When the Body Changes Everything: Supporting Clients with Long COVID and POTS Thought Saftey, Grief, and Adaptation
This session explores how health and mental health professionals can effectively support individuals who are navigating long COVID, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), and other life-altering chronic illnesses for the first time. A new diagnosis often disrupts identity, safety, and daily functioning, leaving individuals not only with physical symptoms but also with grief, fear, and a profound loss of trust in their bodies.
Drawing on The Becoming Cycle methodology, this presentation introduces a practical framework for partnering with clients through three phases of adaptation: stabilization, exploration, and integration.
Attendees will learn how to apply a mental health–informed coaching lens that prioritizes nervous system regulation, mindfulness-based safety practices, and compassionate support for the grieving process that accompanies chronic illness.
The session will discuss how Somatic, Acceptance and Commitment, and Mindfulness-based approaches can be integrated to help clients rebuild a sense of internal safety, develop realistic pacing and self-trust, and create a life that is sustainable and meaningful within new physical limits.
Intended Audience: This session is designed for health and wellness coaches, mental health professionals, rehabilitation specialists, nurses, social workers, and allied health professionals who work with individuals experiencing chronic illness, post-viral conditions, or complex health transitions. It is particularly relevant for professionals supporting clients with long COVID, dysautonomia, or conditions that require long-term adaptation and pacing.
How Professionals Will Benefit: Participants will leave with a clear, compassionate framework for supporting clients through the psychological and emotional realities of chronic illness, not just symptom management. They will gain practical strategies to help clients regulate the nervous system, rebuild trust in the body, navigate grief and identity shifts, and set realistic, sustainable goals. Professionals will also deepen their understanding of how to partner with clients in a way that preserves autonomy, reduces shame, and supports long-term resilience and quality of life.
Stephanie Pack
Stephanie Pack is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) with a Certificate in Lifestyle Medicine, currently working in mental health coaching. She is trained in cognitive-behavioral (CBT), Somatic, Acceptance and Commitment (ACT), and Mindfulness-based coaching approaches, and her work integrates evidence-informed practice with a safety-first, autonomy-centered philosophy.
She is the creator of The Becoming Cycle, a methodology that guides individuals through the phases of Stabilization, Exploration, and Integration during times of life transition, and the host of the podcast A Year of Becoming, where she explores midlife reorientation, identity shifts, and the process of becoming with honesty and depth.
Her work focuses on helping people navigate change in ways that are sustainable, self-trusting, and grounded in nervous-system awareness.
Beyond Strategies: Why ADHD Clients Struggle to Implement What They Know — and How Professionals Can Help
Clients with ADHD are often labeled inconsistent, resistant, or noncompliant when struggling to follow health recommendations and daily routines. In reality, these challenges rarely stem from a lack of knowledge or motivation. ADHD is fundamentally linked to differences in executive functioning and self-regulation, the skills required to plan, initiate, and sustain behavior over time.
This session examines the critical gap between knowing what to do and successfully implementing it. Participants will gain insight into how executive function directly impacts follow-through in areas such as sleep, medication adherence, nutrition, stress management, physical activity, and chronic condition care.
Moving beyond symptom awareness, this presentation focuses on practical application. Attendees will learn to recognize when perceived resistance is actually a skills gap and why willpower-based approaches often increase shame, overwhelm, and disengagement.
Using a strengths-based, neurodiversity-affirming lens, this session introduces brain-aligned strategies that help clients translate intention into sustainable action. Participants will leave with concrete tools to support consistency, reduce overwhelm, and improve real-world outcomes.
Intended Audience: Healthcare professionals, health and wellness coaches, mental health providers, educators, and helping professionals who support individuals with ADHD or executive function challenges; particularly those working with capable clients who understand recommended interventions but struggle to implement them consistently.
Professional Benefits: Participants will: • Understand why knowledge does not reliably lead to behavior change for clients with ADHD • Differentiate motivation challenges from executive function barriers • Apply practical strategies that improve engagement and follow-through • Deliver more neurodiversity-affirming support • Reduce client shame while strengthening confidence and self-efficacy • Improve adherence to health recommendations and overall client outcomes
Attendees will leave better equipped to bridge the gap between insight and implementation; enhancing both their effectiveness and the long-term success of the clients they serve.
Christine Kotik
Christine Kotik, PCC, NBC-HWC, is an executive function and health behavior expert specializing in ADHD. She helps professionals understand why
capable clients struggle with consistency and teaches practical, strengths-based approaches that support sustainable behavior change. A former
educator and nationally recognized ADHD coach, Christine is known for translating brain science into immediately usable strategies that improve client
outcomes. She partners with organizations, healthcare providers, and educational institutions to foster more effective, neurodiversity-informed
approaches to care.
Christine Kotik, PCC, NBC-HWC, is an executive function and health behavior expert specializing in ADHD. She helps professionals understand why capable clients struggle with consistency and teaches practical, strengths-based approaches that support sustainable behavior change.
A former educator and nationally recognized ADHD coach, Christine is known for translating brain science into immediately usable strategies that improve client outcomes. She partners with organizations, healthcare providers, and educational institutions to foster more effective, neurodiversity-informed approaches to care.
Becoming a Wise Self-Healer
In this workshop, we will review the Self as Patient, becoming a detective for our own health challenges, the role and limitations of lifestyle change and SNPs, and the need for a curious and open-hearted approach. We have so much inner wisdom and lived experience that can help us heal from chronic, ineffable conditions.
Professionals and lay people alot will learn a lot about how to become wise self healer, working with doctors, health coaches, therapists, and our own sweet selves. I have studied for so long, experimented so much, been a curious detective about the interface of so many internal systems, with my own health. I have tangible successes that I am proud of.
I help friends and peers by sharing my accumulated knowledge and direct them to multiple resources. As a health coach and lifelong student of functional medicine and holistic health, I often can meet doctors at their level of knowledge, and can extract key takeaways to help myself heal.
Come join me on the journey! I will share hacks, resources, approaches and challenges! Our health journeys are our lives! Become a wise self healer! Help your patients become self healers!
Rhyena Halpern
As a holistic health and wellness coach, a third act retirement coach, an end of life doula, and conscious dying educator, Rhyena works with people in the last act of their lives, optimizing health, crafting a design for their third act, developing end of life plans, and facilitating groups of people who are interested in normalizing conversations about death and approaching they mystery of death with delight and wonder.
She lives in Berkeley, worked as a documentary filmmaker and arts manager, and has an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She is a JewBu, progressive activist, lifelong student in the healing arts, and a long time arts lover.
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