🌿 Nursing from the Inside Out — The Coaching Journey & The Credentials ✦

May 23 (edited) • 💗NURSING FROM THE INSIDE-OUT

I am a Proud Nurse and a Proud Nurse Practitioner — with the full clinical training, the prescriptive authority, the diagnostic lens, and the years of advanced practice that come with that title — who made a deliberate, informed, deeply considered choice to go deeper than the biomedical model alone could take me. With the type of education we provide our patients, as nurses, the coaching journey just made sense to me.

That choice — made not out of dissatisfaction with clinical medicine but out of absolute conviction that human beings deserve more than it alone can offer — is what Nursing from the Inside Out is built on.

And the coaching journey that shaped that choice deserves to be named. 💙

✦ A Note About What I Am About to Share ✦

I have attended many nurse coaching programs and many non-nursing coaching programs throughout my career. More than I could list in a single post. Each one added a layer. Each one expanded the framework.

But some teachers leave a mark that the others do not. Some programs land in a place that changes not just what you know but who you are.

These are the ones that stand out most. The ones that became foundational — to my practice, to my credentialing, to the book, and to everything I am still building. 💙

✦ Ryma Belkus ✦

One of my earliest and most influential coaching teachers. She helped me begin to understand — as a nurse practitioner already practicing from a clinical advanced practice foundation — that coaching and nursing were not separate disciplines but the same act of healing approached from a different angle.

She planted seeds that are still growing. 🌿

✦ Circle of Life Coaching — Rebecca McLean & Dr. Roger Jahnke ✦

Dr. Roger Jahnke, OMD, needs no introduction in the integrative health world — but he deserves one here, because what he built is extraordinary.

A Doctor of Classical Chinese Medicine. Author of the bestselling books The Healer Within and The Healing Promise of Qi — both classics in energy medicine and integrative health. Co-founder of the National Qigong Association. Director of the Institute of Integral Qigong and Tai Chi in Santa Barbara, California. A teacher who has spent over 40 years bringing the healing wisdom of qigong, tai chi, and Classical Chinese Medicine to thousands of practitioners — nurses, physicians, therapists, social workers, military personnel — worldwide. (Fun fact: In a past life, I completed a semester of acupuncture school!)

His Circle of Life holistic coaching model — developed with Rebecca McLean through Health Action Synergies — taught me something essential that my NP training alone had not fully captured: that the most profound medicine is not prescribed. It is cultivated. It is grown from within the patient — and the nurse practitioner who understands this is a fundamentally different kind of clinician than one who does not.

The Circle of Life model wove qigong principles, mindfulness, and whole-person integrative health into a coaching framework that expanded my clinical thinking in ways that no advanced practice curriculum had. 💙

✦ Linda Bark, PhD, RN, MCC — Wisdom of the Whole Coaching Academy ✦

Dr. Linda Bark is a pioneer in every sense of the word.

A nurse since the 1960s. One of the first nurses in the country in private practice — in 1970. A Master Certified Coach with nearly 30 years of private coaching practice and 25 years training coaches internationally at Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and organizations around the world.

Her book — The Wisdom of the Whole: Coaching for Joy, Health, and Success — was awarded the American Journal of Nursing 2012 Book of the Year for Professional Development and Issues. And she has recently been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Holistic Nurses Association — one of the highest honors in holistic nursing.

But perhaps most significantly for every nurse practitioner reading this post: Linda Bark was instrumental in creating the Nurse Coach Board Certification through the AHNCC. The very credential that now sits behind my name — HWNC-BC — exists in part because of the decades Linda spent building the foundation that made it possible.

Her Wisdom of the Whole Coaching Academy — the only coaching program simultaneously approved by ICF, NBHWC, and AHNCC — gave me the coaching architecture that made everything else cohere. Not just as a coach. As a nurse practitioner who practices from the whole person. 💙

✦ What These Programs Built — Together ✦

As a nurse practitioner I came to coaching not as a replacement for clinical practice but as its deepest possible extension.

The NP credential gave me the diagnostic framework, the prescriptive authority, the advanced clinical assessment skills. The coaching programs gave me something the clinical training did not: the capacity to meet a patient in the full complexity of their humanity — their beliefs, their behaviors, their emotional patterns, their relationship with their own healing — and to partner with them there.

Together they created something the healthcare system rarely produces: a clinician who can write a prescription AND sit with a patient in the silence of what the prescription cannot reach.

That is what Nursing from the Inside Out was always trying to describe. And it is what the coaching journey — alongside the clinical training — made possible in me. 💙

✦ The Credentials That Followed ✦

After years of clinical practice as a nurse practitioner, advanced holistic nursing study, coaching education across nursing and non-nursing programs, and decades of bringing all of it to real patients in real clinical moments —

I earned the formal credentials that named what I had already become.

🏅 DNP — Doctor of Nursing Practice

The terminal clinical degree for advanced nursing practice.

🏅 FNP-BC — Family Nurse Practitioner — Board Certified

The advanced practice credential that is the foundation of my clinical identity.

🏅 PMHNP-BC — Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner — Board Certified

The credential that reflects my commitment to the full spectrum of mental health in nursing practice.

🏅 AHN-BC — Advanced Holistic Nurse — Board Certified

The certification recognizing advanced holistic nursing practice across body, mind, spirit, and environment — awarded by the AHNCC.

🏅 HWNC-BC — Holistic Wellness Nurse Coach — Board Certified

The integration of holistic nursing and the art and science of coaching — formally recognized. Built on the foundation that Linda Bark and others spent decades creating for nurses like me.

These letters follow my name. But the journey came first. Always. 💙

✦ What I Want You to Hear ✦

I am sharing this not to impress you with a credential list. I am sharing it because I am a nurse practitioner who chose — deliberately, across decades, across dozens of programs and teachers and modalities — to go further than the clinical training took me.

And I want every advanced practice nurse, every nurse practitioner, every clinical nurse specialist, every CRNA, every CNM reading this to know:

Your clinical training is not the ceiling. It is the floor.

The coaching programs, the holistic certifications, the energy healing modalities, the somatic practices, the consciousness work — none of it diminishes your clinical identity. All of it deepens it.

Nursing from the inside out — from the highest point of your consciousness — is available to every nurse practitioner who chooses to reach for it.

I am still reaching. 💙

Drop a 💛 below if this resonates — if you are an NP, an advanced practice nurse, or any nurse on the holistic path who recognizes that the clinical credential was the beginning, not the destination.

The journey continues. ⬇️🌿✨

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🌿 Nursing from the Inside Out — The Coaching Journey & The Credentials ✦