Macmillan Well-Being Coaching
Our Macmillan Well-Being Coaches are here to help you if you have or have had cancer. They offer free, remote coaching to people who want to work towards making a positive change in their life.
Service closed
The Well-Being Coaching pilot service is now closed for referrals.
If you are looking for support from Macmillan, then we do have a number of other services at Macmillan that you might be interested in:
- To keep everyone safe, we have stopped all our face-to-face volunteering. But if you need someone to talk to, you can sign up for our Telephone Buddies service.
- You can now make a virtual appointment with our No7 Boots Macmillan Beauty Advisors. They can give make-up and skincare advice to help you manage visible side effects of cancer treatment.
- Macmillan are currently offering a free counselling service in collaboration with Bupa. You can refer yourself into this service by calling Macmillan Support line on 0808 808 00 00. Our colleagues on the support line will listen to you and your needs and may refer you for an assessment.
What is Well-Being Coaching?
Macmillan Well-Being Coaching is a free and remote service to improve your mental health and well-being. We have Macmillan Well-being Coaches across the UK who can work with you over the phone or via video call.
Well-being Coaching is a partnership between you and a coach. The coach helps you to learn about yourself so you can take actions to live life as fully as you can.
The coach will:
- Listen to your concerns and how you’re feeling, without judgement.
- Question and reflect these concerns back to you. They may use other approaches so you can define your challenges together.
- Support you to make your own decisions. They will help you take steps towards overcoming these challenges.
How can Well-Being Coaching help you?
Our coaches have helped people affected by cancer in many ways. They could support you in the following ways, or with other challenges not listed here.
- Better understand what’s on your mind and come to terms with your life with or after cancer.
- Build confidence to talk with a loved one about what you’re going through and how they can support you.
- Develop coping strategies for challenging situations you find yourself in.
- Learn how to pause and reflect on a challenging situation before reacting.
- Build courage to be around other people and to communicate with them.
- Find new opportunities for work, study or leisure that interest you.
- Learn to feel okay with making mistakes and become more able to move forward with your life.
Who are the Macmillan Well-Being Coaches?
Not all of the Well-being Coaches have had cancer themselves or have been carers. But cancer has impacted their lives in such a way that they want to support people living with cancer.
The Macmillan Well-being Coaches have:
- coaching qualifications from trustworthy institutions
- experience working with a wide range of people in vulnerable situations
- gone through a screening process to make sure they can deliver quality coaching
- are volunteers who have received specialist training from Macmillan about the impact of cancer.
Macmillan Well-being Coaches are not experts in cancer and treatment. For specialist cancer information, you should speak to a cancer information nurse specialist on the Macmillan Support Line.
Who can use Macmillan's Well-Being Coaching?
The Macmillan Well-being Coaching service is available to anyone who has received a cancer diagnosis. You might be living with cancer currently, be in remission, or have been diagnosed in the past. The service is for anyone who meets the requirements below:
- You are over 18 years old.
- You have something you want to achieve or work on.
- You feel coaching could support you to make a positive change to your life.
- You want to work towards changing negative thoughts, beliefs and actions.
- You want to commit time and energy to working with a Well-being Coach.
- You commit to being punctual to sessions and will let us know if you need to cancel one.
- You are available to take part in up to six coaching sessions over the course of up to 12 weeks.
We are committed to ensuring that Macmillan Cancer Support is a great place for everyone, and prioritise maintaining a fair, equal, and inclusive environment. Our Well-being Coaching service is available to anyone in the UK who is living with cancer, regardless of age, disability, gender identity, marriage, civil partnership, pregnancy, maternity, race, gender, sexual orientation or religion and belief. We want everyone to be able to access this service, so please let us know if there is anything we can do to support you with this.
How has Well-Being Coaching helped other people?
"I’ve learnt to deal with how I’m feeling with treatment. I had trouble saying the word ‘cancer’.
It’s helped me in my confidence, I can talk about having cancer and how it’s affected me more
openly now."
Amanda
"Coaching has brought new things to me, it’s made me think about other careers and things.
I said I feel stupid saying it’s nutrition, but that’s it. [The well-being coach] got me all this
information and stuff about it. I now think ‘yeah go for it man’ so I’m doing a course in nutrition."
Michael
"I was having a lot of emotional stuff with people. I don’t think I’m a people person and I do lose
the plot with them. Coaching has made me feel a lot more positive about myself. I can now look
at people and think that I am just as good as you."
Josephine
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