Some careers move in a straight line. Others circle back on themselves, picking up the same threads decades apart and weaving them tighter each time. Dina Markind’s belongs to the second kind, a path that began at a hospital bedside in Philadelphia and has, more than forty years later, arrived at a life and leadership coaching practice built entirely around one word: well-being.
Dina is the Life and Leadership Coach behind Heart of Well-Being.com, a Danbury, Connecticut-based practice she has run remotely since July 2012. She holds a Master of Science in Nursing from Pace University, is a Professional Certified Coach, and carries a certificate in positive psychology, a combination that shows up in almost everything she does.
From the Bedside to the Boardroom
Dina’s clinical roots run deep. She began as a staff nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, building individualized plans of care alongside patients and physicians. From 1991 to 2006, she moved through nursing and nurse practitioner roles at Danbury Health Systems, including work in palliative care, hospice, and visiting nurse settings. She has said that her favorite part of nursing was simply getting to know people while providing education and counseling, a preference that, in hindsight, reads like a preview of the career still to come.
That transition began to take shape between 2010 and 2019, when she ran 2 for Your Health, her own certified coaching practice in Danbury, specializing in coaching healthcare professionals who had lost their enthusiasm for the work. In January 2016, she introduced Lead from Your Strengths, a four-session coaching package built around identifying and using a client’s strengths to their greatest benefit.
Vital Signs of Well-Being®
Dina’s signature offering today is Vital Signs of Well-Being®, a program she presents to organizations that integrates tools from positive psychology and coaching so that participants learn to prevent and recover from burnout. She has also written a companion e-book, Vital Signs of Well-Being, available on Kindle. Beyond that program, she speaks widely on building resilience, on ways to relate positively, on the impact and development of positivity, and on what she calls Oasis 60-second strategies, quick tools for re-balancing in the middle of a busy day.
One employee at Westchester Medical Center summed up the appeal simply: “Tangible ideas to implement in your daily life.” A client named Antoinette put it more personally. “I so appreciated all your guidance and help,” she said. “I’ve come from our sessions feeling more focused, and … braver. I know I can go forward, embracing new things, without being afraid. Thank you!”
Learning to Read a Room
What stands out about Dina’s approach, according to those who describe working with her, is a nurturing style that leans on strengths rather than deficits. She does not begin by asking what is broken. She begins by asking what a person already does well, then builds outward from there, mapping a plan toward the life the client says they actually want. It is a subtle shift in posture, but one that clients like Antoinette and the staff member at Westchester Medical Center both point to when describing what actually changed for them.
That style did not appear out of nowhere. It was shaped, in part, by years of one-on-one calls and group sessions run through 2 for Your Health, where she worked specifically with healthcare professionals who had lost their spark, and by her academic work training the next generation of coaches to hold the same eleven competencies she had once studied herself.
A Coach Among Coaches
Dina’s coaching credentials were not assembled casually. In 2011, she completed her initial coaching certification through the Co-Active Training Institute, developing expertise in the theory and practice of Co-Active Coaching. She later served in an academic oversight role for the coaching curriculum at The Graduate Institute’s Integrative Health Coaching Patient Navigation Program, collaborating with a fellow coach to ground students in the eleven core coaching competencies outlined by the International Coach Federation.
Her professional footprint widened further through BetterUp, the international coaching platform headquartered in California, where she has served as a Fellow Coach since February 2019, and where she later held the title of Premier Fellow Coach. Alongside that, she has continued for more than fifteen years as a Leadership and Well-Being Coach across the Greater New York City area, and since July 2016 as a Professional Coach and Speaker on topics related to well-being, coaching clients over the phone and internet from Danbury.
What the Work Is Actually For
Strip away the titles and program names, and Dina describes a fairly consistent goal across four decades of work: helping people, especially healthcare professionals, rebuild self-compassion, gain clarity about what matters to them, and find both a vision for a better future and the courage to pursue it. It is, in her words, about exploring the leader within so a person can become “the valued leader of yourself and others.”
That framing matters, because her clients are frequently the same kind of people she once worked alongside on hospital floors, the nurses, physicians, and administrators whose jobs run on other people’s emergencies and who rarely pause to ask what they themselves need. Her own history as a nurse means she is not offering theory from the outside. She has stood at the same bedsides, worked the same long shifts, and felt the same fatigue that later became her specialty to address in others.
More than four decades after she first put on a nurse’s badge in Philadelphia, Dina Markind is still, in essence, doing the same work. She has simply moved the setting from the hospital floor to the coaching call, shifting her focus from clinical care to the professional’s own depleted reserves.
