Choosing Discomfort
Listen to the Episode Here
Topics discussed in this episode
Lindsey’s career path begins
Feeling inadequate and inferior
Improving skills and behaviors
Lindsey starts coaching
Moving past insecurities, learning from failures, and finding success
Episode Summary
Ryan here! I interviewed Lindsey on the 3rd episode of our podcast Fail It to Nail It. I knew much of her story already and was excited for all of you to learn more about her, her struggles, and how she overcame them. We will discuss how she struggled with growth because she feared discomfort. She realized she could no longer run from discomfort if she wanted to accomplish her goals and experience true growth. We talk about the struggles she went through in school, struggles in making decisions about her career, how she worked through fear of failure and insecurities, and how she worked through those challenges and developed skills to overcome them.
Lindsey’s Career Path Begins
Lindsey is a functional medicine nutritionist. She approaches health more holistically and as she works with clients, this means she focuses on behavior modification so health changes are more permanent and long-lasting. While this is what she wanted to do for many years, she quickly felt inadequate when she got accepted into a Master’s program. She had a background in exercise science but aside from her undergraduate degree, she was learning everything about functional medicine from scratch, as you would imagine for someone just starting any program. Her inadequacies did not come from this, however, it was the comparison of her lack of knowledge to her peers.
In her program, there were physicians, dieticians, nutritionists, and all sorts of clinicians who were working in their field already, but they all felt like something was missing from their previous education backgrounds. Many of them saw that health was not being managed holistically or being addressed at the root problem, which is what functional medicine is all about. So these clinicians returned to school so they could learn more about how to help others in this capacity and because of their background and experience, they were very proficient and knowledgeable on nearly every subject in Lindsey’s coursework. She was consistently exposed to people who had decades of experience ahead of her and she witnessed others cruise through the program easily while she felt like she was moving at a snail’s pace semester after semester just to pass her classes. She felt like she was the only one struggling in this way after seeing her peers work through the program so easily.
Feeling Inadequate and Inferior
Lindsey started to feel inferior and inadequate and recognized that this feeling was getting worse over time. While many things contributed to her overcoming this hurdle, she felt that the largest components to her future successes were starting a plant-based health coaching business, a change in belief and worldview, and her utilization of failures and successes as data points.
Improving Skills and Behaviors
Lindsey recognized she fell into patterns of doing all the possible prep that could be done before starting a task, but then not taking that step to risk experiencing failure in doing that task. She began to practice her skills where she was most vulnerable and with people that she struggled to be vulnerable with, those people being her friends and family. She started coaching those in her social support network but was nervous about how they would perceive her if she fell short in her ability to coach or lacked the necessary knowledge to educate them in various discussions. She was worried about how these people would be better off getting coaching from someone else entirely. She feared rejection, damaging her reputation, and failing her business.
Lindsey Starts Health Coaching
She eventually realized that she was able to help those in her life because of her ability to build rapport. While she had shortcomings in other ways of coaching, she felt that rapport was always necessary in a coaching relationship and recognized it as her strength. She was tired of doing prep for something she wanted all her life but then not taking the next step and so she began to ask for support in taking steps, generally by connecting with others. With each failure, she was able to sit in the discomfort of troubleshooting them and process them objectively. She could handle distress better and she was able to grow more quickly than ever because of this habit of sitting in that distress while processing failures. She was sure to do the same process for her successes and deeply analyze what worked and how she could improve. She started to see the need for improvement in both her failures and successes. This helped her realize that if her success was not 100% flawless, despite not having perfection, she could still be impactful, helpful, and life-changing for her clients.
Learning from failures, and Finding Success
I was aware of some of these struggles as she went through her Master’s program but did not realize the extent of these worries or all the ways she evolved through these experiences. It was fun to interview her. Truthfully, if I had been in a program with professionals who had 20 years of experience and knew everything I was learning for the first time, I would have been incredibly intimidated. I would likely struggle with some of the same inferiority, inadequacies, and stress that Lindsey did. I imagine many people would. But Lindsey was able to adopt a new mindset and work through this and is now an AMAZING nutritionist. She has helped people overcome health problems they couldn’t find answers to even after months of bouncing around from coach to coach, whether they be struggles with executive functioning, learning how to transition healthily to a plant-based diet, or even the emotional elements of food, diet, and eating.
Lindsey has some awesome ideas and methods for helping many work through health problems. She also gave some good insight into what it would look like for those of you who want to work in a similar space or industry as her. I’ll post some links to her company, Level-Up Nutrition (a sister company of Level-Up Life) below for you to review. The work she has done with Level-Up Life is phenomenal and I feel she has much more that many of you could benefit from hearing. Feel free to review our show notes for highlights and stay tuned to hear more from Lindsey and other guests she brings onto the show.
