Are you curious about how to start a life coaching business?

If you haven’t already, start here by reading “How I Started My Coaching Business Part One”

This is Part Two.

Over the next coming years, my skills increased, my following increased, and I felt so in alignment with my work in the world. I was so happy and fulfilled every single day.

I launched program after program, like this one:

I taught women how to heal from the inside out. How to connect deeply to their true authentic selves, speak their truth, and learn to love who they are.

I taught women how to heal on every level — physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. They healed childhood traumas and forgave people in their lives they had been holding resentments on to for years.

I taught women how to love and accept themselves and their bodies unconditionally. I showed them how to eat intuitively and let go of what other people thought about them.

I am getting emotional just writing this because I was truly living my purpose and my passion on a daily basis for a very long time.

Looking back, there are some days I wish I never had to close it down.  It was devastating.

I do believe that everything happens for a reason, yet it has been difficult to apply this belief to what happened for me with this business.

Why would I close down a business that I loved?  A business that was providing me with an abundance of fulfillment and financial income?

I’ll make a long story short… I got really sick.

I got food poisoning traveling to Nicaragua and I had a debilitating number of side affects from it in the long term.

I developed a syndrome called SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) although I wouldn’t find out this was the diagnosis until many years later.

This caused a few things to happen:

1. My digestive system basically stopped working. This may be TMI but I literally did not go to the bathroom for YEARS.  The food poisoning literally ‘paralyzed’ my colon and I had virtually zero peristalsis (the wave-like muscular contractions of the intestines that move everything along). You can imagine the trickle-down effects of this, right…
2. Anytime I ate carbohydrates, fruits, sugars, anything fermentable I would blow up like a massive balloon. The bloating, gas & pain were at times unbearable.  (At one point I went to the ER the pain was SO bad.  And this is coming from a woman who had not 1 but 2 natural childbirths!!)Check this out- here’s pictures of when the bloating got so bad:
   
   Here’s me LITERALLY one day later with no bloating:
   WTF
3. I developed leaky gut as a result and it created a systemic infection in my entire body which caused a host of other symptoms, such as:
4. My thyroid stopped working and I was diagnosed with hypo-thyroid
5. My hair started falling out
6. I had frequent migraines “with aura” – at one point I was having them once a week, which were debilitating and left me in bed in the dark with ‘migraine hangovers’ sometimes for days
7. I had wild fluctuating mood swings, depression & anxiety so bad that I had to start taking medication to control it (the gut-brain connection is REAL)
   
8. My period became irregular and I lost it for almost a year (when it was once regular like clockwork)
   
9. I developed cystic acne on my face and cystic fibroids in my breasts
   
   
10. Gained 15 pounds and was puffy from inflammation
    
11. My liver enzymes became elevated as well as a host of other irregularities in my bloodwork.

Needless to say, I was depressed, anxious, irritable and stressed out over all of these things.  I felt powerless going to doctor after doctor whose treatments were not making me any better.

To make matters worse, I felt as if I could not share what was going on with me.  I hid what was going on.

I was supporting and coaching women and at the time believed that I shouldn’t have these issues, and if I did then it was my responsibility to fix it. Boy was I wrong.

Then everything took a turn for the worst…

One day I went out to dinner with my boyfriend and ate a particularly carbohydrate heavy meal. On the way home I yelled for him to pull over, as I felt nauseous and thought I would be sick.

He pulled over and I threw up in the bushes. I felt better afterwards but was concerned as I had been in recovery from bulimia for 7 years and didn’t want to throw up.

Unconsciously I learned that when I was feeling sick, that a “good” solution to avoid the bloating and pain of the SIBO would be to throw up.

Over the next few months, I noticed that when I would eat something that triggered the SIBO, that I started to feel nauseous and would run to the bathroom to throw up.

It started happening more and more frequently with me justifying and rationalizing what I was doing… after all, I was sick and I was seeing doctor after doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me and no one was helping.

I was in denial for a long time about it. I honestly believed at the time that I was just throwing up from being physically sick.

Until there came a time when I ‘intentionally’ threw up… and I realized what had happened. Not only was my body extremely physically sick. I had relapsed in my eating disorder.

I knew what I had to do.

At the time I had about 800+ women in one of my courses I was leading, and had just launched a membership program with about 85 women.

I shut it all down.

Out of integrity I realized that I could not continue to teach something that I was actively struggling with.

I realized that the biggest factor to my recovery would be healing the physical complications I had developed, as this was what triggered the ED relapse.

So I closed my programs down and stopped doing eating disorder recovery coaching.

It absolutely broke my heart.

I felt like I was letting everyone down.

Most of all, I had let myself down.

I spent the next years focusing on myself, healing my body, and learning to forgive myself for what happened.

I have been so hard on myself!!  The hardest part was making sense of what happened and letting go of the shame surrounding it.

During that time I also pivoted in coaching to developing courses that taught the business side of things.

One of the things that evolved out of my private coaching practice over the years, was that I had many women who recovered from their eating disorder and then asked me,

“Lauren, teach me how to do what you did: how to create a business and a brand based on your purpose and passion.”

The next level of my business was born.

I launched a few different programs, one called “Soul Calling” and another called “Create a 6 Figure Business From Soul.”

These were some of my favorite programs that I created over the years.

I taught women how to tap into their own unique passions and explore how it felt to run a business. I taught them how to authentically sell and earn money from their gifts.  I absolutely loved teaching women how to start a life coaching business.

I’ve helped women start businesses from all different sorts of passions:

• Yoga businesses
• Self-love coaching businesses
• Anorexic coaching business- held in a kitchen teaching women w/eating disorders how to prepare, cook and eat their food while learning to love themselves
• Wilderness medicine business
• Confidence Coaching Businesses
• Narcissistic Recovery Coaching Business
• Overcoming Burnout for Teachers & Service Providers Coaching Business
• Financial Literacy Coaching Business
• Personal Training Business
• and more

These brave women all overcame their limitations with their mental health and eating disorders and were able to launch and grow businesses that lit their souls on fire.

This is where I am today.

Although I don’t have a direct desire to go back to eating disorder recovery coaching, I am here to help women step into the person they are meant to become and build the life & business of your dreams, whatever that is to you.

I am proud to say that I am coming up on three years of recovery from my eating disorder and major health issues(!!!).

I have worked very hard to get to where I am today and am finally in a place mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually— where I am ready to hold space for women to transform once again.

I am a business coach, a life coach, transformational coach here to help women to access their own authentic truth, own their story, and create a business and a brand based on being YOU.

I could only do it if I myself put in the work. The last few years have really challenged me to the core and I have grown and learned SO much!!

I’ve always told my clients: I will never ask you to do anything I haven’t done myself.

Now here I am leading by example once again, to show you that it IS possible to live a life you desire while creating a business that supports you in every way — financially and abundantly.

Thank you for letting me share this vulnerable yet powerful story with you.

I haven’t shared these details publicly yet. If I’m really being honest, I’ve been afraid to open up about these things.

I felt a strong need to share my authentic journey with you so that you know that:

1. Struggles are inevitable, you don’t need to be perfect in order to help coach others, and

2. Being open and transparent about what you’ve been through only helps to create trust and rapport with your clients.  They will respect and love you for sharing your vulnerable pieces with them.

And so in the spirit of vulnerability – I lay my truth before you and bare my soul.

I am so grateful for what has happened and am so excited for what’s to come.

I hope you’ll join me yet again on this amazing journey. Thanks for being here!!

Love,
xo Lauren