MY STORY

WELCOME FRIENDS

I’m Courtney Rickstad and THANK YOU for visiting my website. I am a professional health and wellness coach, physician assistant, and mom. I am certified through Wellcoaches, The American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, and soon to be board certified through the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches. I have been a certified Physician Assistant for the past 10 years with  experience in multiple specialties including critical care, pulmonary, cardiology, and electrophysiology. Most recently, I have found my niche in medical weight loss and bariatric surgery. I have two elementary school aged children, am a former college athlete, and group fitness instructor. 

As with many wellness coaches, we enter the field to discover and remedy a particular area of life that we ourselves are looking to improve. I am no exception. As a child I struggled with my weight and the feelings of inadequacy and lack of belonging. This carried into adolescence where I learned to survive through unhealthy performance based esteem mentality. Perfection and performance were my primary coping mechanisms. I became fit and athletic, was a high school valedictorian, a college athlete, and graduated at the top of my class in both my undergraduate and graduate school studies. 

Unfortunately in 2017, life threw me a curveball with a severe back injury during my second pregnancy which required emergency surgery and left me without work for 6 months. This was then followed by the ending of a marriage,  death of a very close family member, and then came 2020. My “conditioned” ways of surviving in life were shattered. I had to change. I had to learn how to surrender, adopt self compassion, and grow. 

The last 5 years have been all of those things.. I have turned my pain into passion through wellness coaching.. I get to create a partnership with my clients that helps connect the links from where they are currently to where they wnt to be in their ideal level of wellness. Coaching is about being less of an expert, and telling you what to do, and more of a collaborative partnership. My mission is to work together to help others identify what they want more deeply in life, and then help facilitate change based on their priorities, strengths, and experiences.