About Monica

Monica Villalba is a nationwide Wellcoach certified health coach and owner of Mindful Wellness. Over the past 20 years, Monica has held positions in social work and health care. Specifically, she has provided health and life coaching to clients across the United States and in Colombia, her native country. During the last year, she has trained hundreds of individuals in areas such as breathing techniques, and meditation to help with anxiety, strategies for learning new habits that replace unhealthy habits. Monica is passionate, trustworthy, and has been a reliable health coach for all of her clients over the years. She enjoys getting to know her clients and is curious about their goals. She supports their way of making changes based on their level of readiness.  As an experienced wellness coach, she has the ability to use different approaches including Motivational Interviewing, Client-Centered-Therapy, connect deeply with people to help them recognize their abilities and strengths since each client is an expert on their life to work on their goals, encouraging them to use adaptive positive thinking strategies and mindfulness techniques. Monica is bilingual and has provided face to face coaching to Spanish speaking clients in a primary health care setting as well as via phone and video across the United States. Her background in Psychology as well as in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy enables her to provide strong mental health support which aims to facilitate creativity, empathetic, and adaptable health education content. To clients that are seeking self-directed, enduring changes, aligned with their culture and values with the goal of empowering women and men to achieve a better quality of life. Including people with high-risk emotional and chronic medical conditions by changing negative, unhelpful thoughts, behaviors, and developing coping strategies so that it makes it easier to change the way they feel now to the way they want to feel. At the same time that Monica provides one-on-one coaching sessions. She also has the ability and experience to provide health and wellness education to a large group of people from different backgrounds and educational levels by developing workshops and group facilitation on how individuals can apply mindfulness in their physical and emotional health. Monica can help by incorporating or modifying habits and behaviors into their daily routines as a long-lasting process until they become part of their lifestyle. One of the most recent professional achievements is that Monica was part of the first Community Health Workers class at Make the Road New York in 2012, she is now training a new generation of Community Health Workers providing them the skills and competencies needed to work with multicultural communities and clients to provide informal counseling, care management plan, health education, health advocacy, internships, and employment post graduations. 

Monica has been described as an inspiring force, highly committed with her dreams and job because more than a job, this is a rewarding activity she has the privilege to perform every day. Monica is a dedicated mother, wife-partner, energetic friend that loves inspiring people around her to enjoy their life looking for what works well in their life rather than focus on negative experiences. Monica brings positive energy, enjoys drinking coffee in the mornings, singing laughter while driving, doing aerobics and workouts with her mother, reading a book at night when her family is resting. For her, supporting her family, friends, students, and co-workers it’s so important, this is the most beautiful gift she ever had. Finally, Monica enjoys when people can improve their living conditions because happiness, health, well-being, and joy become part of their daily journey so that everyone close to them feels happy, motivated, and hopeful too!

Credentials

• Certified Wellness and Health Coach, Wellcoaches, School of Coaching, Certification Number is 210231. Boston, MA, Expires 2023
• Peer Leader Certification for The Chronic Disease Self-Management Program. Health First, Developed by Stanford University. New York, January 2020.
• Peer Leader Certification for The Diabetes Self-Management Program – SMRC Evidence-Based Self- Management programs originally Developed by Stanford University, New York, January 2020
• Screening Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment, SBIRT Training, NYS Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services, Credential ID, 1272. New York, NY 2019
• NIEHS Disaster Worker Resilience Training, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). New York, NY 2019