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If you’re still trying to figure out how to deal with being gluten free and finding a love of your new lifestyle and food, then this is for you! While my journey to being gluten free started off with a sense of relief because I knew what was wrong, eventually I dealt with the ups and downs of living this lifestyle.
Like many, I went through a period early in my journey where I made all sorts of excuses why it was just TOO HARD to eat gluten free all of the time. I’d get angry at people who would stop inviting me out to dinner because they felt I was “too difficult” to eat with. And I wasn’t always courteous and nice to people who were serving me because I was terrified that they weren’t listening to me or believing me.
Eventually I learned that much of my anger, anxiety and fear could be handled with some self work. That’s why I want to introduce you to Laurie Gerber who is one of the head coaches at the Handel Group. Our conversation is exactly the personal work I did to get to the place I’m in now. I think you’ll find it enlightening and hopefully it will help you figure out how to deal with being gluten free from a place of empowerment.
How to Deal with Being Gluten Free & Loving Your Life with Laurie Gerber
The following points were discussed in during the podcast:
00:36 — Jennifer welcomes Laurie Gerber from Handel Group Life Coaching to the Gluten Free School Podcast.
01:25 — Why does coaching work and specific issues coaching helped Jennifer overcome.
05:30 — This first life lesson has the power to build us up, or make us fall apart.
08:38 — The difference between being a hero and being a victim comes down to ONE thing, and how this one thing turned feeling “cursed” to compassion for others.
12:07 — This second life lesson puts you on a “mental diet.”
13:11 — Life lesson number 3 tests whether your stories are true, you’re scared or just being a brat!
17:56 — Life lesson number 4 becomes an obstacle only if you use it as an excuse.
20:23 — It’s about time you come to terms with life lesson number 5… before it’s too late.
22:22 — Jennifer shares a very personal story about what can happen if you don’t make your health a priority.
25:21 — How dealing with the voices in your head impacts health, bringing you to a place of keeping promises and living your own law.
29:06 — Life lesson number 7 is all about personal integrity and action.
31:28 — How to get a free coaching session, and closing thoughts.
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COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
Jennifer: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. And today, we are going to talk about some very interesting life lessons that will absolutely apply to not just transitioning to being gluten-free, but what it’s like to live this lifestyle and how we can find a way to live a better life, a happier life, one that’s more fulfilling.
So I have a very, very wonderful guest with me. Her name is Laurie Gerber. She’s the co-president and a senior coach at Handel Group Life Coaching.
Her personal and professional mission is to better the world by teaching people to tell the truth and pursue their dreams. Her focus is on maximizing clients’ ability to thrive across all areas of life – health, love, career, money, family, et cetera.
Laurie spreads her message of empowerment through live international events, one-on-one coaching, virtual coaching courses and as a writer on radio and in TV appearances such as MTV’s True Life Special: I’m Getting a Second Chance, A&E’s The Marriage Test, The Dr. Phil Show and the Today Show.
Laurie, welcome to the podcast.
Laurie: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Jennifer: I wanted to ask you real quick how exactly did you get into coaching people and why do you think people benefit so much from being coached?
Laurie: I got into coaching because I was looking for a career in helping the world. I had always been working in education, non-profits. I was actually running my own business of helping people get educational help that needed it in academic subjects and I was not fulfilled, so I hired a coach.
The coach I happened to hire was one of the co-founders of the Handel Group who I now work for. She not only very quickly had me realize that I wanted to teach what she taught me, but she also cleaned up my health in about three months – my health, my body, my kids started sleeping through the night. I fixed some major problems in my marriage, my relationship with my father. So I just came to her for help with a few little things.
She just rocked my world so hard. She challenged my thinking in a way that nobody had in the past. I had really tried a lot of courses and therapies and modalities and yoga. I was a personal growth junkie by this time when I found her, but she really rocked my world with a method. I was so impressed by that method, which answers your next question why does coaching work.
Whatever I had learned so far from the gurus I had met and the meditating I had done and the therapy I had done and the courses I had done, did not get me to my dream state. It got me better. I will give it credit, but it did not get me focused on my dream and shutting up the voices in my head and actually taking action. It just didn’t cover that.
So when I realized that coaching was so effective, I couldn’t help but want to teach it.
Jennifer: I have also been through a long period of time where I did life coaching. I have to say, it completely changed my experience with the world, with my family, my friends. It helped me a heal a lot of relationships that were fractured and such.
I think too it also helped me cope with the transition in all of a sudden having to break up with all of this food that, for all intents and purposes, was actually a part of my heritage. It was a part of my culture, my family. It’s what bound us together.
All of a sudden, you’re like, “I can’t eat this. I can’t sit at the table with you.” You know what I mean? That’s really hard to be able to say, “Oh, I’m sorry, Grandma. I can’t eat your prize-winning, your famous dishes” and have your family not feel shunned.
All of a sudden, it becomes you versus them. There all of a sudden is an ‘other’ in the room. That’s really hard for people. There’s a lot of resentment and frustration that goes along with that.
I hope that today, with our conversation, we’ll be able to uncover, peel back some of those layers and perhaps give the folks listening a few different approaches to try and maybe change their perspective on things to feel a little more empowered.
Laurie: Yeah, I really want to do that because that is one of the most powerful things to reframe.
Everybody has a story in their life of feeling like an ‘other’, whether it’s how they look, their socio-economic status, their food sensitivities or allergies or health conditions. Every single human being we work with in coaching has some feeling of ‘us versus them’ or ‘me versus you’ that we have to get underneath, unpack and then empower.
I love that topic. I, too, one of the first things I did in coaching was quit sugar, which felt like losing my best friend.
Jennifer: No, sugar is hard. That’s a hard one to do.
Laurie: I learned a lot of really good lessons. That included bread, pasta, all that kind of stuff. I can really very much to what a – you call it a ‘transition’. That’s a very nice way to put it. Terrible loss, you know? But it is a transition because you actually learn to love something else, something that I would say is much more important.
Jennifer: So you’ve got a bunch of life lessons that you talk about and you teach about. Just from listening to you like we had a little conversation ahead of time and I know that what we’re going to share today is going to be incredibly empowering for people. So why don’t we start at life lesson #1?
Laurie: Ta-dah-da-dah. Don’t we love lists?
Okay, so the first lesson we always try to get everyone to agree to is that you are the author of your life.
Most people are like, “Duh? Yes, I wasn’t thinking someone else was in charge of my life” except that we really do tell the story of our life with the things that we like and we’re proud of. “Yeah, we’re the author of that, yup! I lost 20 lbs. I got a new client. I look great today.”
The things we don’t like, we have nothing to do with. “My mother won’t support me in my diet. These restaurants just don’t get it. Nobody’s on my side. I really always am in a bad mood on Mondays.”
So there are some things we talk about like we’re in charge and there are some things we talk about like the weather like, “It’s hot in August. There’s nothing I can do about this.” There really isn’t any given moment in our minds as well as in our words that we say out loud either an author speaking or a weather reporter speaking.
We really train people to really listen “Who’s talking right now? Are you sure you want to rely on the weather reporter?” because the weather reporter has no power. The best a weather reporter can do is bring an umbrella. The best you can do is just go into that restaurant with your guard up. That doesn’t create a wonderful result.
Jennifer: No, it doesn’t. It actually leaves people sitting on edge and feeling like at any moment, the whole world could fall apart and they’re going to get glutened and they’re going to walk out sick.
It’s interesting, the fears that we hold and really hang on to in our mind, we then sometimes find they materialize in front of us.
Laurie: Yes, we call that manifesting. It is your creative power. It’s your muscle. And when you realize you have that power, yeah, you could be a little scared that you have that power, but it’s also such a miracle because you can use it to – what we say is ‘design’ your life, ‘author’ or ‘design’ your life.
So now you can actually say, “Well, how do I want to think when I’m on a restaurant? How do I want to think when I’m with my family? How do I want it to feel as I let go of these addictions and bring in new things to eat? How do I want that to feel?”
Because I’m a human being and I have the pause button, between, my thoughts, I can actually stop them and assess them and decide what I want to think. What do I want to think about this? And then, what do I want to create? And that’s what we literally train people how to do.
Jennifer: And you talked about becoming your own hero for your own life. And I think (for me at least) that resonates quite strongly. When I was confronted with a lot of problems, people always ask me why did I write my book.
Well, I wrote my book because I was determined to find a way to triumph over so many circumstances that really were not in my favor, but in actuality, because I was so determined, I figured it out.
Laurie: Exactly!
Jennifer: And that figuring it out led to me being able to transmit that information to other people and hopefully help improve the quality of their life. So what does it mean to be a hero?
Laurie: That’s so inspiring, by the way. I really do believe it happens that way so that you can help. There are people, honest to God, that struggle more than others. And it’s to learn something.
So that’s the context of being the author of your life, is that everything is on purpose too. You’re not a victim. The opposite of a victim is a hero. It’s a chosen state of mind. It goes with being the author. If you are the author, what do you want to be? Do you want to be the hero of the story of do you want to be the damsel-in-distress in the story. I choose hero. You chose hero.
And it’s funny that you brought up your perseverance because the issues that I have (I have an autoimmune issue of my own), it shows up as an itch all over my entire body that comes through my skin. And when I got that – oh, my…
I mean, I was up at night. In the middle of the night, I’ve got ice packs on my body trying to just sleep and function like a normal human being covered in sores, like scabs and bleeding, blood everywhere for over a year believe it or not.
I had the same mentality as you did when I stopped feeling victimized, when I had to go through the struggle. But then I said, “You know what? I’m going to solve it. And not only am I going to solve it, I’m going to learn every freaking lesson I’m supposed to learn along the way because I know this wouldn’t be happening if there wasn’t something I’m supposed to pay attention to.”
Jennifer: I just want to clarify. What you’re saying is going from feeling like a victim (like everybody is against you, all the circumstances are against you) to “I’m choosing to figure this out. I’m going to be the hero of my own story,” that is a conscious choice that a woman – and the guys. I know some guys listen too.
But everybody listening, you’ve got to make that decision for yourself. How do you want to show up in the narrative of your own story?
Laurie: And I have to tell you though, Jen. I was not going to get there on my own. It really did take a coach to smack me upside the head and be like, “Really? You’re going to go through this like you’re cursed versus telling the story like a hero and knowing that however many tries it takes, you’re going to get to the end of the story and you’re going to be able to help other people with it? I mean, do you really think you’ll die of this? You don’t die of this.”
It was like, “Okay, okay!” I got sick of hearing my own complaining.
And then I made this little joke to myself, which was I said (and this is what I tell my clients), “If you haven’t tried 70 ways, don’t come complaining to me yet.”
I’m sorry, but I must’ve tried 70 different things including spiritual healing, meditating, visualizations, stress reduction, every drug of course, every herb, every balm, acupuncture. I tried probably 70 – I even asked what has cured people of this and I took everyone’s suggestions and then one after the other, I did them.
I just said, “I’m going to learn something from everything I try. I’m going to stop suffering. I’m going to learn. I’m going to learn. I’m going to take my lesson. I’m going to figure it out and I’m going to be able to help other people. I’m going to grow in my humility and my compassion for myself and for others.”
And that was a good turning point.
Jennifer: Well, it sounds like we touched on lesson no. 2 in there because you did talk about this ‘mental scripts’ that was going through your head.
Laurie: Exactly! Lesson two is your internal dialog dictates everything. Your inner dialog is boss. It is queen of the queendom. Whatever it says goes. And sometimes, we actually don’t even know what it’s saying.
We have people write it out, literally write it out because if you think you know what you’re saying to yourself – it’s like you don’t know what you’re eating. At the end of the day, you don’t know why you feel crap because you don’t even know what you ate.
It’s the same thing with the mental diet. Whatever you’re feeding yourself as your thoughts, we have people write them down for two weeks in a row. Writing down, catching it maybe three times again maybe for five minutes just what you’re thinking.
So you can see what you do for a living with your mind. And that’s where you’ll find many repetitive themes that are not nice – not that nice to you, not that nice to the world, not that nice to your condition. And then you can actually systematically switch what you want to be thinking.
Jennifer: Say you’re there. You write this stuff out and you’re all of a sudden, you see, “I’m stupid. I’m not good enough. I’m a bad person. I’m…” all these things that people think, whatever it may be that comes up for them. Does this sort of goes then into life lesson no. 3?
Laurie: Amazing!
Jennifer: …because you’re seeing this and you realize like, “Whoa! I recognize now maybe I’m not too nice to myself and I know why I feel pretty bad about my circumstance.” But what can we do? What is the life lesson here?
Laurie: Well, the first thing that you find when you start to listen to your mind and you listen to what you say to yourself is that you say a lot of things that are BS. First of all, you say a lot of things that are BS like you say, “I’m not good at this” or “I’ve never succeeded before” or, “People don’t care about me” or…
Jennifer: “I can’t cook.”
Laurie: “I can’t cook,” right or “I can’t afford it.” You really do say things that are patently untrue like if you brought them to the jury, the jury would be like, “What?! That doesn’t make sense.”
So a lot of the work we do with people is to actually test if it’s true or if you’re just scared or you’re just being a brat. What’s actually going on in your mind because your mind is what’s dictating your actions.
So that’s really revolutionary. People find out that really, there’s not much that’s true that’s going through their mind wherever they’re disempowered. What’s really true is they’re either afraid of something or they’re being a brat about something.
But most people don’t want to admit, “I’m afraid” or “I’m just a brat. I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to get up early. I don’t want to get to bed on time. I don’t want to eat vegetables” or like, “I’m scared. I’m scared to tell my mother that I’m not eating bread. I’m scared to tell my grandma that I’m scared to go to Thanksgiving.” They don’t want to say something like that.
So instead, they create other dramas. The types of other dramas they create are dramas like, “Nobody cares about me,” feeling bad about the situation or about themselves, or imagining things to be worse than they are.
And what this is, we have a very specific name for this. We say, “Feeling bad is a diversion.” It’s literally a diversion that the brat in your mind gives you so you don’t have to focus on the scary thing or the annoying thing that you have to do like, “You really have to get up and make your lunch every day. You really have to tell your friends, ‘This is the restaurant I can go to.’ You really have to have a deep conversation with each member of your family.”
As far as I’m concerned, that is the best news on the planet. In fact, I think that’s why we’re all having these sensitivities is so we have to talk to each other because we’re not.
We’re not talking to each other about health. We’re not talking to each other about what we need. We’re not talking to each other about our emotions. We’re not talking to each other very well in this culture.
All of these new problems that we have to deal with (if we chose to deal with them) force us to talk. I think that’s actually a good thing.
Feeling bad completely preoccupies you especially if you feel bad about yourself because you’re then like, “Well, what can I do? I’m just a piece of crap.” And then you’re off the hook for taking the scary action, having the conversation, making the food, doing the research, making the plans, sticking to the plan and all that stuff that would have what we call ‘integrity’.
Jennifer: And I was going to say that puts you back in control…
Laurie: Exactly!
Jennifer: …when you start realizing that by taking what feel like really hard, scary stuff. And I will admit that when I procrastinate – very badly, and I do. You know, I get that best compliment from most people out there who I’ve been interviewed by and what-not. They’ll go, “You know, Jen, you’re so efficient. Are you a mom? You must be a mom because you’re so efficient.” I was like, “No, I have two cats. I guess you could call me a mom.”
But I am. I pride myself on being very efficient. However, there are times when I will be very bad about avoiding certain things. I have found that those are usually 1) things that are not nearly as hard as I have imagined them to be in my head and 2) it’s because I don’t want to deal with the discomfort that I am again are imagining will come from that. So I suffer in the avoidance phase.
Laurie: Right, absolutely.
Jennifer: …imagining this huge mountain that I’m going to have to climb or clean up or declutter or whatever it may be. And in reality, it would’ve taken me five minutes. But instead, dealing with the problem for five minutes actually took days and weeks because I avoided it.
So this is part of the process, getting back in control. So what’s interesting, your life lesson no. 4 – because I just talked about big obstacles. Why don’t you talk a little bit about life lesson no. 4.
Laurie: So life lesson no. 4 is that you actually inherit many of your negative traits from your parents. Pretty much all of them actually. We are not aware of that.
First of all, everybody should have in mind the thing that they do that gets in the way. So for you, it might be putting things off that are scary or annoying. For someone else, it might be doubting themselves. For someone else, it might be getting too angry. For me, it’s like I’m a control freak. That I think is part of what I got the itch. It was because I’m obsessive and I like to run on adrenalin, which is not good for your health.
So there is a trait at play. There’s something in my – I’m going to go ahead and say ‘your lineage’ like something that gets handed down that gets expressed in a new way in you and you think it’s original. You not only think it’s original, but you think it’s helping.
I mean, for years, I was like, “This is a great drug, adrenalin. This works great. I’m wide awake. I can get tons done. I can work 13 hours in a row and not blink. It’s awesome. Great! What’s the problem?” And it’s not a problem until your life falls apart and you’re like, “Hmmm… I think I made a deal with the devil.”
So it’s very comforting I would hope for people to realize that these traits are not original and they did not pick them. They came like brown hair. They came like they’re a part of your thing. They’re a part of your goodie bag, we call it and part of what you’re here to deal with.
They can be very big obstacles if you don’t treat them like something that you can overcome and something you can actually manage, which is the whole point of this story, which is that if you know something’s an excuse, you can start to deal with it. If you know you’re feeling bad and that’s a diversion, you can start to deal with the real issue. If you know you’re just dealing with a trait that you got from your grandmother or your mother, you have enough distance and forgiveness hopefully that you can now start to deal with it.
So these are all just the tools and the tricks we have up our sleeve to help people actually deal with the real issue. The real issue is you have to get up half an hour earlier and you have to make your lunch and your dinner and see how you feel when you do that. And then vote, which is the harder life…
…which leads us to life lesson no. 5!
Jennifer: Number five.
Laurie: So shall I just launch in?
Jennifer: Please go ahead.
Laurie: So life lesson no. 5 – and again, people do not realize this. Forever, my clients (and I’m sure yours too) are trying to do everything. It’s like you still want to be able to do Thanksgiving the old way and the new way. You still want to be able to work out and eat out with your friends and make your own food.
I remember the day I realized, I was like, “Oh, I could order my groceries.” I don’t have to go out every three days and buy groceries. I can order them once a week and have them delivered. That is the miracle of modern technology in my city. It was like a revelation!
And then I had another revelation. I could have the babysitter cook dinner according to my recipes. Oh, my God! A revelation! But those are my revelations. You might be like, “D’uh, Laurie? Why didn’t you figure that out sooner?” But I have my world view about what’s possible and what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to do everything. I’m sure you have people in your community who feel the same.
But here’s the life lesson… you can’t. You have 24 hours in a day. That’s a finite amount. That’s all you get. Everybody gets the same amount. It’s an even playing field and you have to decide how you’re going to allot it.
And my wish, my prayer, my offering to humanity is that people figure out what’s most important. Unfortunately, people don’t figure out that their health is the most important until it’s under great duress or really breaking down. And so my hope is that you and I together can help people to understand that it has to be the priority because it’s the basis of everything. It’s the basis of everything.
Jennifer: And it is true. If you really don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.
Laurie: It’s a cliché, but it’s totally true. You don’t have a great sex life if you feel like crap. If you don’t have a great love life if you feel like crap. You’re not great in your career if you feel like crap. You’re not great with the people in your life if you feel like crap. Of course not!
Jennifer: And actually, I was going to share a personal story. My uncle who was a big supporter of mine had passed away earlier this year of complications to diabetes.
I’ll never forget when I went to visit him. He have had one part of his one leg amputated and he said, “What I wouldn’t pay right now to get up out of bed and walk just…” – I mean, it was literally not even 10 ft. It might’ve been 7 or 8 ft.
He said, “I’d pay a thousand dollars just to be able to get out of bed right now and just go across the room.”
I don’t know if that struck anyone else, but it struck me realizing that there comes a point when we compromise our health and we don’t make it a priority for so long that sometimes, you can’t fix it anymore.
And so I see that as much as I’m so sad of what happened to my uncle. It was also a very good lesson for me to see that now and to realize that now that I have to take care, really take care of myself or else, there might come a day when you no longer can take care.
Laurie: Right. And I love the point you’re making about trying to grasp the long-term impact and the long-term results. But the other beauty of what we’re really talking about here is also the moment to moment gratification or the moment to moment feeling of alignment that you have when you do the right thing for yourself.
And everybody has had that experience, of going through that rough moment where you’re like, “No, thanks. No desert for me” and you go through that moment of like [drooling sound] and then it’s like, “Oh, I did it! I did it!” And then maybe the person next to you is like, “Hmmm… maybe none for me too!”
When someone comes up to you later, it’s like, “Hey! What’s that about?” There’s unbelievable results. Of course, you don’t die as soon, you don’t die as painfully, you don’t lose your capabilities when you start to bring yourself into alignment.
What I’m selling is the way that it feels, the way that personal integrity feels in the moment that you rise to your highest ideal. And that’s beautiful because all we have is the moment. We just have one moment after one moment after one moment and we don’t know how many we have no matter how good we take care of ourselves.
So that’s what I’m wanting people to focus on, that moment to moment experience of aligning with their own highest ideals, whatever yours is. It’s not the same for any two people and it shouldn’t be.
Jennifer: And I just want to underline the point about we can make this choice. Yes, you might be “stuck” with gluten sensitivity or Celiac Disease or an autoimmune disease, whatever you have. But you get to chose your experience to some degree especially what’s going on and running through your mind.
Laurie: Exactly!
Jennifer: And in your experience with working with people, when you deal with those voices, when you make peace with them or triumph over them, however you want to look at it, do you also find that sometimes, it’ll have a massive impact on how their health will show up on a daily basis?
Laurie: Of course. You mean like the person who’s figuring out how to triumph over these other voices? Absolutely!
Jennifer: Yeah! You don’t feel well every day. You’re under a lot of stress. And then all of a sudden, you make that choice where you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to figure this out. I don’t know how I’m going to be okay, but I’m going to be okay. I’m going to figure it out.”
Laurie: That’s the main thing, that switch of perspective. That’s the main relief and stress reduction. Then we move to life lesson no. 6, which is that we actually make promises.
We have our clients make promises. We also live by promises as coaches because we practice what we preach. And this is where it all starts to get so much simpler. This is where the voices start to shush.
A good parallel is like if you know anybody who has an addiction and they’re in a 12-step program, that’s because they really have just suffered too much with the voices in their head and they want to follow a program. The program is pretty simple. One day at a time, don’t do the addiction. Very similar concept. One day at a time, follow the rules that you set.
When you say, “I’m in AA” or you say, “I’m sober,” nobody tries to throw a drink down your throat. There’s some real brilliance to actually, “I have a promise. I don’t eat after 8 o’clock… I only eat these things… I made a promise to my kid… I made a promise to myself… I made a promise to my doctor.” People don’t crap on that unless they’re really not your friends.
So you start to live by your own law. Instead of living by the law of the restaurant or the law of your grandmother or the law of your past or someone else’s law, you live by your own law. You say, “This is how I design my life for now. For now, this is how I design my life. This is what I’m going to do and this is what I’m not going to do.”
And then obviously, if you can tell a coach, that’s great because the coach will hold you to account. But if you don’t have a coach, you can tell a friend that you trust that loves your dream or you can tell everyone. In fact, I recommend telling everybody, “This is my new rule for myself. Please help me uphold it.”
And then, if you really want to get yourself to do it, we have our clients create artificial consequences if they don’t follow through. A really good mind trick is if you break your food rules, you have to pay the political party you don’t like or you have to throw $20 out the window or do 20 pushups. If I pick at my face, I have to do 100 pushups and if I’m late for dinner with my family, I have to pay my kids $20. So I have these little tricks because in the past I was late to dinner almost ever y night and let me tell you, I work on the first floor and dinner is on the second floor. It’s not like I have a good excuse.
Jennifer: Just accept being a workaholic.
Laurie: Exactly! My excuse is that I had another email, could you believe that I had another one that came into my inbox so you guys could just wait. So simple, simple, very simple rules. I don’t eat after a certain hour of the night and if I break that then I have to drink 3 glasses of water the next morning when I wake up. Simple. Like not punitive, just something to keep the other voices quiet.
Because if you know you have a rule and an annoying consequence, you’re not going to debate and negotiate like a little kid at the candy counter of the supermarket.
Jennifer: So how does that trickle in… because I think we already touched on what is rule no. 7… but what is rule no. 7 in regards to how we can bring this conversation into focus and give everyone some really food takeaways.
Laurie: Good question! So by way of wrap up, lesson no. 7. The best game in town is personal integrity. What I mean by that is that I think we play the game of winning and losing. We play the game of Are we good enough? There’s a lot of different games we play. Another really common one is morality. “Are we doing it good or right?” A lot of us are really into that and it gets really exhausting. So scrape all that and just worry about whether you’re honoring your highest ideal. So am I honoring my own highest ideal? That requires that A) articulate what that is. That’s the first thing we do in coaching, we make you articulate what you are actually inspired by. Like what you are ACTUALLY inspired by. Not just eating healthy and in a way that supports your body, but WHY. Ok?
Then you remove the obstacles — the voices in your head, the traits from your parents, the things you haven’t forgiven, the conversations you’re avoiding. You remove the obstacles and then you promise the required actions and put in consequences if you don’t keep those promises. And then you start to act in accordance in your ideals ignoring the naysayers in your head and outside of your mind. That’s the formula for personal integrity and building personal integrity. That’s the best game in town because that’s what going to make you feel good in the moment. You can scrape it at any time and see how you feel. And you can bring it back at any time and see how you feel.
Jennifer: It’s easy! You made it sound very simple.
Laurie: It’s not easy! It’s simple, but it’s not easy!
Jennifer: No, I know. I did life coaching… not me as the coach, but I was being coached for many years and it took a long time to unravel all the knots in my personal journey. Laurie I really appreciate you coming on and that you can come back some time and we can dive into one or two of these topics a little deeper because I feel like there’s so much we didn’t get to touch on.
Laurie: Absolutely, I would love to.
Jennifer: Cool, thank you so much for being here!
Laurie: Thank you!
Jennifer: So everyone, stay in touch with Laurie. Go visit her on the web at www.handelgroup.com. You can also go to www.handelgroup.com/coaching/hg-life-coaching. They’re on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Google+… you name it, and Laurie and the Handel Group is going to show up. I will put all the links below so that it’s really easy for you to find her.
And if you’re interested and want to see what it’s like to work on this kind of stuff, because it’s different, but it’s very effective and I can say that personally. You can access a free 20 minute consultation with someone at the Handel Group.. with Laurie, maybe?
Laurie: Yes, with Sallie most likely, my right hand.
Jennifer: So Sallie! A free 20 minute consultation available to anyone. You just have to email them on their contact for at www.handelgroup.com/contact-us and I’ll put the link to that below. And they have a really great newsletter and stay in touch with them. We really appreciate Laurie coming on and sharing all this information with you.
Remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and then head on over to GlutenFreeSchool.com and leave your questions and comments. Maybe you have a good perspective or you’ve had a great experience doing life coaching. Please share that with us. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate your presence and I’ll see you the next time. Bye bye.
The links referred to in this episode are:
Handel Group – www.handelgroup.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HGLifeCoaching
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HGLifeCoaching