With thirty-five years of experience in the mental health, wellness, and healthcare industry, Shelly O’Neal is considered an expert at her craft. Born and raised in southern Illinois, she became a therapist and provided counseling before ultimately starting her own health care company. Thriving in watching her clients take control back over their lives, O’Neal began working with companies to do training and wellness activities for their employees actively working on prioritizing their mental health. After many years as a healthcare professional and entrepreneur, she wanted to shift her focus back to coaching and prevention to help normalize wellness. After encouragement from others, she made the leap and SO Wellness was born!
SO Wellness’ mission is to help organizations by designing personalized wellness programs to improve employee performance, attendance, and retention. One of their main goals is to help individuals and organizations function at their highest level using the Four Pillars of Wellness - Emotional, Physical, Spiritual, and Financial. Splitting her time between Nashville and her farm in Kentucky, O’Neal strives to instill healthy habits in all she comes across.
“I noticed as a therapist that people would come into my office and someone would maybe have their financial health in pretty good shape, but not physically or mentally… I noticed the most successful people had all four of those areas well covered,” O’Neal shares, of the inspiration behind the Four Pillars of Wellness at SO Wellness.
Forming healthy, consistent habits are vital; O’Neal noticed patients who formed healthy habits in each category were often putting themselves in the best place mentally, physically, spiritually, and financially. By actively practicing a new habit, you can train your brain to instill it as a new part of your routine.
“Learning to regulate your emotions,” O’Neal shares, speaking on habits she has seen work well for patients and clients. “We can’t control what’s happened to us, or what’s going to… we can only control how we think about it and how we view it.”
For the emotional pillar, learning how to deal with difficult situations is an important factor in life. Whether it be speaking to a professional or following apps for tips, investing in ourselves is important! While physical wellness may seem more obvious, SO Wellness encourages clients to practice daily habits of health; this doesn’t have to be spending hours in the gym, but just making a habit of moving your body. People who move their bodies tend to live longer and age better. Spiritual health is what O’Neal describes as a “spiritual practice”, it is less about religion and more about enhancing our spirituality with nature and finding purpose in the everyday. Finances can be stressful, so implementing positive patterns to make it even a bit less overwhelming is something that O’Neal encourages. For example, spending one night each week overlooking finances that can save an abundance of stress later on. Whether she is working with an individual, a group, or a company, O’Neal instills these four pillars with her clients while also coaching individuals while also developing wellness programs for companies.
SO Wellness has an array of services to choose from; performance coaching for artists, musicians, and athletes, to corporate wellness, Pre-Employment for companies, and leadership development programs, O’Neal primarily serves the entertainment, health care, financial, legal, agriculture, medical, and marine industries.
“The whole purpose of investing in those four areas is for you to be designing your life versus letting life happen to you,” she explains. “There are a lot of things we can’t prevent, but if we are on a path where we are designing what we want to show up in our life, life is less about surviving… you don’t want to have a life that you’ve just survived.”
Built off of practicality, SO Wellness acknowledges that investing in yourself does not have to be expensive or complicated; they advocate for instilling microhabits into your daily routine, starting small and simple, and eventually building off of that.
“I say three wins a day: a physical win, which could be walking for twenty minutes that day, a spiritual win, maybe doing a devotional or writing in a gratitude journal, and a mental win, which could be practicing with your emotions like you would working out,” she shares.
For more information, visit shellyonealwellness.com or keep up on socials @shellyonealwellness.