July 15, 2025 • 33 mins
Join host Erin Power as she reboots the show by reflecting on her personal journey to becoming a health coach and shares what she’s witnessing in the coaching world as an educator with Primal Health Coach Institute.
In this highly relatable, candid episode, she discusses:
- Her path from student to seasoned coach and how that shapes her current work
- Common and surprising coaching trajectories she observes in her students
- Shifts happening in the health coaching industry today—from business models to client needs
- How educators can support coaches in adapting, scaling, and staying true to their values
Expect an authentic, introspective conversation that will resonate whether you're just starting or teaching others to coach.
Episode Overview:
0:00 Introduction
1:13 - Rebooting the Podcast & Observing Coaching Paths
1:54 - Erin’s Health Crisis: The Turning Point
3:32 - Life Before Diagnosis: A Misguided Pursuit of Health
5:50 - When Everything Fell Apart
7:03 - Discovering the Role of Stress & Lifestyle
9:14 - The Rabbit Hole: Books, Research, and Realization
10:50 - Making Changes: Food, Stress, and Quitting Her Job
12:00 - The Big Payoff: Brain Clarity and Feeling Alive Again
13:27 - Coaching Clients Through Metabolic Dysfunction
14:34 - The Pain-to-Purpose Journey of Health Coaches
16:00 - The Question That Changed Everything
17:32 - From Evangelist to Educator
19:03 - Getting Certified and Learning How to Coach
20:57 - Starting Her Health Coaching Practice
23:30 - Balancing Coaching with Part-Time Jobs
25:38 - Advice for New Coaches: Make It Work on Your Terms
27:40 - Wrapping Up: Coaching with Purpose and Passion
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
In this episode, I share my own personal journey to health coaching, which started about 15 years ago.
And now, 15 years later, I really have established myself as a leader in the industry.
I've got industry clout and thought leadership status, which I actually do think is one of the end goals of a health coaching trajectory.
(00:20):
But you might be somewhere else on that continuum.
Maybe you're thinking of making the leap to health coaching.
Maybe you've just done it.
Maybe you're in the messy middle.
Either way, I'd love for you to listen to my story to get some inspiration to keep moving because, gosh darn it, the health coaching industry needs you.
Please enjoy.
Hi, I'm Erin Power.
I'm a health coach, a health coaching educator, and mentor, and your host of Health Coach Radio.
(00:44):
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income, change the lives of the clients who need your help.
And leave a lasting mark in this rapidly growing field.
(01:06):
It's time for health coaches to make an impact.
It's time for Health Coach Radio.
I'm excited to share with you today my own journey to becoming a health coach as we kind of reboot the Health Coach Radio podcast and kick it off for another season.
I thought it'd be fun to just check in on my journey and talk about some of the journeys I'm seeing as a health coaching educator because it's interesting the change I'm witnessing, some of our students coming into our school.
(01:37):
Have a similar trajectory to mine, but some have quite a different one as well.
And so I kind of want to bring it back around to the health coaching industry in general.
What I'm seeing.
You know, anecdotally, as a health coach, again, educator and a thought leader in this space, somebody who's been doing it for a long time.
But I wanted to start by sharing my own story.
And I'm sure you're going to hear threads of familiarity in my story that ring true for you in some way or extrapolate it to a story that you can relate to as well.
(02:09):
So when I was in my early to mid-3, I was diagnosed pre-diabetic, which was an absolute utter shock to me because I had lived a very healthy lifestyle for my whole life.
I was an athlete.
I was a fitness addict.
I was
(02:30):
A recovering anorexic.
I had a very obsessive relationship with food and body for my teens and twenties and thirties.
Unfortunately, and I could spend a long time talking about that.
And quite frankly, I do spend a lot of time thinking and talking about that in my own health coaching practice because now I'm working with women my age.
in their late forties who came of age in that same era where we just really, really put the hammer down on being skinny and doing whatever it took to get skinny.
(02:58):
And I was doing that too.
And then in my 30s, I was getting fat.
I got fat in my 30s, but like a weird kind of fat, like a really round belly kind of fat.
And you know, I a very tall, kind of, I guess, lanky.
Oriented woman, I was growing this large tummy all of a sudden, and I didn't like that.
But worse than that was the way I felt.
(03:22):
I could not stay awake.
My brain didn't work.
And like, that was a big one for me because my job at the time, I was a writer.
I worked in advertising and marketing.
That was my previous career.
Many of us come from a previous career.
I came from marketing and advertising, just a small parenthetical.
I think this is interesting because we all many of us who have entered health coaching as a late in life career change, like I did.
(03:48):
Came from a previous career doing something.
And I always tell my health coaching students to leverage that.
You have amazing skills that you've developed.
Throughout your career, doing other things.
So, for me, I was a copywriter.
I was in marketing and advertising.
I do have that aptitude for marketing.
Lucky me, because now I'm in private practice, it comes in handy.
(04:12):
A lot of health coaches who had this sort of late in life awakening, like I did, and moved into this career path midlife, you know, leverage what you know.
Lever what you know and what you know how to do.
Anyway, I was working as a writer in the marketing department of a really cool sporting goods company.
It was a fun, cool job.
(04:32):
It was amazing, cool perks, but I couldn't.
Think.
I couldn't think of words.
That was a big one for me.
Anyone who's ever had pre-diabetes, tell me if that resonates with you, because I've heard that from a lot of women that I've spoken to on the phone who are insulin-resistant or pre-diabetic.
And we bond over the fact that our brain can't find words.
(04:52):
It's like this vocal acuity thing because I couldn't write words, but also I was having a hard time speaking words.
I was very inart in speech. My speech
was jumbled.
And I was so tired and checked out.
Now, I'm also, by the way, in my early 30s, I'm a woman trying to become something.
That's a really pivotal time of life, right?
(05:12):
I'm trying to.
grow my career, advance myself professionally.
I'm trying to establish relationships.
I was single, dating, trying to find a life partner.
and struggling to function at a basic thinking and being level.
So that is what took me to the doctor.
I went to the doctor and I said, Doc, my brain isn't working.
(05:35):
I feel so stupid.
I'm so tired.
I fall asleep driving every time I get behind the wheel of the car.
I have to pull over and take a nap.
I get home from work and I can't bring myself to do anything.
My house is a mess.
My life is a mess.
My mail is on.
Like, I'm just checked out.
I'm just checked out.
And she said, Yeah, and you've also gained a ton of weight.
(05:59):
And I said, Yeah, that too.
She said.
It sounds like you might be pre. Let's do
some blood testing. And I'd never
heard of pre before. I was a fitness and nutrition
professional, but
That was my side gig, right?
I worked in marketing advertising, but I was a fitness professional as a side gig.
(06:22):
And I just had no idea what pre-diabetes meant.
I really didn't even know what diabetes was, quite honestly.
Anyway, ran the blood test, came back.
Sure enough, my HBA1C put me at the pre-diabetic range, and she said, Yep, you're pre-diabetic.
And I said, Well, what are we doing about this?
And she said, Oh, there's actually nothing we can really do about it.
If it gets worse, it becomes diabetes, and then we can do something about it.
(06:46):
This is, you know, this is going back almost 20 years.
So let's go easy on the doctor.
was doing what we probably know differently now.
I would say a different doctor might I would hope give a patient a different prognosis on pre-diabetes.
But she did in her defense say to me something like, Because I asked, What on earth caused this?
(07:09):
She said it could be genetics.
Okay.
I mean, maybe.
I think about that because, you know, as somebody who sort of nerds out on wellness stuff, I had over the years become
Unconvinced that I was genetically predisposed to much of anything.
My parents are not healthy.
And about you guys, my parents are not healthy.
(07:30):
Well, my mom unfortunately passed away of a heart attack.
So that gives you some sense of her poor metabolic health.
My dad is unhealthy.
He is COPD because he smoked.
Like my mom and dad both smoked and they ate a processed food diet and they didn't exercise.
So I look at their lives and I think
I don't know that I genetically inherited the things that made them sick.
(07:52):
We'll see, I guess, what happens.
Anyway, the doctor said genetics could play a role.
And then she said, but other things too, like, you know, your diet or your stress level, that can play a role too in creating this dysfunction.
And I had my mind blown.
I said, Did you just say stress?
She said, Yeah, yes, no stress can create sort of this metabolic dysregulation.
(08:15):
And gang, I had never contemplated that.
Like, again.
If you're my age, if you're my age, think back to when you were thirty.
Did you have any line of sight on the fact that stress could influence your metabolic health?
No, we didn't talk about stuff like that in the early aughts.
That's relatively mainstream now, but it wasn't then.
(08:38):
So I had my mind utterly blown.
I'll tell you what I did.
I marched right out of that doctor's office.
And this is before I had a smartphone in my pocket, okay?
So stay with me.
I marched to the bookstore, because the doctor's office was in the mall.
I went to the big
box bookstore.
The big box bookstore has they had these computer kiosks where you could search for books by keywords or author.
(09:01):
So I walked to the kiosk and I typed in pre into the kiosk. Well, there weren
't any books on pre, but there were books that mentioned pre.
And I found those books, learned a lot about ins, insulin resistance, insulin sensitivity, became very interested in this. And I
(09:24):
learned about inflammation and the role that can play in our metabolic health.
I learned some of the stuff the doctor hinted at with like stress and lifestyle factors, stress and sleep, how this impacts our metabolic function.
I was.
Delighted and excited and awestruck to learn this part about my body that I didn't know about.
Because you know what I knew about my body was diet and exercise.
(09:47):
You know, I definitely was exercising way the hell too much.
I learned.
In my research into pre, that was one of my problems. I was exercising
too much. I learned that the
way I was eating, which was this very low fat, very high carb, many, many meals a day.
Type of diet to support ultimately my over-training that I was doing this sort of chicken egg.
(10:08):
I was over, and then I had to eat to, you know.
Support my overtraining.
And that method of eating the high-carbohydrate multi-meals a day thing, potentially was playing a role.
Oh, here's one for you.
The stress piece really blew my mind, so I quit my job.
(10:28):
I know, that's a bit of an extreme measure.
I had a lot of things going on and that job was really kind of not my favorite anymore, so I quit.
And I'll tell you what, I made a big difference right away.
But I made a difference to my lifestyle, quit my job.
I didn't start training less.
(10:48):
That took me another 10 years to figure that one out, unfortunately.
You know, that's how sort of
The diet and exercise obsession of maybe Gen X women shakes out it.
You have to learn those lessons the hard way.
You know what I'm saying?
But I did change how I ate quite considerably.
Just to jump ahead in the time machine here a little bit, to this day, this is now 15 years later.
(11:12):
I teach my clients to eat the way I taught myself to eat to resolve my insulin resistance, to resolve my pre. It's a really
fascinating thing that I
I kind of learned in my research.
So I just cobbled together this knowledge of how to resolve this problem for myself from all these different books I read.
And put together this eating protocol that fit into my lifestyle and was enjoyable and made sense and seemed to satisfy some of the requirements of resolving my pre.
(11:42):
So I made all those changes and I did resolve my pre. And the first thing that
happened was I got my energy back. My brain
started working again. And it was
I mean, I will never forget what that felt like.
I will never forget what it felt like the day that I woke up and my brain worked because it was literally like that.
I woke up.
I felt smart.
(12:04):
I felt energetic.
I felt alive.
I felt vibrant.
Vital.
These words are so, like, these feelings are so powerful.
And
I will never forget what it felt like to have that back because you can feel pretty miserable for a long time and just kind of adapt.
We're really adaptive.
(12:25):
A lot of people just feel start to feel low-grade miserable and they adapt to it.
And then, though, if you can get to feeling suddenly
Amazing.
It is astonishing to feel that good.
It will knock you off your feet to feel that good.
I won't forget what that feels like.
(12:46):
And by the way, I work with women now.
On weight loss and resolving this insulin-resistant stuff, because that's what I know how to do.
I'll get to that in a second.
But
One thing I try to tell my clients is this part of the story.
I'll say, you're going to wake up one day and feel like yourself again because now your body is using fuel better.
That's the big problem with
(13:07):
Pred and insulin resistance, this met dysregulation is your body's not good at using fuel, to put it very, very simply. That's why fuel is
getting stored away just astronomically. That's why your brain
doesn't work because it's not getting fueled. You feel lazy and unmotivated.
One day you're going to wake up and you're going to feel that vitality again, that vibrancy.
And I'll be honest with you, listeners.
(13:30):
Vibrancy and vitality, unfortunately, don't pay the bills for me.
I wish it did.
I wish women cared more about that.
I wish women cared more about feeling like themselves again, feeling vibrant, feeling vital.
They really.
They will take it if it comes as a cool side effect, but they really want weight loss, which is no problem.
That's how I package my health coaching services (13:46):
weight loss.
But then I tell them once, you, sort of this concept of sell them what they want, give them what they need, which is, yes, I've got a weight loss program for you.
And as a cool side effect, you're going to feel incredible in your brain and in your body and energetically.
Spiritually, and it's everything changes.
And so I wish that becoming more vibrant and vital was more of a motivator for women to take these jumps and jump into these changes.
(14:17):
It isn't right now, but maybe it will be.
It was for me, though.
Keto, Carnivore, Paleo, AIP, SCD, LO maps.
So many diets, so much confusion.
And if health coaches are having a hard time keeping up, imagine how clients must feel.
To make sense of it all, Primal Health Coach Institute partnered with registered dietitian and health coach Martha Titt to create a comprehensive functional therape diet specialist certification.
(14:44):
This flexible online course dives deep into the many different types of therapeutic diets.
You'll learn the purpose of each of these diets and how to help your clients map out a nutritional plan to resolve their specific health issues.
As a certified functional therape diet specialist, you'll help people reach a deeper understanding of food as medicine and transform their lives for the better. Find
(15:08):
out more at primal.com.
Back to my story.
It was for me.
The big thing that took me to the doctor was not my ever-growing waistline, believe it or not.
It was what's going on with my brain.
Who am I?
Why am I not myself right now?
And anyway, we discovered pre. Then I.
Poured myself into learning what pre was. And one of the things,
(15:30):
this is kind of kooky, I want to validate.
I bec very frustrated. I
think frustration, by the way, is a necess and pretty commonplace factor in
The pain to purpose type journey that health coaches many of us have, right?
(15:52):
Many of us, we were healthy, we became unwell, we got mad.
And now we're a health coach.
I think that's quite a common trajectory.
But you know, you tell me if yours is different because I know there are a lot of different origins out there.
Trust.
I know that.
But I was annoyed.
Quite frankly, I was pissed off.
Because I was doing most things right.
(16:12):
I was a good little anorexic girl for my teens and 20s, just not eating.
And then when I.
Mercifully recovered from that, I did start eating very healthy food.
Low fat, whole grain, steamed vegetables, chicken breasts seven times a day.
Exercising two hours a day at least.
Like I was doing a lot of things right.
(16:35):
Now, I know and you know, we all know that that's actually not great.
The way I was eating, and for sure, the way I was training was just a little extreme.
Not great metabolically, not great from a health supporting perspective.
We know that now.
But I know I was doing things by the book to a certain extent, and I got fat and sick.
And it's like, what is up with that?
(16:58):
I'm obsessively following the rules here.
Obsessively, like to the detriment of joy in my life.
I'm.
Exercising and dieting in my tw twenties and thirties, the most the highlight of your life, your misguided youth.
Did I go backpacking in Europe?
No, I did not.
I stayed home and exercised and got a job.
(17:19):
Like, just a good little girl, doing it all right.
I'm not eating Big Macs.
I'm not drinking big gulps.
No way.
Are you kidding me?
No.
Not a fitness and diet obsessed person like me, not a recovering anorexic girl like me.
I would never.
And I still got fat and sick, and that annoyed me.
Very specifically.
And I said to myself, wait a second.
(17:41):
If I'm doing what they told me to do and it stopped working, then the question I ask myself is, how does my body actually work?
How does a human body actually
Work?
How does it want to eat?
How does it digest?
How does it assimilate nutrients?
How does it sleep?
How does it stress?
How does it play?
How is the human body designed to work?
(18:02):
And that's where I really went down the rabbit hole of evolutionary biology and ancestral health.
And that really cracked open a lot of enlightenment for me.
I wouldn't say that I'm dogmatically connected to a lot of the ancestral tenets, but it makes it make sense for me.
It helps it make sense for me.
(18:25):
I think about the sort of ancient programming of a human body and what makes sense for a human body.
I know we're living in this modern world, but it's a real mism from our DNA, which is quite old.
Depending on your beliefs, it might be millions of years old, it might be thousands of years old, it's still pretty dang old when you think about it.
We're in a very modern time, and the inputs are mism from what the body is expecting. And I
(18:48):
really just anchor to that idea.
And again, not in a dogmatic way.
I'm not a dogmatic health and wellness zealot.
I'm not.
I'm reasonable.
And I can reasonably say what makes sense for the human body.
And that's actually how I made most of my decisions that got resolved my prediabetes.
So, obviously, I became very evangelical about this.
(19:12):
I wanted to tell everybody.
I wanted to help everybody.
I would look around and I could see pre-diabetic people all around me.
They're thick midsections.
They're, I could, you know, the way they're eating, I could hear people talking about the way their brains weren't working and the way they were feeling.
And it was like, I just think you're mouth.
Pre-diabetic or pre-pre-diabetic, I was very, very myopic on pre-diabetes because that was my journey.
(19:38):
That was my struggle.
Listen.
Maybe yours was Hashimoto's.
I know nothing about Hashimoto.
I really don't.
Like, you want to see a blank stare?
Ask me for a Hashimoto's protocol.
I don't know.
Maybe it was an autoimmune disease of some other kind.
Maybe it's endometriosis that you help women with, or something that I know nothing about.
But you know what I know a lot about?
It's freaking pre, baby. And pre is this metabolic
(20:01):
dysregulation that sort of occurs on a continuum, right? Pre-diabetes is a point on a
continuum.
It gets eventually to type 2 diabetes, but before you're pre-diabetic, you're like pre-pre-, you're mildly insulin resistant. This may or may not show up
on a blood test, depending on your doctor, obviously.
Doctor might say, Hey, your HBO is just like a tiny bit high. You guys
should keep an eye on that. But many
(20:21):
doctors wouldn't even mention it. But I
feel like symptomatically I can see and hear a lot of my own personal journey in women that I speak to.
Oh, your brain doesn't work.
Oh, you're tired and unmotivated.
Oh, you have intense sugar cravings.
You're just ravenously hungry all the time.
Oh, you're falling asleep when you drive anywhere.
Oh, you're gaining abdominal weight.
(20:43):
Ding, ding, ding, ding, bingo, right?
I've got you.
So I became really, really excited every time I met somebody who I felt like I could help.
And the logical next step for me was to help them, to do something or become something that could help people.
So I started gaining.
Coaching credentials just because I wanted to have well, I needed to learn how to be a coach, first of all.
(21:07):
I didn't know how to do that.
I was a copywriter.
I don't have any coaching skills.
I don know how to help people change.
I knew I made myself change.
I made myself change because I was at my rock bottom.
I was feeling my own rock bottom.
The gap I had to bridge was.
If I meet another woman who's at her rock bottom, how can I encourage her to make the change based on, first of all, just trusting and believing in me?
(21:32):
And also, trusting and believing in herself that she can do it, right?
So, how can I help people make these changes?
So, I had to learn how to do that.
So, I went to school and I got two credentials actually.
I went to school and got a nutritionist credential.
I know some people think that nutritionist credential doesn't exist, but I definitely went to school for a year full time and got a diploma in holistic nutrition.
(21:53):
And I'm a registered holistic nutritionist.
I don't really honestly use much that I learned in that credential.
A couple things.
Like, I think I learned a lot about symptomatology and how to sort of
You know, put symptoms to certain body systems.
That's pretty interesting.
But quite frankly, the holistic school I went to for nutrition
Was very plant-based.
(22:16):
I'm not.
So there's a lot of the nutritional stuff I didn't really align with, but I wanted a credential.
I wanted to have a credential.
I felt like that was important to show.
To demonstrate that I had trained and taken this seriously.
So I got that nutritionist credential.
In the nutrition school, I didn't learn anything about how to work with clients, though.
And it was like, that's the thing I actually need the most help with.
(22:38):
So I got a health coaching credential.
learned how to coach, how to encourage tiny behavior change that add up over time and help people when they get stuck and navigating their barriers in life and in their own minds.
I thought it was really, really important to learn how to coach.
(22:59):
So I got these two credentials.
I got, I developed the skill of coaching, and then I literally just went to business.
I mean, this is probably a story for another day.
I think I will save my business origin story for another day because this gets into the weeds a little bit.
But because I had this commun background,
(23:21):
And a little bit of a tech background, you know, website design and copywriting was part of my role at some point in marketing materials, you know, things like that.
It was all part of my previous career.
I quickly whipped up a website, put it up online.
That's it.
I did not optimize the SEO.
I didn't.
(23:43):
have any paid ads to the website, nothing like that.
I just put up a website offering to help women with weight loss.
And I kind of described, you know, this might be for you if
And then I could just, if people asked me what I was doing, I could point them to the website.
And on the website, there was a book now button that said, hey, just book a call with me in my calendar.
And I want to say, without doing too much work on it, within the first three months, I got my first client.
(24:08):
Her name was Ten. I'll
never forget that. It's
a name you don forget. Her name
was Ten.
She was not pre. She was not my
ideal client. She did have an
autoimmune disease that I knew nothing about. But I worked with
her because I knew how to coach and I wanted to get a first client under my belt just to say I was doing it.
And I helped her.
So that was amazing.
And then from there, it really did take off.
(24:29):
Not quickly.
It doesn't take off quickly.
And again, I think I'll save this.
Maybe Aaron's business growth journey can be a next installment in this ser.
But I actually immediately started my practice virtually.
I went right out the gate virtual.
I was like, I've got a website.
You're going to book a call with me.
(24:49):
We'll do our coaching calls on the phone.
I didn't need you to be in my city.
It was not important to be in the same.
I created materials that I could send people.
I immediately digitized the whole thing because, I mean, it was, you know, this was what was this?
2010, 2011?
Okay, like, you know, technology was technologying.
(25:11):
It's time to get online, right?
I knew that.
And I really do honestly to this day encourage a virtual practice for anybody who's going into private practice.
I mean, you certainly can't open a brick and mortar.
I just.
You don't have to.
You don't have to.
You can do this virtually.
It works perfectly.
It worked perfectly in 2011.
It works even better now in 2025 when I'm recording this.
(25:31):
As I was building my coaching business, I cobbled together an income doing other things.
So I wanted to leave, I wanted to really leave marketing and advertising.
Remember, I quit that one job that was stressing me out.
I got a different job doing marketing, advertising, some more else, because I have to pay the bills.
I have a mortgage to pay.
Like, I can't not pay my bills, right?
(25:54):
I think this is an important piece I just wanted to mention.
But I had this dream of like leaving that industry because it wasn't really a passion project.
And now I was dancing around the edges of something new that I felt incredibly passionate about.
So I ended up at the time, I was now working at an advertising agency, which was not a great idea from the perspective of managing my stress.
(26:17):
But at the point being, I was
I was ready to leave that job too.
It's like, okay, you know what?
This is my time.
I've got this thing built.
I've now got two or three clients come through.
It's actually viable.
I'm constantly improving, tweaking, adjusting this program.
I can see a time, I can envision a time when I have 10 clients, 15 clients, 100 clients.
I can see this building.
(26:38):
I believe in it.
So, what I need to do is, I need to make a real effort at it.
So, I left marketing and advertising.
I stepped right out of that industry, but I still have a mortgage to pay, so I got a couple little jobs.
I got a job at a smoothie bar.
Yeah, making smoothies.
I don't even like smoothies.
I't even really buy into smoothies as a really good nutritional strategy.
But the smoothie bar, they were trying to expand to different locations, and I helped them open a new location and
(27:04):
I created some smoothie recipes and I worked behind the bar making smoothies and chit-chatting with people.
It was actually quite fun.
I got to talk about nutrition a lot, obviously, at the smoothie bar.
These smoothie bars were inside of a gym chain as well, so it was great.
It was a lot of fun.
It wasn't a high-paying job.
So I got another job.
I got a job at a cafe that wanted to have, they needed a little help with their marketing and a little help with their menu.
(27:26):
Because I'm a nutritionist and a former marketer, it's, I'll come in and you know, help zh up this cafe. And so I
was doing these two part-time jobs while building my coaching business. So, just
to put this out there.
I was professionally employed.
I was professionally employed with a career trajectory.
I was getting paid a nice salary at a corner office.
(27:48):
I really worked my way up the corporate ladder.
To then go get these part-time hourly jobs in coffee shops, really big change for me.
But I was so excited.
I didn't care.
It's like this is enough to just get by financially.
I can get by on the money I'm making at these jobs.
(28:09):
Am I getting rich working at the smoothie bar and the coffee shop?
No.
But I'm creating the opportunity to grow my health coaching business.
Now, this is advice I do give health coaches quite often is
Keep some source of income, maybe consider leaving your cushy source of income and go to something else.
(28:29):
The reason I just suggest that is because if you stay in the cushy salary job,
You're disincentivized to build something new.
So, in some ways, by stepping out of advertising and marketing, this career I developed over the last 20 years, call it, I
Had to make my health coaching business work because I probably couldn't afford to work at the coffee shop at the smoothie bar for the rest of my life.
(28:54):
But the other thing is, I always had that safety net.
I could always go back to marketing and advertising.
I could always get a job.
I still can.
15 years later.
If my successful health coaching business happens to just crumple, which it won't, it's not going out of business.
It is thriving.
But if it did, or if I stopped liking it or whatever, I can go get a job.
(29:17):
There's no problem.
There's no worst case scenario here.
It took a good three years for my business to establish itself to the point where I could leave.
I didn't stay at the coffee shop and the smoothie bar for three years.
I jumped around to other jobs.
While my health coaching income was growing, you know, I could.
(29:40):
I was shoring up the difference with other jobs for about three years until it was at a point where I could solely focus on it.
Yeah.
Now.
I also work at a health coaching school now, which is amazing.
I'm the coaching director at Primal Health Coach Institute.
I get to mentor and train health coaches.
I get to do this podcast.
(30:00):
I get to be a thought leader in health coaching because I've been doing it for a long time.
So, I do have my hands in other little pies, right?
I have lots of other little side gigs I do, but that's because I've established myself as a leader in the health coaching space, and I can do that.
And I actually love that.
I love the idea of the health coach becoming a just a sort of gener health thought leader. I
(30:27):
think thought leadership, quite honestly, is sort of where we eventually get to.
We help clients, we build a business, and then eventually we kind of get to the point where we are now at a level where industry is asking for our opinion on things.
And that's really cool.
I'm actually excited about this.
And I think I should do another episode on this.
about the job market for health coaches, for example.
(30:48):
You can go get a job as a health coach.
There's more and more and more jobs now than ever before.
When I first started, there weren't jobs.
So I just had to go into private practice, and I like it.
But I mean, I'm seeing health coaches who are now managing teams of health coaches in industry and organizations.
Imagine you being the lead health coach.
(31:08):
That's some there's some clout there.
There's industry cl. That
's the word I was looking for. Industry
cl.
When you have industry clout, you can get jobs like this.
You can be brought in, like I was, into Primal Health Coach Institute to be a consultant for a health coaching school.
You can be asked to speak on stage.
You can write books.
You can have a monetized podcast.
(31:29):
You become an industry leader, but only if you put in the reps.
And it's interesting.
It's pretty cool to see.
And what I will say.
And this is a little bit of a raw, raw, pep talk, is I'm pretty sure I wasn't going to become an industry leader in advertising and marketing.
I think what was going to happen there is I might have gotten a cost of living pay increase.
I might have gotten one more promotion.
(31:50):
I could see myself in like the
VP role.
If I really knuckled down, I could have gotten to the VP of marketing somewhere, maybe, and maybe I'd be making a nice six-figure salary.
doing something I don't necessarily love.
But the potential for expansion and growth in my previous career is nothing compared to the potential that I obviously had right from jump in doing my own thing in health coaching.
(32:17):
And um so I'm really excited for me that I did that.
And it really has paid off in immense ways, not just financially, which I know we're concerned about that.
Will I be able to pay my bills?
I you will.
You will if you don't quit.
If you don't quit, I have high confidence your health coaching business will pay your bills comfortably.
(32:38):
And I think you'll find that you grow.
At an exponential rate faster than you are going to in your current career path that you're obviously not that in love with.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this health coaching podcast.
I hope that my story is interesting to you, or at least there's some resonance there.
(33:01):
And I'd love to know what, if anything, you've taken away from it.
This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute.
To learn more about how to become a successful health coach, get in touch with us by visiting primalhealthco. forward
sl call.
Or if you're already a successful health coach, practitioner, influencer, or thought leader with a thriving business and an interesting story, we'd love to hear from you.
(33:25):
Connect with us at hello at prim. and let us know why we
need to interview you for Health Coach Radio. Thanks for listening.
In this episode, I share my own personal journey to health coaching, which started about 15 years ago.
And now, 15 years later, I really have established myself as a leader in the industry.
I've got industry clout and thought leadership status, which I actually do think is one of the end goals of a health coaching trajectory.
(00:20):
But you might be somewhere else on that continuum.
Maybe you're thinking of making the leap to health coaching.
Maybe you've just done it.
Maybe you're in the messy middle.
Either way, I'd love for you to listen to my story to get some inspiration to keep moving because, gosh darn it, the health coaching industry needs you.
Please enjoy.
Hi, I'm Erin Power.
I'm a health coach, a health coaching educator, and mentor, and your host of Health Coach Radio.
(00:44):
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income, change the lives of the clients who need your help.
And leave a lasting mark in this rapidly growing field.
(01:06):
It's time for health coaches to make an impact.
It's time for Health Coach Radio.
I'm excited to share with you today my own journey to becoming a health coach as we kind of reboot the Health Coach Radio podcast and kick it off for another season.
I thought it'd be fun to just check in on my journey and talk about some of the journeys I'm seeing as a health coaching educator because it's interesting the change I'm witnessing, some of our students coming into our school.
(01:37):
Have a similar trajectory to mine, but some have quite a different one as well.
And so I kind of want to bring it back around to the health coaching industry in general.
What I'm seeing.
You know, anecdotally, as a health coach, again, educator and a thought leader in this space, somebody who's been doing it for a long time.
But I wanted to start by sharing my own story.
And I'm sure you're going to hear threads of familiarity in my story that ring true for you in some way or extrapolate it to a story that you can relate to as well.
(02:09):
So when I was in my early to mid-3, I was diagnosed pre-diabetic, which was an absolute utter shock to me because I had lived a very healthy lifestyle for my whole life.
I was an athlete.
I was a fitness addict.
I was
(02:30):
A recovering anorexic.
I had a very obsessive relationship with food and body for my teens and twenties and thirties.
Unfortunately, and I could spend a long time talking about that.
And quite frankly, I do spend a lot of time thinking and talking about that in my own health coaching practice because now I'm working with women my age.
in their late forties who came of age in that same era where we just really, really put the hammer down on being skinny and doing whatever it took to get skinny.
(02:58):
And I was doing that too.
And then in my 30s, I was getting fat.
I got fat in my 30s, but like a weird kind of fat, like a really round belly kind of fat.
And you know, I a very tall, kind of, I guess, lanky.
Oriented woman, I was growing this large tummy all of a sudden, and I didn't like that.
But worse than that was the way I felt.
(03:22):
I could not stay awake.
My brain didn't work.
And like, that was a big one for me because my job at the time, I was a writer.
I worked in advertising and marketing.
That was my previous career.
Many of us come from a previous career.
I came from marketing and advertising, just a small parenthetical.
I think this is interesting because we all many of us who have entered health coaching as a late in life career change, like I did.
(03:48):
Came from a previous career doing something.
And I always tell my health coaching students to leverage that.
You have amazing skills that you've developed.
Throughout your career, doing other things.
So, for me, I was a copywriter.
I was in marketing and advertising.
I do have that aptitude for marketing.
Lucky me, because now I'm in private practice, it comes in handy.
(04:12):
A lot of health coaches who had this sort of late in life awakening, like I did, and moved into this career path midlife, you know, leverage what you know.
Lever what you know and what you know how to do.
Anyway, I was working as a writer in the marketing department of a really cool sporting goods company.
It was a fun, cool job.
(04:32):
It was amazing, cool perks, but I couldn't.
Think.
I couldn't think of words.
That was a big one for me.
Anyone who's ever had pre-diabetes, tell me if that resonates with you, because I've heard that from a lot of women that I've spoken to on the phone who are insulin-resistant or pre-diabetic.
And we bond over the fact that our brain can't find words.
(04:52):
It's like this vocal acuity thing because I couldn't write words, but also I was having a hard time speaking words.
I was very inart in speech. My speech
was jumbled.
And I was so tired and checked out.
Now, I'm also, by the way, in my early 30s, I'm a woman trying to become something.
That's a really pivotal time of life, right?
(05:12):
I'm trying to.
grow my career, advance myself professionally.
I'm trying to establish relationships.
I was single, dating, trying to find a life partner.
and struggling to function at a basic thinking and being level.
So that is what took me to the doctor.
I went to the doctor and I said, Doc, my brain isn't working.
(05:35):
I feel so stupid.
I'm so tired.
I fall asleep driving every time I get behind the wheel of the car.
I have to pull over and take a nap.
I get home from work and I can't bring myself to do anything.
My house is a mess.
My life is a mess.
My mail is on.
Like, I'm just checked out.
I'm just checked out.
And she said, Yeah, and you've also gained a ton of weight.
(05:59):
And I said, Yeah, that too.
She said.
It sounds like you might be pre. Let's do
some blood testing. And I'd never
heard of pre before. I was a fitness and nutrition
professional, but
That was my side gig, right?
I worked in marketing advertising, but I was a fitness professional as a side gig.
(06:22):
And I just had no idea what pre-diabetes meant.
I really didn't even know what diabetes was, quite honestly.
Anyway, ran the blood test, came back.
Sure enough, my HBA1C put me at the pre-diabetic range, and she said, Yep, you're pre-diabetic.
And I said, Well, what are we doing about this?
And she said, Oh, there's actually nothing we can really do about it.
If it gets worse, it becomes diabetes, and then we can do something about it.
(06:46):
This is, you know, this is going back almost 20 years.
So let's go easy on the doctor.
was doing what we probably know differently now.
I would say a different doctor might I would hope give a patient a different prognosis on pre-diabetes.
But she did in her defense say to me something like, Because I asked, What on earth caused this?
(07:09):
She said it could be genetics.
Okay.
I mean, maybe.
I think about that because, you know, as somebody who sort of nerds out on wellness stuff, I had over the years become
Unconvinced that I was genetically predisposed to much of anything.
My parents are not healthy.
And about you guys, my parents are not healthy.
(07:30):
Well, my mom unfortunately passed away of a heart attack.
So that gives you some sense of her poor metabolic health.
My dad is unhealthy.
He is COPD because he smoked.
Like my mom and dad both smoked and they ate a processed food diet and they didn't exercise.
So I look at their lives and I think
I don't know that I genetically inherited the things that made them sick.
(07:52):
We'll see, I guess, what happens.
Anyway, the doctor said genetics could play a role.
And then she said, but other things too, like, you know, your diet or your stress level, that can play a role too in creating this dysfunction.
And I had my mind blown.
I said, Did you just say stress?
She said, Yeah, yes, no stress can create sort of this metabolic dysregulation.
(08:15):
And gang, I had never contemplated that.
Like, again.
If you're my age, if you're my age, think back to when you were thirty.
Did you have any line of sight on the fact that stress could influence your metabolic health?
No, we didn't talk about stuff like that in the early aughts.
That's relatively mainstream now, but it wasn't then.
(08:38):
So I had my mind utterly blown.
I'll tell you what I did.
I marched right out of that doctor's office.
And this is before I had a smartphone in my pocket, okay?
So stay with me.
I marched to the bookstore, because the doctor's office was in the mall.
I went to the big
box bookstore.
The big box bookstore has they had these computer kiosks where you could search for books by keywords or author.
(09:01):
So I walked to the kiosk and I typed in pre into the kiosk. Well, there weren
't any books on pre, but there were books that mentioned pre.
And I found those books, learned a lot about ins, insulin resistance, insulin sensitivity, became very interested in this. And I
(09:24):
learned about inflammation and the role that can play in our metabolic health.
I learned some of the stuff the doctor hinted at with like stress and lifestyle factors, stress and sleep, how this impacts our metabolic function.
I was.
Delighted and excited and awestruck to learn this part about my body that I didn't know about.
Because you know what I knew about my body was diet and exercise.
(09:47):
You know, I definitely was exercising way the hell too much.
I learned.
In my research into pre, that was one of my problems. I was exercising
too much. I learned that the
way I was eating, which was this very low fat, very high carb, many, many meals a day.
Type of diet to support ultimately my over-training that I was doing this sort of chicken egg.
(10:08):
I was over, and then I had to eat to, you know.
Support my overtraining.
And that method of eating the high-carbohydrate multi-meals a day thing, potentially was playing a role.
Oh, here's one for you.
The stress piece really blew my mind, so I quit my job.
(10:28):
I know, that's a bit of an extreme measure.
I had a lot of things going on and that job was really kind of not my favorite anymore, so I quit.
And I'll tell you what, I made a big difference right away.
But I made a difference to my lifestyle, quit my job.
I didn't start training less.
(10:48):
That took me another 10 years to figure that one out, unfortunately.
You know, that's how sort of
The diet and exercise obsession of maybe Gen X women shakes out it.
You have to learn those lessons the hard way.
You know what I'm saying?
But I did change how I ate quite considerably.
Just to jump ahead in the time machine here a little bit, to this day, this is now 15 years later.
(11:12):
I teach my clients to eat the way I taught myself to eat to resolve my insulin resistance, to resolve my pre. It's a really
fascinating thing that I
I kind of learned in my research.
So I just cobbled together this knowledge of how to resolve this problem for myself from all these different books I read.
And put together this eating protocol that fit into my lifestyle and was enjoyable and made sense and seemed to satisfy some of the requirements of resolving my pre.
(11:42):
So I made all those changes and I did resolve my pre. And the first thing that
happened was I got my energy back. My brain
started working again. And it was
I mean, I will never forget what that felt like.
I will never forget what it felt like the day that I woke up and my brain worked because it was literally like that.
I woke up.
I felt smart.
(12:04):
I felt energetic.
I felt alive.
I felt vibrant.
Vital.
These words are so, like, these feelings are so powerful.
And
I will never forget what it felt like to have that back because you can feel pretty miserable for a long time and just kind of adapt.
We're really adaptive.
(12:25):
A lot of people just feel start to feel low-grade miserable and they adapt to it.
And then, though, if you can get to feeling suddenly
Amazing.
It is astonishing to feel that good.
It will knock you off your feet to feel that good.
I won't forget what that feels like.
(12:46):
And by the way, I work with women now.
On weight loss and resolving this insulin-resistant stuff, because that's what I know how to do.
I'll get to that in a second.
But
One thing I try to tell my clients is this part of the story.
I'll say, you're going to wake up one day and feel like yourself again because now your body is using fuel better.
That's the big problem with
(13:07):
Pred and insulin resistance, this met dysregulation is your body's not good at using fuel, to put it very, very simply. That's why fuel is
getting stored away just astronomically. That's why your brain
doesn't work because it's not getting fueled. You feel lazy and unmotivated.
One day you're going to wake up and you're going to feel that vitality again, that vibrancy.
And I'll be honest with you, listeners.
(13:30):
Vibrancy and vitality, unfortunately, don't pay the bills for me.
I wish it did.
I wish women cared more about that.
I wish women cared more about feeling like themselves again, feeling vibrant, feeling vital.
They really.
They will take it if it comes as a cool side effect, but they really want weight loss, which is no problem.
That's how I package my health coaching services (13:46):
weight loss.
But then I tell them once, you, sort of this concept of sell them what they want, give them what they need, which is, yes, I've got a weight loss program for you.
And as a cool side effect, you're going to feel incredible in your brain and in your body and energetically.
Spiritually, and it's everything changes.
And so I wish that becoming more vibrant and vital was more of a motivator for women to take these jumps and jump into these changes.
(14:17):
It isn't right now, but maybe it will be.
It was for me, though.
Keto, Carnivore, Paleo, AIP, SCD, LO maps.
So many diets, so much confusion.
And if health coaches are having a hard time keeping up, imagine how clients must feel.
To make sense of it all, Primal Health Coach Institute partnered with registered dietitian and health coach Martha Titt to create a comprehensive functional therape diet specialist certification.
(14:44):
This flexible online course dives deep into the many different types of therapeutic diets.
You'll learn the purpose of each of these diets and how to help your clients map out a nutritional plan to resolve their specific health issues.
As a certified functional therape diet specialist, you'll help people reach a deeper understanding of food as medicine and transform their lives for the better. Find
(15:08):
out more at primal.com.
Back to my story.
It was for me.
The big thing that took me to the doctor was not my ever-growing waistline, believe it or not.
It was what's going on with my brain.
Who am I?
Why am I not myself right now?
And anyway, we discovered pre. Then I.
Poured myself into learning what pre was. And one of the things,
(15:30):
this is kind of kooky, I want to validate.
I bec very frustrated. I
think frustration, by the way, is a necess and pretty commonplace factor in
The pain to purpose type journey that health coaches many of us have, right?
(15:52):
Many of us, we were healthy, we became unwell, we got mad.
And now we're a health coach.
I think that's quite a common trajectory.
But you know, you tell me if yours is different because I know there are a lot of different origins out there.
Trust.
I know that.
But I was annoyed.
Quite frankly, I was pissed off.
Because I was doing most things right.
(16:12):
I was a good little anorexic girl for my teens and 20s, just not eating.
And then when I.
Mercifully recovered from that, I did start eating very healthy food.
Low fat, whole grain, steamed vegetables, chicken breasts seven times a day.
Exercising two hours a day at least.
Like I was doing a lot of things right.
(16:35):
Now, I know and you know, we all know that that's actually not great.
The way I was eating, and for sure, the way I was training was just a little extreme.
Not great metabolically, not great from a health supporting perspective.
We know that now.
But I know I was doing things by the book to a certain extent, and I got fat and sick.
And it's like, what is up with that?
(16:58):
I'm obsessively following the rules here.
Obsessively, like to the detriment of joy in my life.
I'm.
Exercising and dieting in my tw twenties and thirties, the most the highlight of your life, your misguided youth.
Did I go backpacking in Europe?
No, I did not.
I stayed home and exercised and got a job.
(17:19):
Like, just a good little girl, doing it all right.
I'm not eating Big Macs.
I'm not drinking big gulps.
No way.
Are you kidding me?
No.
Not a fitness and diet obsessed person like me, not a recovering anorexic girl like me.
I would never.
And I still got fat and sick, and that annoyed me.
Very specifically.
And I said to myself, wait a second.
(17:41):
If I'm doing what they told me to do and it stopped working, then the question I ask myself is, how does my body actually work?
How does a human body actually
Work?
How does it want to eat?
How does it digest?
How does it assimilate nutrients?
How does it sleep?
How does it stress?
How does it play?
How is the human body designed to work?
(18:02):
And that's where I really went down the rabbit hole of evolutionary biology and ancestral health.
And that really cracked open a lot of enlightenment for me.
I wouldn't say that I'm dogmatically connected to a lot of the ancestral tenets, but it makes it make sense for me.
It helps it make sense for me.
(18:25):
I think about the sort of ancient programming of a human body and what makes sense for a human body.
I know we're living in this modern world, but it's a real mism from our DNA, which is quite old.
Depending on your beliefs, it might be millions of years old, it might be thousands of years old, it's still pretty dang old when you think about it.
We're in a very modern time, and the inputs are mism from what the body is expecting. And I
(18:48):
really just anchor to that idea.
And again, not in a dogmatic way.
I'm not a dogmatic health and wellness zealot.
I'm not.
I'm reasonable.
And I can reasonably say what makes sense for the human body.
And that's actually how I made most of my decisions that got resolved my prediabetes.
So, obviously, I became very evangelical about this.
(19:12):
I wanted to tell everybody.
I wanted to help everybody.
I would look around and I could see pre-diabetic people all around me.
They're thick midsections.
They're, I could, you know, the way they're eating, I could hear people talking about the way their brains weren't working and the way they were feeling.
And it was like, I just think you're mouth.
Pre-diabetic or pre-pre-diabetic, I was very, very myopic on pre-diabetes because that was my journey.
(19:38):
That was my struggle.
Listen.
Maybe yours was Hashimoto's.
I know nothing about Hashimoto.
I really don't.
Like, you want to see a blank stare?
Ask me for a Hashimoto's protocol.
I don't know.
Maybe it was an autoimmune disease of some other kind.
Maybe it's endometriosis that you help women with, or something that I know nothing about.
But you know what I know a lot about?
It's freaking pre, baby. And pre is this metabolic
(20:01):
dysregulation that sort of occurs on a continuum, right? Pre-diabetes is a point on a
continuum.
It gets eventually to type 2 diabetes, but before you're pre-diabetic, you're like pre-pre-, you're mildly insulin resistant. This may or may not show up
on a blood test, depending on your doctor, obviously.
Doctor might say, Hey, your HBO is just like a tiny bit high. You guys
should keep an eye on that. But many
(20:21):
doctors wouldn't even mention it. But I
feel like symptomatically I can see and hear a lot of my own personal journey in women that I speak to.
Oh, your brain doesn't work.
Oh, you're tired and unmotivated.
Oh, you have intense sugar cravings.
You're just ravenously hungry all the time.
Oh, you're falling asleep when you drive anywhere.
Oh, you're gaining abdominal weight.
(20:43):
Ding, ding, ding, ding, bingo, right?
I've got you.
So I became really, really excited every time I met somebody who I felt like I could help.
And the logical next step for me was to help them, to do something or become something that could help people.
So I started gaining.
Coaching credentials just because I wanted to have well, I needed to learn how to be a coach, first of all.
(21:07):
I didn't know how to do that.
I was a copywriter.
I don't have any coaching skills.
I don know how to help people change.
I knew I made myself change.
I made myself change because I was at my rock bottom.
I was feeling my own rock bottom.
The gap I had to bridge was.
If I meet another woman who's at her rock bottom, how can I encourage her to make the change based on, first of all, just trusting and believing in me?
(21:32):
And also, trusting and believing in herself that she can do it, right?
So, how can I help people make these changes?
So, I had to learn how to do that.
So, I went to school and I got two credentials actually.
I went to school and got a nutritionist credential.
I know some people think that nutritionist credential doesn't exist, but I definitely went to school for a year full time and got a diploma in holistic nutrition.
(21:53):
And I'm a registered holistic nutritionist.
I don't really honestly use much that I learned in that credential.
A couple things.
Like, I think I learned a lot about symptomatology and how to sort of
You know, put symptoms to certain body systems.
That's pretty interesting.
But quite frankly, the holistic school I went to for nutrition
Was very plant-based.
(22:16):
I'm not.
So there's a lot of the nutritional stuff I didn't really align with, but I wanted a credential.
I wanted to have a credential.
I felt like that was important to show.
To demonstrate that I had trained and taken this seriously.
So I got that nutritionist credential.
In the nutrition school, I didn't learn anything about how to work with clients, though.
And it was like, that's the thing I actually need the most help with.
(22:38):
So I got a health coaching credential.
learned how to coach, how to encourage tiny behavior change that add up over time and help people when they get stuck and navigating their barriers in life and in their own minds.
I thought it was really, really important to learn how to coach.
(22:59):
So I got these two credentials.
I got, I developed the skill of coaching, and then I literally just went to business.
I mean, this is probably a story for another day.
I think I will save my business origin story for another day because this gets into the weeds a little bit.
But because I had this commun background,
(23:21):
And a little bit of a tech background, you know, website design and copywriting was part of my role at some point in marketing materials, you know, things like that.
It was all part of my previous career.
I quickly whipped up a website, put it up online.
That's it.
I did not optimize the SEO.
I didn't.
(23:43):
have any paid ads to the website, nothing like that.
I just put up a website offering to help women with weight loss.
And I kind of described, you know, this might be for you if
And then I could just, if people asked me what I was doing, I could point them to the website.
And on the website, there was a book now button that said, hey, just book a call with me in my calendar.
And I want to say, without doing too much work on it, within the first three months, I got my first client.
(24:08):
Her name was Ten. I'll
never forget that. It's
a name you don forget. Her name
was Ten.
She was not pre. She was not my
ideal client. She did have an
autoimmune disease that I knew nothing about. But I worked with
her because I knew how to coach and I wanted to get a first client under my belt just to say I was doing it.
And I helped her.
So that was amazing.
And then from there, it really did take off.
(24:29):
Not quickly.
It doesn't take off quickly.
And again, I think I'll save this.
Maybe Aaron's business growth journey can be a next installment in this ser.
But I actually immediately started my practice virtually.
I went right out the gate virtual.
I was like, I've got a website.
You're going to book a call with me.
(24:49):
We'll do our coaching calls on the phone.
I didn't need you to be in my city.
It was not important to be in the same.
I created materials that I could send people.
I immediately digitized the whole thing because, I mean, it was, you know, this was what was this?
2010, 2011?
Okay, like, you know, technology was technologying.
(25:11):
It's time to get online, right?
I knew that.
And I really do honestly to this day encourage a virtual practice for anybody who's going into private practice.
I mean, you certainly can't open a brick and mortar.
I just.
You don't have to.
You don't have to.
You can do this virtually.
It works perfectly.
It worked perfectly in 2011.
It works even better now in 2025 when I'm recording this.
(25:31):
As I was building my coaching business, I cobbled together an income doing other things.
So I wanted to leave, I wanted to really leave marketing and advertising.
Remember, I quit that one job that was stressing me out.
I got a different job doing marketing, advertising, some more else, because I have to pay the bills.
I have a mortgage to pay.
Like, I can't not pay my bills, right?
(25:54):
I think this is an important piece I just wanted to mention.
But I had this dream of like leaving that industry because it wasn't really a passion project.
And now I was dancing around the edges of something new that I felt incredibly passionate about.
So I ended up at the time, I was now working at an advertising agency, which was not a great idea from the perspective of managing my stress.
(26:17):
But at the point being, I was
I was ready to leave that job too.
It's like, okay, you know what?
This is my time.
I've got this thing built.
I've now got two or three clients come through.
It's actually viable.
I'm constantly improving, tweaking, adjusting this program.
I can see a time, I can envision a time when I have 10 clients, 15 clients, 100 clients.
I can see this building.
(26:38):
I believe in it.
So, what I need to do is, I need to make a real effort at it.
So, I left marketing and advertising.
I stepped right out of that industry, but I still have a mortgage to pay, so I got a couple little jobs.
I got a job at a smoothie bar.
Yeah, making smoothies.
I don't even like smoothies.
I't even really buy into smoothies as a really good nutritional strategy.
But the smoothie bar, they were trying to expand to different locations, and I helped them open a new location and
(27:04):
I created some smoothie recipes and I worked behind the bar making smoothies and chit-chatting with people.
It was actually quite fun.
I got to talk about nutrition a lot, obviously, at the smoothie bar.
These smoothie bars were inside of a gym chain as well, so it was great.
It was a lot of fun.
It wasn't a high-paying job.
So I got another job.
I got a job at a cafe that wanted to have, they needed a little help with their marketing and a little help with their menu.
(27:26):
Because I'm a nutritionist and a former marketer, it's, I'll come in and you know, help zh up this cafe. And so I
was doing these two part-time jobs while building my coaching business. So, just
to put this out there.
I was professionally employed.
I was professionally employed with a career trajectory.
I was getting paid a nice salary at a corner office.
(27:48):
I really worked my way up the corporate ladder.
To then go get these part-time hourly jobs in coffee shops, really big change for me.
But I was so excited.
I didn't care.
It's like this is enough to just get by financially.
I can get by on the money I'm making at these jobs.
(28:09):
Am I getting rich working at the smoothie bar and the coffee shop?
No.
But I'm creating the opportunity to grow my health coaching business.
Now, this is advice I do give health coaches quite often is
Keep some source of income, maybe consider leaving your cushy source of income and go to something else.
(28:29):
The reason I just suggest that is because if you stay in the cushy salary job,
You're disincentivized to build something new.
So, in some ways, by stepping out of advertising and marketing, this career I developed over the last 20 years, call it, I
Had to make my health coaching business work because I probably couldn't afford to work at the coffee shop at the smoothie bar for the rest of my life.
(28:54):
But the other thing is, I always had that safety net.
I could always go back to marketing and advertising.
I could always get a job.
I still can.
15 years later.
If my successful health coaching business happens to just crumple, which it won't, it's not going out of business.
It is thriving.
But if it did, or if I stopped liking it or whatever, I can go get a job.
(29:17):
There's no problem.
There's no worst case scenario here.
It took a good three years for my business to establish itself to the point where I could leave.
I didn't stay at the coffee shop and the smoothie bar for three years.
I jumped around to other jobs.
While my health coaching income was growing, you know, I could.
(29:40):
I was shoring up the difference with other jobs for about three years until it was at a point where I could solely focus on it.
Yeah.
Now.
I also work at a health coaching school now, which is amazing.
I'm the coaching director at Primal Health Coach Institute.
I get to mentor and train health coaches.
I get to do this podcast.
(30:00):
I get to be a thought leader in health coaching because I've been doing it for a long time.
So, I do have my hands in other little pies, right?
I have lots of other little side gigs I do, but that's because I've established myself as a leader in the health coaching space, and I can do that.
And I actually love that.
I love the idea of the health coach becoming a just a sort of gener health thought leader. I
(30:27):
think thought leadership, quite honestly, is sort of where we eventually get to.
We help clients, we build a business, and then eventually we kind of get to the point where we are now at a level where industry is asking for our opinion on things.
And that's really cool.
I'm actually excited about this.
And I think I should do another episode on this.
about the job market for health coaches, for example.
(30:48):
You can go get a job as a health coach.
There's more and more and more jobs now than ever before.
When I first started, there weren't jobs.
So I just had to go into private practice, and I like it.
But I mean, I'm seeing health coaches who are now managing teams of health coaches in industry and organizations.
Imagine you being the lead health coach.
(31:08):
That's some there's some clout there.
There's industry cl. That
's the word I was looking for. Industry
cl.
When you have industry clout, you can get jobs like this.
You can be brought in, like I was, into Primal Health Coach Institute to be a consultant for a health coaching school.
You can be asked to speak on stage.
You can write books.
You can have a monetized podcast.
(31:29):
You become an industry leader, but only if you put in the reps.
And it's interesting.
It's pretty cool to see.
And what I will say.
And this is a little bit of a raw, raw, pep talk, is I'm pretty sure I wasn't going to become an industry leader in advertising and marketing.
I think what was going to happen there is I might have gotten a cost of living pay increase.
I might have gotten one more promotion.
(31:50):
I could see myself in like the
VP role.
If I really knuckled down, I could have gotten to the VP of marketing somewhere, maybe, and maybe I'd be making a nice six-figure salary.
doing something I don't necessarily love.
But the potential for expansion and growth in my previous career is nothing compared to the potential that I obviously had right from jump in doing my own thing in health coaching.
(32:17):
And um so I'm really excited for me that I did that.
And it really has paid off in immense ways, not just financially, which I know we're concerned about that.
Will I be able to pay my bills?
I you will.
You will if you don't quit.
If you don't quit, I have high confidence your health coaching business will pay your bills comfortably.
(32:38):
And I think you'll find that you grow.
At an exponential rate faster than you are going to in your current career path that you're obviously not that in love with.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this health coaching podcast.
I hope that my story is interesting to you, or at least there's some resonance there.
(33:01):
And I'd love to know what, if anything, you've taken away from it.
This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute.
To learn more about how to become a successful health coach, get in touch with us by visiting primalhealthco. forward
sl call.
Or if you're already a successful health coach, practitioner, influencer, or thought leader with a thriving business and an interesting story, we'd love to hear from you.
(33:25):
Connect with us at hello at prim. and let us know why we
need to interview you for Health Coach Radio. Thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.