I had originally
intended for this blog to be primarily a way to share my travel stories, but
for the next few months I will mostly be travelling for business so it's about
time I did a post about how my career here has taken shape. In a previous post I explained how I started
working for Greenhill Family Chiropractic and was training to become a Wellness
Coach, but a lot has changed since then.
When we got back
from our Canada trip I really got focused on preparing myself to be a
coach. I had to start my own business
and meet with Brett so he could teach me the skills I needed for coaching. In my own time I just kept reading and
researching, and I was able to take my first clients in January 2013. For the first month Brett sat in on the
sessions with me and gave me feedback, and since then I have been coaching on
my own! I do lots of sessions in person,
but I also have a few clients from across Australia that I do Skype sessions
with. More recently I've been working on
adding some new services to my business.
Soon I will start offering personalized home visits for people who want
help cleaning out their pantry, reading food labels, meal planning, cooking
demos, and even grocery store or market tours.
I have found that a lot of people are interested in nutrition but don't
really want to be coached through it; some people just like to rip off the
band-aid and get started!
But if that was all
I was doing, I would have had a lot more time to write this blog! I actually have a few other projects underway
at the moment.
My favourite of them
all is the podcast I'm co-hosting with Brett and the other chiropractor at the
practice, Janah. The three of us get
along great and we decided to start a podcast called "That Paleo Show". We're all very passionate about helping
people get back to eating real, unprocessed food, and we're having a lot of fun
with the podcast. It has been extremely
popular, hitting #1 health podcast in Australia on iTunes in the first week,
and pretty much staying there ever since.
We have doubled our listeners each week, and this week we're up to the
#26 ranked health podcast in the US, which is AMAZING considering how many
podcasts there are there! It's so cool
to get emails and messages from friends and family, and even people I've never
met, saying that they're enjoying the podcast and it's helping them stay
motivated. If for no other reason, then
that makes it a success to me. Check it
out: http://thewellnesscouch.com/that-paleo-show
My other major
project is the workshop I'm planning with Brett called The Business of Wellness
Coaching. We found that once I started
advertizing my services as a coach, people were actually more interested in
becoming a coach themselves. The
industry is not regulated at all so actually anyone who has passion and
knowledge can do it, so we decided to put together a workshop detailing exactly
how to take the steps to start a Wellness Coaching business from scratch. Brett has been writing a coaches guide for
awhile, and I'm doing all of the worksheets, extra resources, and appendices,
along with designing the flow of the workshop and of course the logistics. Some people may see this as essentially
training my competition, but I see it as the more people doing Wellness
Coaching, the more people there are marketing it, and the more it will gain
popularity with clients and help the world get well. It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned. You can check out our website here: http://www.thewellnesscoach.biz/
And of course,
that's not all I'm doing! On top of all
of that I'm also taking more courses!
The major one that I'm taking is a year long at the Institute for
Integrative Nutrition. It's a Health
Coach training program, covering topics in nutrition, how to start a business,
and coaching skills. The network of
students is amazing, and many of the students are even in Australia. The course is all done online but I'm hoping
to meet up with some of the local students eventually. Everyone taking the course is incredibly
inspiring, and the graduates have all taken really unique paths in
wellness. In fact, that's where I got
the idea to do home visits in addition to coaching! I think this course is just what I need to
help me focus my efforts and really make a difference.
I've also found an
awesome website called Coursera where anyone can take select university courses
for free! You don’t get a credit of
course, but the courses are all from credible universities taught by actual
professors with university quality material.
I've already taken a course called "Growth to Greatness: Growing
your small business" and I'm currently taking "Introduction to Human
Physiology". The physiology course
is really hard for me since I don't have a science background, but even if I
take away 25% of the information, that's more than I knew when I started! I've also signed up for a Biology course, a
Chemistry course, and an Epigenetics course, but they don't start for a few
months yet. For anyone who just loves to
learn, you should definitely check out the website: http://www.coursera.org
Well, I think that's
about it from a business perspective.
I've got a few trips lined up to go to seminars and training, but I'll
post about them when they happen.
On the home front,
summer is just coming to an end here and my garden has been amazingly
productive! I had more basil, red
chilies, tomatoes, and lemongrass then I knew what to do with, and the chili
plants just started flowering again so I'm sure I'm in for another massive
batch. I'll bet I've harvested about 800 so far already! I just planted a ton of spinach and salad
greens, and I'm about to plant some garlic.
I hope it's hot enough for garlic this time of year, but we'll see. I never considered myself to be a gardener,
but I now understand the satisfaction of eating right out of your own
garden. And I know they're not covered
in chemicals! The neighbours majorly
pruned the lemon tree, but I can see a few more growing so all hope is not
lost. Maybe in a few more months we'll
have lemons again.
Ryan and I are doing
our last trip for awhile in 2 weeks.
We're doing the "Great Ocean Walk" which is about a 100km hike
along the Great Ocean Road outside of Melbourne. It's famous for being the most scenic drive
in Australia, so we're hoping the walk will be better! We've hired a service to drop off our gear
and food at our campsites each night, so we'll only have to carry our day packs
which will make it a lot more fun.
Hopefully we're in good enough shape to do it!
Thanks for being
patient and reading my long story (if anyone is still reading my blog), and I
promise all of my travels will be recorded eventually! This is my journal, after all, and I don't
want to forget any part of this amazing adventure.
