#316: What 13 Years of Health Coaching Taught Me and Why I Walked Away

Well, hello there, health coaches. You know what? About a week or so ago, Samantha posted in our health coach Power Community Facebook group, and we get tons of posts every week asking for help with various business issues and looking for support. But this one was different. This one was very direct. Samantha asked why I had stopped health coaching. Good question. So thanks for asking Samantha. And it's true. In 2022, after 13 years of private practice, I walked away from my private health coaching business and I can already hear all the cynics. I don't know why this industry, we do get very cynical sometimes, and yeah, sometimes I'm like that too. I guess anything that exists primarily in the online space, we still, in 2024, we still have this inherent distrust. So whenever anything tweaks us a little bit, we're like, oh, can't trust that. Oh, I bet they're just trying to get me, this must be a scam.

Maybe you're thinking, Michelle, why are you even trying to get us to become successful as health coaches if you don't even want to be doing it? Anyone have that thought? Go ahead. It's all right. I can take it. You can raise your hand. You can say, yes, Michelle. That's exactly what I thought. Maybe you're like, I knew it. Health coaching really isn't all it's cracked up to be. See, I knew it from the start. Well, listen, I can't blame you entirely for being skeptical. I know when I started school to become a health coach, I was the most skeptical person in the room. I 100% never, ever thought I was going to turn it into a career. Please. I never even thought I was going to work with a single client. I didn't think I was going to be able to help change lives. Who was I?

Right? And I was going to make money doing this. You're right. No way. So I get it. I'm right there with all of you skeptics and cynics out there. Actually, I'm pretty curious, even just for yourself or if you can answer in the comments here as we're broadcasting into the Facebook group. On a scale of one to 10, how cynical do you find yourself about this industry? It's fascinating. We have thousands and thousands of health coaches graduating every year. I don't know, maybe it's tens of thousands graduating every year from various health coaching schools. And yet all I ever hear is everything kind of laced with this underlying skepticism of it all. So I'm just curious, are you like a 10 on cynicism? Are you like a one? I, I'm sure my position on this has just evolved through the years. I've been involved with health coaching now for 15 years, but today I want to share the truth about what I learned in those 13 years of practicing as a health coach and yes, making money and yes, working with clients around the world and how and why I made the decision to move on.
This episode is brought to you by Practice Better. It's the practice management software that has a special place in my heart. It came along in the later years of my health coaching practice, and wow, did it change everything? Such a lifesaver. Finally, I had one platform that was handling all the things, the billing and the scheduling, helping run my sessions, even selling group coaching or online courses or hybrid programs. Do yourself a favor. You're going to want to go sign up for a free trial and you can save 30% off your first three months at healthcoachpower.com/pb, and that stands for Practice Better. Practice Better. So when I was preparing this episode, I was thinking, what did I learn? What did I learn in 13 years and what jumps to the front of my mind immediately are the big successes that happened within my health coaching practice, which gosh, to compare to that cynical, cynical person who entered health coaching school thinking, no way, no.

How I would like to say to her and to all of you that, yeah, over the course of my career working with clients, I did indeed have clients all over the country, all over the world. I remember working with a client in China. I remember working with a client in Israel. I've had clients on almost every continent. And even with just that one little silly, perhaps health coach certification, a lot of times we don't have faith that that is enough. But with just that, I was changing lives. I was watching that happen. I was helping people improve their health. A lot of my clients got off prescription medications. It wasn't something that I was like, I'm going to get people off prescription medications necessarily, but even not even realizing that that was going to happen, it was a happy byproduct of working with them. So I can't tell you how many of my clients were like, oh, yeah, I don't have to take that anymore.

Oh yeah, my doctor said, I'm all set with this. Wow. Right. Wow. Take that big pharma. I have had a lot of clients get their health markers in check, like cholesterol numbers, triglycerides, things like that. Just bringing numbers into a healthy range. I've seen clients reverse things like prediabetes. That's amazing. I've seen couples do that together because when one starts eating differently, the other starts eating differently. Not always, but sometimes. And together, reversing diagnoses like prediabetes. I've seen clients get rid of symptoms of autoimmunity, heartburn, gone, PMS symptoms, gone, IBS symptoms gone. All the acronyms. I can think of all of these client success stories right up here in my head, and I especially love seeing how it would ripple out into their lives. Yeah, okay. So we got their cholesterol down or whatever their goals were, but then they started new jobs. They started going for things in life.

Like once you realize you can do one thing, your brain's like, oh, I can do other things too. And for me, that was always the most powerful part of health coaching a client finally taking that trip or finally diving into a hobby that they always wanted to get into. Take up salsa, dancing clients, drawing boundaries for the first time where they were needed or confronting negative thought patterns in their head. Basically, I just saw clients like it's about food and it's about health, but it's about everything When we're working with clients and they end up a lot of my clients, so I just saw them start living more. Well-rounded, more fulfilled lives. And I'm curious if you've had that experience too. Sometimes it is just about the health. Someone wants to lose 10 pounds and they lose 10 pounds. I'm like, great. We did good. Great, awesome. We can all feel wonderful about helping the client with whatever they're trying to do, but you just dig a little bit more. Sometimes you just push a little bit more where you think it could be helpful and wow, wow, life-changing stuff can happen when people change their food. I mean, I know that happened in my life too, and maybe it's happened in yours. That's the kind of change I was always looking for in my health coaching practice. So I just kind of get goosebumps thinking about that stuff. It kind of makes me want to take on more clients now that we're talking about it. Oy. Okay. So what I also learned as a health coach was that, and this hit me pretty hard in the beginning. I think it took a while for me to realize this, and I think a lot of you do not realize this, so I'm going to just spell it out for you.

No one wakes up in the morning thinking, I want a health coach. I'm going to find me a health coach today. They don't think that people know, oh, I moved to a new town. I need to find a primary care physician, or I need to find a new dentist. Or, oh, I need car insurance, whatever. So we know we need certain things. Nobody knows that they need a health coach. There's not thinking like that. So what that means when you're in this job career calling, it's more than a job or career. It really is a mission. Most of the job is marketing yourself. I know don't shoot the messenger, but we need to show people how they could benefit from a health coach. We need to give them opportunities to get to know us and trust us. So when you're like, oh, I want to be health coach, I can't wait to get into help coaching, you're probably thinking about how you're going to be working with clients, and that is fantastic, and you'll absolutely be doing that, just like I was sharing with you, seeing all these amazing things happen when we start working with people.

But to really succeed business wise, you're going to spend, I promise you, just as much time if not more marketing yourself. That is the reality of running your own health coaching business. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the reality of offering something that's outside the traditional model where people desperately need the help, but they aren't out there looking for it specifically. And I think most of us got into health coaching. We were fed up with the traditional medical model. We don't want to be part of that. We want to be helping people in a better way, in a different way.

You just have to remember that if you are working outside the system, you're going to have to work differently than it would be if you were inside the system. If people were just finding you on their health insurance website and calling you up and asking if you were taking new clients, that would be totally different. But we chose not to go that route in our careers. We chose to do something alternative. We chose to offer people an alternative. So here we are. So that is a big, big thing that I learned in my private practice. And so with that idea in mind that a lot of the job is marketing. My background in big advertising came in very, very, very handy. More than I ever really thought it would. But the thing was, I knew how to get people's attention and I knew how to build trust and I knew how to get them to say yes even when most people don't really like the idea of changing their diet and lifestyle. Everybody wants to pop a pill. Very few people want to do the real work. It sounds scary. It sounds hard. So we have to be careful with how we message around health coaching services.

Gosh, it was so fascinating to me. Have you noticed that people are sometimes extremely resistant to something that feels kind of, maybe feels silly to you or me, where it's like we might be like, oh, I should experiment by eliminating dairy for my diet. Or maybe I shouldn't drink coffee for a while and see how I feel. We might be into that, but some people are extremely resistant to changing how they're eating, giving up their favorite foods, taking a hard look at habits that aren't serving them. So just know that the work that we're doing, it can be backed by all the science in the world. It can be client led up, down, and sideways. This work fundamentally is very, very personal, and it's nothing like selling someone a new tv. People are willing to embrace a new TV with new features that doesn't typically scare them, but if you suggest that someone tries quinoa or that's very weird, sometimes you're going to really get the side eye about things that they don't want to do.

Or maybe they could try eating some nice soy free range eggs instead of a bagel for breakfast. It goes against everything that they've been taught to believe. Sometimes a belief in nutrition topics runs weirdly close to religious beliefs. Once someone gets in their head that fat makes you fat, it is really hard to get them to have a teaspoon of butter in their oats or something like that. Anyway, it's very personal. Where does this land us? Well, it lands us back in marketing because no one is going to sign up for your healthy eating program if they think they're going to have to eat bird food or if they think you are nuts because you're telling them to eat fat and that it's not going to make them fat. And that just goes against everything that they've ever heard or believed. They're not going to want to do it if they think you're going to sell them another fad diet or if they think, oh, here's something else that I can fail at.

Because people, they do want to be healthy, for sure, there's a giant, giant market for this billions of dollars, but they too are skeptical just like you and I can be. So all the successes that I saw with my clients over 13 years, here's what I noticed. It had something to do with my skills as a coach. Sure, it had something to do with my knowledge of nutrition and the human body. Of course, it had a lot to do with the client's willingness to change, and it had everything to do with my ability to market myself and market these services to even the most cynical people out there. I remember one of my early clients, she gave me the fiercest side eye when we talked about the possibility of an elimination diet and quite pointedly, she looked right at me. She was going to eat my head, bite my head off, and she told me she was never going to give up cheeseburgers like that with that kind of ferocity in her voice.

And it was kind of like, oh my God. It was kind of rude in a way, and I kind of wanted to cry a little bit. I was a new coach, and I don't think anyone ever spoke to me like that before about food. I didn't understand how could someone be so aggressively against experimenting with their diet a little bit, but I learned it's really common. And she learned that yes, she could make changes to her diet. And guess what happened? PS her mood lightened up a lot. She wasn't experiencing so much anger, and she never quite exactly apologized. She probably didn't even realize how that stuck with me the way she spoke to me that day. But later on she told me that it was amazing just by changing her food, she didn't have road rage anymore. That's what she noticed. And I just smiled.

Here's what I know. My health coaching practice came with me through lots of different stages of life, right through a major career change. I left advertising in 2009 and went full-time as a coach, never looking back. I was health coaching through five big moves from Boston to Washington DC back up, up and down the East coast. And it seems like no matter where I went, this was one thing that remained constant for me. My health coaching business, I health coached through the birth of my two boys, their toddlerhood, their elementary years, I health coached straight through my divorce.

So with all that good stuff and all that good learning, why I'm even asking myself, I loved it. Why after 13 years would I walk away? Why would I stop coaching? What happened ever since basically day one of me being a health coach, other coaches were asking for my help with their businesses. Sometimes I didn't have time to help them. Sometimes I didn't want to help them because I was busy building my own thing. My health coaching school even invited me to speak as part of their business building curriculum. So that was pretty cool. And I kind of against what I was even trying to do, I wasn't trying to do this at all, but I amassed a following of health coaches. So in 2011, I started offering private business coaching. And I would do this while I was literally doing it. While I pushed my son in his stroller, he would only nap in the stroller.
So I was like, well, I might as well talk to clients while I'm pushing this thing for hours a day. I really had no other time, but I was like, wow, health coaches really need this kind of help. And then years later, in 2017, so when I started Healthy Profit University, and that allowed me to help more and more health coaches with less time. I wasn't pushing a stroller anymore, think the Lord. But now I had these online courses and these online resources, and I could see these coaches starting, many of them. You're probably listening today, right? They're still in our community. You guys found your first client started making money, your practices started to explode. What everyone needs is, especially in the beginning, is you need some guidance. You need some support around marketing. And frankly, health coaching schools are not providing merely enough around marketing for health coaches.

So that was all good, but I still had my own clients and my energy was split between what was now two entirely different successful businesses. And I got to tell you, it just came to a head like a few years after my divorce, after living through covid, my stress levels were through the roof. Do you remember that time? It was insanity, wasn't it? And as a single mom, I was like, something has to give. I cannot do all of these things and do them all. Well, especially the part about being a mom that has to be done well. And my energy was just getting split in too many different directions. I was working far too many hours. And that can happen when you're running your own business. And I thought about it for a while, but I thought the truth is that on my own, I had been able to reach hundreds, thousands of people and help them create happier and healthier lives, and that's good.

But together, I mean, we have 15,000 health coaches in our health coach Power community Facebook group right now. If every coach in my community worked with one or two clients, that would be a far greater impact than I can create in the world, in my own individual business. So we are definitely stronger together, and each of us, we each have our strengths. Some coaches say to me, I don't know, maybe this is, you say something like, I'm not good at cooking. Can I even call myself a health coach if I don't like to cook? Yes, lean into the areas that come naturally for you. Or maybe you're somebody who's more introverted and you're going to lean into creating online programs instead of doing so much one-on-one coaching, whatever it is. I think when we double down on what comes naturally, what feels full of ease, not that it's always going to be easy, you guys, I mean, starting your own business, running your own business.

It's not easy. But leaning into the things where it feels more full of ease, that's where we really shine. So for me, the area that I know best and the area that I have over 20 years of experience with is online marketing. So I had to admit, that's probably where I'm most powerful in this army of ours. If we're all working together, we each have to play a role. This is where I can be most powerful. This is how I can create the biggest impact. So I decided to stop taking my own clients, to take down my shingle, even though I spent 13 years making a name for myself as a health coach and pivot to use my talents to help you succeed. Giving Healthy Profit University and our health coach power community, 100% of my effort instead of splitting it between another business. So it's not that I don't believe in health coaching, but it's actually the opposite.
I believe in it so, so much. I know it works. I know you can be. It works on both sides. It works for clients and it works for coaches. You can be profitable. You can feel incredibly fulfilled doing this work, and I know that for that to happen, it requires a certain kind of marketing and belief in yourself that's different than other industries. So I got to tell you over here, my life feels much better only having to run one business instead of two. Thanks. I'm not going in all these different directions. I'm still a super duper health nerd, though I still love learning about nutrition just as much as the rest of you. I cook everything from scratch. I am still a health coach in my heart. My medicine cabinet is full of herbs. Don't worry. But I do all of that for me and for my family now.

And in terms of my business, I'm all in for helping this community succeed together because together we are much, much stronger. So if you want to do this with me, what do you say? I want to first of all, thanks Samantha for asking her question in our Facebook group. Keep asking questions. I will keep answering them. And if you're in, you want to join this little army of ours, this peaceful army of ours to reach people and get them to say yes to their health. I've got Healthy Profit University's free blueprint to help. You can go to healthcoachpower.com/blueprint, and I'm going to drop that right over here into our Facebook group, so you can check that out, you guys. This episode is sponsored by That Clean Life, which I also loved using as a practicing health coach, digging up recipe ideas. It used to take a hundred years, but then That Clean Life came, and suddenly, whether it's for elite magnet or a cooking class that I was doing or a group program that I was running, I could very easily find recipes for every dietary style or restriction. You can even use That Clean Life to teach your clients to meal plan for themselves. Super valuable skill, right? I had great luck with many recipes from that Clean Life's database. I still make a whole bunch of them myself here in my own house. So for all of my listeners, you can save 20% off your first four months when you join@healthcoachpower.com slash tcl. That stands for That Clean Life. Thank you all for joining me, and I'll see you next time. Take care.