I used to always question whether I was ready, like really really ready, to coach other people in their health and wellness journeys no matter how many success stories I had under my belt. And all because I was not at my perfect health and wellness. But then after many years on this track, I realized there is no finish line, no gold medal to win at the end of this race. It is a lifelong journey that will ebb and flow and have its ups and downs based on my age, life circumstances, and outside stressors that distract me from my best health habits.
It is actually in my own personal practice of finding wellness that I have learned more than any school course has taught me. It is in my practice that I continually learn to be empathic toward others’ wellness journeys. It is in my challenges and weaknesses that I am learning to be a better coach, a better listener, and a better cheerleader. Health and wellness is what my career is based on, but that is secondary. Working toward optimal health and wellness is my life’s work. And so here I am with this blog sharing my hacks, thought processes, and learnings that I go through daily to hopefully inspire others to do the work to step into the next best version of themselves.
I am a married 43-year-old woman, mother to 3 children, and run my own health and wellness coaching business, Whole Health Results. How did I get here? It is all a long story but the short version is I battled with unexplained infertility for a decade plus and it cracked open in me an unwavering desire to figure out what the heck was wrong with me, wrong with my body. Why was this happening to me? What was I supposed to be learning from this – that is the only way I could make peace with the heartbreak of infertility – to know this was all happening for my good. And now that I have 11, 9, and 3-year-old children I can look back and say heck yes, it all did happen for my good.
Before I underwent IVF to have my youngest daughter I had had about a 5-year break from actively trying to get pregnant – and therefore the woes of IVF. However, don’t think I didn’t still magically wish each month that somehow I would miss my period and become one of those stories of magically cured infertility with a miracle pregnancy. Well that didn’t happen, or the miracle didn’t happen in exactly that way I should say. So instead I said this is it, this is my chance to go through a trying experience I had been through several times before and to do everything I knew how to do to change the experience and to take complete ownership of my physical, mental, and emotional health and to see if I could make the experience different this time. And well, it worked for me. I started to prep my body and mind for undergoing IVF about 9-12 months before I got started. From that time through the fourth trimester my job was working towards improved health and wellness and my measure was how well I was able to handle IVF, handle my pregnancy, and handle the 4th trimester (the first 3 months after the baby is born) which had been extremely challenging with my first daughter (my oldest son is adopted so I have only had 2 pregnancies). I learned so much from this little challenge I gave myself. I was obsessed with working on all areas of my health while my oldest two were in school (I quit my corporate marketing job when my second was 1 to be a stay-at-home mom) and little by little began to feel like a new person.
It was when my third and last daughter was born I knew I wanted to go back and study health and wellness coaching so that I could coach others to undergo the transformation I had begun to experience. That was 3 years ago and now I look back to that time and can’t even recognize how far my health and wellness has come since then. That is why I love this work. It is such a process, a lifestyle really of just little by little uncovering the areas of your physical, mental, and emotional well-being that need to be upgraded.
I also love this work because I get to dismantle what the picture of health is. I think going on a wellness journey is intimidating because many people have an idea of what that version of themselves has to look like – lots of kale, meditation, sound baths, a Bravo detox, and no more pizza Fridays. We are all here with our God-given set of passions, skills, and strengths and our ideal picture of wellness is extremely individual. But what I have learned is that even though our ideal lifestyles all look a little different, we are all after the same thing – becoming happier, more peaceful, loving, and productive humans. And even though the specifics of how we get there are different from person to person, the foundational pieces of building health and wellness are the same whether you are trying to get more sleep, reduce anxiety, or lose 20 pounds.
Today my picture of health includes meditation, lots of different types of meditation but the consistent foundation of Transcendental Meditation. It includes workouts of all sorts – pilates, yoga, tennis, walking/jogging, and heavy weights. I cook almost all meals at home and spend a ridiculous amount of my budget on organic, high-quality foods. I love love love sleep and have a very involved and amazing evening ritual. I also get regular Botox and again spend too much money to cover my grey hair and make my hair look like it has natural highlights. I spend most days watching at least 1 trashy Bravo show to unplug. I get caught up in over consumerism. My kids spend too much time on their iPads (really working on improving this!) And they also eat more junk food than I’d like. And I lose my patience about these things more than I’d like to admit. So we are all a work in progress – but the thing I come back to is today I am a vastly improved version of myself than what I was a year ago. And that is what I hope for everyone to be able to say – not that we are perfect or that we are even striving for perfection. But we are improving and finding more peace and joy in every season of life.
