy, children and youth.

Let’s say you’ve set a goal of walking two miles at least three days a week. Your personal coach will help you plan the steps to build up to that and will call you to ask how you’re doing — to see if you’ve hit any roadblocks and to talk about solutions.

“It’s somebody rooting in your corner,” Thompson said. The coach could help you get over your lethargy or face down those excuses for why you can’t take time for your health.

And it’s free.

Call 800-342-9647, or go online to www.militaryonesource.com for more information or to sign up. If you’re overseas, the Web site has additional phone numbers you can call at no charge.

You may remember reading in these pages about teacher Krissy Stratton, an Air Force wife who, like many other military spouses, was having trouble finding a job.

When she moved from Wyoming to Florida early this year, the local school district was cutting back on teachers, so she explored every other possibility.

Six months after she began pounding the pavement, she was thankful to get a job offer at the base child development center — even though it was a temporary position outside her career field, with no guarantee of work hours.

In August, she was hired as a third-grade teacher in the local public school system. “I am excited to be back in the schools,” she said.

Although she says she was “just very lucky,” she’s an example for all of us. Everyone she met was a potential source of information about a job. One person happened to work in the local school district and called Stratton with information about a job opening.

Stratton called the principal the next day, was interviewed on her lunch hour that same day and got the job.

“The biggest thing is networking,” she said.