Review of The Fibromyaglia Coach: Feel Better, Change Lives, and Find Your Best Job Ever

The Fibromyalgia Coach

The Fibromyalgia Coach: Feel Better, Change Lives, and Find Your Best Job Ever is written by Tami Stackelhouse who also wrote Take Back Your Life: Find Hope And Freedom From Fibromyalgia Symptoms And Pain. You can read my review of her first book here.

Tami has also started The Fibromyalgia Coaching Institute to train people to be fibromyalgia coaches and advisors. You can also find a fibro coach at this institute.

Tammy’s goals for this book are one: to “provide you, as a fibromyalgia patient, a way to evaluate your needs so that you can find the best job for you.” Her second goal is to “provide enough information on what a Fibromyalgia Coach is and does that you will know if being a coach or working with a coach might be helpful for you.”

She starts out by relating her story with fibromyalgia, and then asks us to shift our thinking:

“Your world doesn’t revolve around your illness.

It revolves around your healing.”

I learned that our brains look for what we focus on. If we’re focusing on what we cannot do, our brains notice more of what we can’t do. If we focus on taking care of ourselves, our brain notices all the times we choose to help ourselves heal. This is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. I’m going to have to mull this over.

Eight Key Questions To Identify Successful Work With Fibromyalgia

Tami asks eight questions to guide us in assessing and addressing our physical, mental, and social needs and our idea of successful work.

The questions are:

1. How much control will I have over work hours and deadlines?
2. What equipment or skill set is needed?
3. What is the volume of work?
4. How physically demanding is the work?
5. How mentally and emotionally demanding is the work?
6. How social is the work?
7. Am I getting a good return on my investment of time, money, and energy?
8. Am I making a difference?

Tami then gives “action steps” to help us figure out how to incorporate our needs, while working on  improving our health, to get a picture of what kind of work is manageable and rewarding.

My Conclusions About The Fibromyalgia Coach

Personally, I’m struggling with the “healing” idea. Chronic illnesses can be managed, but they don’t heal in my experience. I also have multiple chronic illnesses, not just fibro. Depression is kicking my butt lately, so that may be coloring my vision here.

I think the book does a good job of getting people to think about either using or training to be a fibromyalgia coach. Tami is passionate about training more coaches so that more fibromyalgia sufferers would have someone to talk to who understands what it’s like to have fibro, and who could offer sound information to help manage the disease.

The eight questions would help anyone to evaluate any job they were considering. The questions would help you pick a job that won’t make your health worse, which is really important.

I would recommend this book to anyone with fibromyalgia.

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Till next time, Kathy