I have spent most of my professional life somewhere in the strange intersection between health, fitness, wellness and business.

I have owned a gym. I have coached people privately. I have worked for large fitness and wellness companies. I have hired practitioners and instructors, referred people to other professionals, and spent a frankly ridiculous number of hours thinking about clients when I was technically not working. I have seen this industry from a lot of different angles.

And the longer I work in it, the more convinced I am that most of the people doing the actual work are not the problem.

There are extraordinarily educated, qualified people working inside large health and wellness organizations who care deeply about the people they serve. There are also systems built around efficiency, scale and cost that can make doing that work well much harder than it should be.

There is a tremendous amount of invisible labor involved in caring for another human being. The appointment is only part of it. Good practitioners think about people afterward. We look something up. We find a resource. We reconsider something you said three conversations ago because suddenly it makes more sense. We prepare, document, consult and wonder whether the thing we suggested actually worked.

We think. And thinking takes time. That gets complicated when care has to scale. There are real advantages to corporate wellness and healthcare. If your employer or insurance gives you easy access to therapy, coaching, physical therapy, nutrition support, fitness programming or other services, that can remove enormous barriers.

You don’t have to figure out where to go. You may pay very little out of pocket. Several kinds of support might exist in one convenient place. For someone who otherwise wouldn’t seek help at all, that can be incredibly valuable.

But convenience and comprehensive care aren’t necessarily the same thing as individualized care. Humans remain inconveniently individual.

Sometimes the practitioner available through your benefits is exactly the person you need. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes a short appointment is plenty. Sometimes it barely scratches the surface. Sometimes your needs fit beautifully into the services available to you, and sometimes what you need exists outside that ecosystem entirely.

None of this is exclusive to wellness. Healthcare has been consolidating for years, influenced by insurance, reimbursement, administrative costs and the economics of delivering care. Wellness increasingly operates under many of the same pressures. Scale solves certain problems beautifully. Relationships are harder to scale.

And then there is the other side of this industry. Independent coaches, trainers, therapists, dietitians and other practitioners now exist in an internet economy that has completely changed what we expect expertise to cost. There is more free health information available than any of us could consume in a lifetime.

I could spend every day giving you workouts, nutrition tips, habit hacks, morning routines and "Five Things Every Woman Over 40 Needs to Know." Some of it would probably be useful. But there is a limit to how useful I can be when I don’t know you.

The longer I coach, the less interested I am in pretending otherwise. I don’t know whether you need to train harder or recover more. I don’t know whether tracking your food would give you useful information or make your relationship with food worse. I don’t know whether you need more structure or whether your life is already so structured that one more thing to manage will push you over the edge.

I don’t know because I haven’t asked you enough questions, yet. That isn’t withholding information. That is the work.

And somehow we have built an online wellness economy where practitioners are expected to give away enormous amounts of expertise to prove that their expertise is worth paying for.

At the same time, good marketing has become almost indistinguishable from good care: Lose this much weight. Fix your hormones. Heal your metabolism. Transform your life in thirty days. People buy those promises, they don’t always get what was promised, and eventually they become skeptical of everyone.

Then legitimate practitioners enter a marketplace where people are simultaneously suspicious of paying for help and accustomed to receiving endless advice for free. It’s a strange place to work.

That doesn’t mean independent practitioners are automatically better. They’re not. I have met extraordinary professionals inside large organizations and independent practitioners I wouldn’t refer anyone to. Nor do I think everyone should abandon employer benefits, or corporate wellness and start paying privately for everything. That’s neither realistic nor necessary.

Sometimes convenience is exactly what you need. Sometimes accessibility matters more than perfect fit. Sometimes the person available through your benefits is fantastic. But sometimes paying a practitioner privately isn’t paying for information you could have Googled. You’re paying for attention.

You’re paying for someone to know enough about you to recognize which information matters and which doesn’t. To notice patterns. To adjust. To remember. To recognize the edges of their expertise and tell you when you need someone else. You’re paying for a relationship with someone whose job isn’t simply to dispense advice, but to help you figure out what to do with it.

Those of us working in this industry have responsibilities here, too. We need to stop promising outcomes we can’t guarantee. Stay within our scope. Refer out. Be transparent about our qualifications. And stop reinforcing the idea that whoever delivers the most confident 30-second answer must know the most.

We also need to talk about the conditions that allow people to do good work. When practitioners are overloaded, underpaid, tightly scheduled or given little room for the work that happens around an appointment, eventually those working conditions become part of the care people receive. You cannot optimize every minute of someone’s day and expect an infinite supply of curiosity, patience and empathy. Those things require space.

After years of moving between independent business, coaching and larger wellness organizations, I don’t think the answer is choosing one side. I think it is becoming much more thoughtful about what we’re actually choosing.

Use the convenient option when it serves you. Use your benefits. Ask questions about who’s providing your care and what they’re qualified to do. Go outside the system when it doesn’t meet your needs, if you have that option. And support independent practitioners and local businesses when having those choices available in your community matters to you.

Most importantly, maybe we stop measuring the value of a practitioner by how quickly they can give us an answer: After all these years of coaching, I increasingly believe the opposite. I don’t need to have an answer for you before I know you. I need enough time, skill, and curiosity to ask the right questions that will help us find the right answers.

NBC-HWC | ACSM-CPT

Mental PEAKS: Choose the person, not just a platform.

Whether you are choosing a coach, trainer, therapist, dietitian, physical therapist or another practitioner, convenience and a polished website can tell you very little about whether someone is actually right for you.

Start with qualifications and scope. What are they trained to do? What are they not trained to do? A good practitioner should be able to answer both questions.

Pay attention to how much they ask before they answer. Expertise doesn’t always sound like certainty. Often it sounds like, Tell me more.

Look for personalization beyond your demographics. Being a 45-year-old woman, a runner, a new parent or someone trying to lose weight doesn’t automatically tell someone what you need. Your history, preferences, resources, barriers and actual life matter.

Notice how they handle the edges of their expertise. Someone willing to say, “That’s outside my scope, but here’s who can help,” is showing you something important about how they practice.

Be skeptical of guaranteed outcomes. A practitioner can explain their process, share evidence and help you make informed choices. They cannot control every variable in your body or your life.

And finally, ask yourself a very simple question:

Do I feel like this person is trying to understand me, or trying to fit me into what they already sell or provide?

Sometimes the easiest option really is the right one. Sometimes the person covered by your benefits is fantastic. Sometimes paying privately is worth every penny.

The goal isn’t to find the fanciest credentials, the biggest following or the “perfect” practitioner. It’s to become a more informed participant in your own care, and to choose people who treat you like one.

Join us for Power in Practice 2027

Power in Practice is heading to South Tyrol, Italy, May 30–June 5, 2027. We’ll be based at Das Paradies, a beautiful 5-star retreat hotel in Latsch, with the mountains right outside the door. Expect daily movement, hiking, spa and sauna time, incredible food, a day in Merano, plenty of space to exhale, and the kind of connection that happens when a small group of very good humans gets out of everyday life for a while. And this is no longer just a “someday” retreat. People are already putting their deposits down. This one will stay intentionally intimate, and our VIP list gets first access to details, availability, and special presale pricing. If Italy in the spring sounds like your kind of reset, get on the list now so you’re first to know what’s still available. ​Join the Power in Practice Italy VIP List or hit reply and tell me you want first dibs on the Dolomites details!

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