I Left Corporate for Health Coaching. Here’s How I Matched My Income.

Michelle Leotta:
Welcome to the Health Coach Power Community Podcast. I'm Michelle Leotta, ex-corporate girl turned certified health coach with over 15 years of experience growing a successful online practice. I started out with no idea what I was getting into and learned a lot of lessons along the way that have given me the freedom to do the work I love and raise two boys as a single mom.

I created the Health Coach Power Community over a decade ago to make it easier for health coaches to build a career they love and make the world a better place.

When I left my corporate career to become a health coach, the hardest part was going from having a respected career, title and salary to feeling like a total beginner starting from scratch with nothing except a certificate in my hand. In this episode, I'll share how I got through that identity shift, built my confidence in an entirely new career, and the most surprising thing that helped me start earning real money, not only to replace my nine-to-five income, but multiply it.

Now, I should preface all of this by saying I never wanted to run my own business. It was not a dream of mine. I did not have an entrepreneurial bone in my entire body. I was very good at working for someone else. Can you relate to that? I was an A+ student. I was a high achiever, a solid employee, very good at following directions.

And beyond that, I'd worked really, really hard to get ahead in my advertising career. I was super proud of climbing that ladder within a respected ad agency. I was finally making good money, my own window office. Like, I had it made. And at the same time, I was terribly conflicted in that job because as I'd gotten into health and wellness, let's just say the work no longer aligned with my core values.

And maybe you've had an experience like this, too. In my case, I was working for clients that included McDonald's and Ocean Spray, and I was really starting to have a hard time with that as I cleaned up my own diet and saw how harmful these processed fake food products were. And I became motivated. I wanted to do better work in the world.

But yet, my identity as a senior art director working at Arnold, which back then was the largest and most respected ad agency in Boston, well, you know, my self-worth was all kinds of tied up with that, the status, and the career that I had built. So yeah, I went to health coaching school to immerse myself in health and wellness, but I had no plans to leave advertising until it was 2008, the banks crashed, and I was offered the choice between taking a few months of severance or staying with the clear understanding that it was not okay for me to leave at 5:00 to go to yoga.

It wasn't gonna be okay anymore because people in the office were talking about my lack of commitment. So I took it as a sign from the universe, and I said, "Give me the pink slip. I'm outta here." I mean, I can't leave at 5:00, and people gossip about how I go to yoga to take care of myself. Meanwhile, I am telling you at least three-quarters of that office was on Xanax.

So I had to go. This was it, and it was very freeing, and it was also very unsettling. So if you're going through this transition, I have been there. I woke up on the first day of my new life, and it was so weird. You know, if you've come from another career, I'm sure you've felt this way. It's like, "Who am I?

Do I set an alarm clock in this new life?" Like, "What do I do? I guess I don't commute anymore. Do I get dressed? Do I stay in my pajamas?" And it's funny because I thought making that career change, I was like, "Okay, the biggest change, the biggest risk is going to be the financial piece." But finances, like, they can be planned, they can be managed in black and white.

You can get it settled somehow. But for me, it was really the emotional leap that was enormously destabilizing 'cause I didn't have a map to follow. What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do after that? I didn't have a boss to help me along the way. And most of all, I felt that I had lost status, like I was now on the bottom of the totem pole again.

Goodbye to everything that I had worked so hard for. Now, I am looking back now, it's almost two decades later, and I see it differently. So, just know if you've left or if you are in the process of leaving corporate, leaving a nine-to-five, you know, whatever your first career has been before health coaching, my best advice for you is to not think about it as starting over as a health coach.

You're not starting from scratch. Like, of course not. That's ridiculous. You have degrees, maybe multiple degrees, maybe a PhD. And if not that, you have years and years of experience. You have a network full of contacts. So don't walk into health coaching like I did, like it was my first day on planet Earth.

You're bringing enormous assets to the table, and if we can leverage them, I see the opportunity for you to reach far more people and demand higher rates right out of the gate. I mean, with your experience and with your network, you might be able to reach into pockets of the population that would not normally seek out help with their health, for example, right?

You might have access to people who, yes, they need help, but they would just never go online searching for a health coach. That's literally everybody that I worked with in advertising. But they'll listen to you because they know you. They respect you. And more importantly than any of that, they know you understand their industry and where they're coming from, their lifestyle, those unique challenges that they're up against at work.

Again, advertising was, and probably still is, notoriously unhealthy as a work environment. But you know how many of my clients came to me through the years? All from advertising. And they didn't think to themselves, "Oh, I want a health coach. Let me go interview 100 health coaches and pick one." Not at all.

They specifically wanted to work with me. I was their connection to thinking about health and wellness. Otherwise, probably never would've even crossed their minds. So not only do you have those contacts and that unique background, but you bring practical skills. So I'll give you an example again from my own life.

In advertising, I'd gotten pretty good at presenting creative concepts to clients and pitching ideas. I had to stand up in conference rooms and sell people on campaigns. I mean, that was just part of the job. So now, as a health coach, I was like, "Hmm, I only have this one little nutrition certification in my hand," and felt kind of low.

But I was already comfortable speaking confidently in front of people. Check. So workshops? Sure. Presentations? No problem. Sales conversations, like those came much more naturally to me than they might for someone else without that background. Now, I'm not trying to say that you need a background in advertising or sales to make it as a health coach.

I now work with coaches who've come from finance, pharmacy, research, teaching, corporate leadership, like all kinds of industries. And I can tell you this for sure your previous career experience is not something that you're leaving behind, or I don't want you to. It's not separate from your success as a coach.

It's actually part of what makes you most valuable. The mistake is thinking that your health coach certification is the only thing you're bringing to the table, and it's not. It's not even close. See how confidently I can tell you that, though? Trust me, I did not feel confident in the beginning at all.

And as I was preparing this episode, I'm like trying to remember the first time that it felt real. Like, when did I start to believe in myself as a health coach and think of myself that way? And I know it was not with my first client. It was maybe with my third or fourth. Like, I remember it was the first time that I met with somebody in person instead of everybody else had been over the phone.

Yes, the phone, not Zoom, 'cause we're talking about way back in the dark ages. Anyway, this was the first person I met in person, and she also paid me in full. She was the first person to do that. She wrote out a check for the full amount of my program and kinda slid it across to me. Even though I was meeting her for the very first time, I was like, "Oh my goodness, look at all this money she's giving me."

Shocked. Shocked that she didn't see me as a total beginner. She believed in me before I even believed in myself, and I think there's something to that. When other people out in the world, you know, perfect strangers, they see your value, and then you start to see it too. You know? So that means putting yourself out there before you feel ready.

Like, you're not going to feel 100% confident. This is something new, of course. I want you to leverage your previous experience, but of course, you're doing something you haven't done before. But hello, if you are coming from another career, you are absolutely bringing more to the table than that health coach certification.

Please. So my first big challenge really was that identity shift that came from this big career change, just the who am I now feeling. And then the next big challenge I learned, there's this really big difference between finding success in a corporate job and finding success working for yourself as a coach.

I mean, frankly, any job that I ever had before was different, even waitressing. Like, I waitressed at Friendly's through high school. So with most jobs, you're paid to do certain tasks, right? They give you the tasks, and you complete them. There's a job description, and you fill it. And if you do it well and you're generally smart about it and pretty nice to be around, then hopefully you'll get a promotion.

But in coaching, in this business, it's not about so much what you do. It's about who you are, and that does include your previous career experience, right? So it's not just about tasks and doing and doing and doing. People don't hire you even for information. I mean, these days, they can just ask ChatGPT if they want info.

Trust me, they don't hire you because they really, really want 12 one-hour coaching sessions. Nobody wants that. That's not it. Clients hire us for our energy, our vision, and how we make them feel about themselves. Like, they hire us, I believe this, they hire us to believe in them. Meanwhile, coming from corporate, in the beginning, I was over here looking for the project plan, like the checklist, the deadlines, the budget.

There's some of that, of course. I mean, we are running a business. But coaching is based on who you are and who you inspire, not what you're able to check off a list. It's just a totally different way of defining success. And by the way, since we're talking about tasks, there are the things that are gonna have to get done.

I had to get comfortable with B-minus work. I was not comfortable with that in the beginning. So if you come from a corporate background, beware. I couldn't expect that same level of polish because I didn't have the team, the budget and the timelines. Like, whether it was an email or it was my website or whatever, I could still create pretty amazing stuff, and I did, but they looked a little different without that whole team behind me. The final shift, and this is the one that I know you wanna hear about the most, right?

It's that shift to actually earning, and yes, matching my income from advertising and making it many times over, eventually far surpassing it. Much to my surprise, I only ever thought if I could just match what I was making before, if I could just make what I was making before, I'd be happy. And I hear that from a lot of coaches, too.

Now, in the beginning, I made the same mistake that almost everybody makes when they come out of health coaching school because we're, like, enamored with health. We are health enthusiasts. I love this stuff. I could talk your face off all day about flaxseed because you know what? I was interested in, as mundane as it sounds, the benefits of flaxseed.

Other people, maybe, probably not. So I had to remember that while health coaching was, and still is, my passion, this was intended to be a business, right? Not like, let me just do things that I think are cool. So I had to think like a business, not a hobbyist, not an enthusiast. Working in advertising, I'm like, "Oh, that's right.

We didn't create ad campaigns." I didn't just sit around working on, you know, ads for things I personally liked, right? I wasn't making ads for yoga. I was making ads for McDonald's because there's no business if there's no clients, and there's no clients unless you're providing something that they want and are willing to pay for, and that's when the income appears.

You know, you start connecting your passion to an actual demand that exists. I've noticed that health coaching schools have created this huge gap. They sell the idea that you're gonna become a health coach, and then you're gonna walk out into the world, and you're gonna get a job. Or you're gonna find all these clients pretty easily 'cause everybody out there needs health coaching.

And that might be true that they need it, but this is not what usually happens. I'm here to help you bridge that gap. I'll show you how to match your old nine-to-five income in my free private training, which you can check out at HealthCoachPower.com/CareerChange. See, if you're a health coach who's left a previous professional career, I know you're going through this big transitional moment, and some of it feels awesome, like maybe you don't have to set an alarm in the morning, and some of it feels really disorienting.

But you're not a beginner, so stop acting like one. I'm gonna help you combine your professional strengths with your passion and the demand that's already out there and waiting for you, with the reality of entrepreneurship. My free private training is waiting for you. It's at HealthCoachPower.com/CareerChange.

Thank you so much for listening to the Health Coach Power Community podcast. Please take a moment, leave a written review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us reach more coaches and allows me to bring you this free content every week. To join us live, ask your questions, and have a direct line to me, join our free Facebook group at HealthCoachPowerCommunity.com.