About Me

Rob Wicke AMACCPH

20+ Years Changing Lives

When I was about twelve, I had a Jade plant perched on my bedroom windowsill — a plump, glossy little thing that shed leaves every time I climbed up to call my cat in for the night. One day I noticed something curious: the fallen leaves were sprouting tiny roots. Just lying there. Doing their thing. I decided to pop them back into the soil, give them a drink, and watched in amazement as they turned into whole new plants. It blew my young mind. It was my first real lesson that life wants to grow — and with the right conditions, it absolutely will.

That fascination with plants eventually nudged me into gardening as a job. After a Sociology detour at university, I found myself teaching gardening to young people who’d left school with no qualifications. They weren’t “problems to be solved”; they were simply people who’d been in the wrong environment for too long. And the moment they got outdoors, got their hands in the soil (or rather on some dangerous power tools), and saw the impact of their work — they lit up. They were being treated with respect, not managed. Not neutralised. Just met as humans.

We talked, we worked, we set boundaries rooted in mutual respect. And something in me said: Yes. More of this.

Then my back gave out. Properly. Doctor’s orders: no more heavy labour. It was the financial crisis, so finding work was… character‑building (or rather, stressful and demoralising). Eventually I became a trainee Community Organiser, learning how to bring strangers together around shared interests and help them take action in their neighbourhoods. That led to me managing a 10‑year community development programme designed entirely by local residents.

While I was helping people change their external environment, I was quietly learning how to change my internal one. I’d been meditating for years, but most of my “healing” was still happening in my head — ideas, theories, philosophies. Slowly, I began to feel the real connection between my body, my thoughts, my emotions, and the world around me.

And then came the big realisation: I was stressing myself out daily. I was scanning for threats that weren’t there, tightening my body, living in survival mode for no good reason. Meditation and yoga gave me brief relief, but I’d dive straight back into tension.

Then came the turning point: intense pain, a desperate Google search, a couple of paragraphs on a website about pain processing… and one morning I woke up pain‑free for the first time in eleven years. Eleven. Years.

As the miracle settled in — and the pain stubbornly refused to return — I realised something profound: my nervous system had been living in the wrong gear. I flourish when I’m seeing beauty, feeling beauty, and not obsessing over imaginary threats.

And I want to be clear: some people are living with real, immediate danger — violence, war, illness, starvation, grief. Their nervous systems are doing exactly what they need to survive. My experience is a fortunate one, and I don’t take that lightly. But for me, the right conditions to grow — just like those Jade leaves — were gentleness, safety, and a shift from survival to rest‑recovery‑expansion.

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Why I Became a Health Coach

Somewhere in the middle of all this — the gardening, the community organising, the back pain, the miracle morning — a realisation began to take shape. I didn’t want to manage people. I didn’t want to push them. I didn’t want to be another voice telling someone to try harder, be better, hustle more, or “fix” themselves or their community. I’d seen enough of that in schools, in services, in workplaces, in myself.

What I wanted was to help people create the right conditions — the same way those Jade leaves needed nothing more than soil, water, light and time to become whole new plants.

That’s why I became a health coach. It felt like the most natural extension of everything I’d lived: the gardening, the community building, the healing, the philosophy, the nervous system work. Not the kind of coaching that’s all about accountability spreadsheets and performance metrics, but the kind that treats a human being like… a human being. A living system. A creature wired for growth, safety, curiosity, and expansion.

My approach to health coaching is rooted in:

- Safety instead of pressure — because a nervous system in survival mode can’t heal or change sustainably.

- Exploration instead of force — because real transformation comes from discovery, not discipline.

- Listening instead of overriding — because the body is wiser than any plan.

- Agency instead of authority — because people flourish when they feel their own power returning.

- Conditions instead of commands — because growth happens when the environment is right, not when the plant is shouted at.

It’s the opposite of “fixing.” It’s the opposite of “pushing.” It’s an invitation — to soften, to notice, to feel, to understand, to experiment, to grow.

This is the heart of my work now: helping people shift from surviving to flourishing, from bracing to breathing, from threat to beauty. Because when the conditions are right — internally and externally — magnificent things can happen.

ACCPH Accredited Coach

SIRPA Informed Professional