I thought I would take you guys on a journey of these past several years of what I have done with business and how far I’ve come, but how it’s really changed and doing this thing that I love that brings me fulfillment and hopefully making some sort of impact in the world.
BEING MOM
So my favorite and best priority has been being a stay at home mom, and that has been my main job and I’ve been so grateful to have that opportunity. And I really do feel blessed to mainly have that and that my husband can work, but then I have been able to make some money on this side through the years.
VIOLIN TEACHING
My Very first job being a stay at home mom though, has been teaching violin lessons and I taught violin lessons on and off for about eight years. Just in between babies. I had to take breaks, but I started that even before I had kids. My husband and I were just newly married and in college and that was one way to make some money on this side, and it was such a blessing to teach little kids.
I love playing the violin. I was in the American Fork symphony for almost 10 years and I wanna go back and do more of that. But since I’ve been doing business, I haven’t been doing as much violin and it was really fun to teach and I really loved seeing the kids grow.
But I found that I wanted to have more camaraderie with the parents… and the teaching didn’t light my soul on fire.
So I realized it wasn’t something that I wanted to do in the long run anymore. I thought that would just be what I would do.
A HARD FAMILY TRIP
The main thing that had happened is I had finally had my third baby, and I was starting to feel the huge pressures of being a mom with three young kids and. I had severe depression. I’ve always had postpartum depression after each one. But one huge catalyst that happened was we went on a trip to the Pacific Northwest to go visit our families. Both of our families live up that direction, and this family trip was so exhausting. It was the hardest trip I’ve ever been on in the sense I’m having to nurse my baby. I’m reaching back to the backseat every other minute. We’re going in between different activities, and that whole trip left me so exhausted and I came home and I was so depressed, so exhausted. I got mastitis, all stress induced, and I just realized something has to change.
I don’t feel like me.
I am so stressed.
DISCOVERING MYSELF
So that trip forever changed me and I realized I am going to make myself haggard by the end of my life if I don’t put myself first in some way and really take care of myself. And it was a huge journey. I started that journey and within that journey, I tried a lot of different things, but I’d realized I’m going to start my own business.
I went back to do some school. And I felt that I wanted to become a coach. I had heard about coaching, Jody Moore had started to become popular. I’d also had a deep love for health and I’d always worked out, always tried to eat healthy to my detriment, which I’ll talk about later. But that was what I decided I wanna do.
HEALTH COACH
So I went to the Health Coach Institute. And I got my certification in both health and life coaching because I knew it was so important to have both. And I love life coaching, but I also wanted to do the health side and help women in that way. And I started my business.
And that business, my very first business was helping women lose weight and get healthier. And I had done the same for myself. I’d lost quite a bit of weight. I’d gotten really healthy. I was waking up at 5:00 AM. I was working out an hour a day. I was eating really, really picky. And I had had some success in the sense that I helped some women and I’m so glad I had that opportunity.
MY MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
I had known in my heart something was wrong and I was sick.
And I started to fade out the business just a bit because I was starting to have very severe depression and I was starting to have suicidal thoughts and I was orthorexic. And that means to be so in control of what you eat, that it takes over your life. And I was having panic attacks and I found myself in the psych ward in the summer of 2020.
So I went to the psych ward and they helped me with my medicine and I had gotten some more help in some therapy, and I think just my whole life was coming down to this year. And of course, 2020 was really hard on all of us and just trying to deal with my childhood traumas that I’ve gone through in all those negative patterns and thoughts that I’ve had in my brain trying to get better with my own marriage.
I had had a pretty rough time in our marriage during that time, and I compared myself a lot to him. And I could not get better though no matter what I was doing, it was not getting better, and I was still just as orthorexic and having those eating disorders. I even ramped it up so much that I became a raw vegan and I was doing juice cleanses… trying to heal myself.
And it ‘s not gonna do it! The only thing that heals you is Christ. And I had to go to a rehab in October of 2020, and I was away from my family for a whole month.
That rehab was my Gethsemane and it was the hardest times that I had ever experienced, and it was really dark and I had some really hard times there. Trying to get through my brain and getting out of those suicidal thoughts, and I was just there mainly for that. Not even for my eating disorders, because I had to get out of that survival mode first.
EATING DISORDER PROGRAM
I had finally gotten out and I was feeling a lot better and definitely. Got some help.
I was feeling a lot better and I could feel that Christ had healed me in a lot of ways and I felt that power. The beginning of 2021 started and I was still feeling some depression. I was just wanting to go back to knowing how to control my body again, and I realized I had not really helped and healed that side with my body (eating disorders) and really tackled those eating disorders that I had and now that I was in a better state, I was finally able to finally do that.
I went to the Center for Change in Orem, Utah. I did an outpatient program there and I definitely. Was only in and out of there for two months because I had already done a lot of mental work before and I was so grateful and I had found intuitive eating, and I was so ready to do that as my new business once I had finally gotten all better.
BACK INTO BUSINESS…INTUITIVE EATING COACHING
So I started my business up again. I had taken a whole year off going through that mental health crisis and getting myself better and I was so excited to share my message and just do some good. I wanted to teach people about intuitive eating because it helped me so much. And I, of course, loved all this self-help part of it too (that’s really what it’s all about!)
But I always thought I needed to just keep to the health side of it all. And I still loved it. It was fun for a while and got a lot of success from that. People were receptive and really needed that message, so I was really grateful.
I had created a course, I had created a workbook. I was really figuring out the tech with my job, I had clients.
LEANING INTO LIFE COACHING
It was just a few months ago that it just didn’t feel right anymore. It felt like I needed to switch and we change as beings and that’s okay! And I had to embrace that.
And really, my first love is life coaching. I wanted to do counseling back in the day too, when I went to school and I went to BYU and thought I would someday go back and get my master’s, but I just knew I needed to pivot to this side of coaching.
So after some self-reflection and taking some time to be still, I figured out what I wanted to do now and to still coach and to still get that message out there. And definitely having more of the mental health focus and to help people have a stronger sense of self. Women in particular, obviously, but to then be able to connect better with others once they have done that.
And I want to create a community in a place where people can land here softly and feel that they belong and be able to teach some of these principles of our mindset work that we can work on, that I have gone through myself and definitely have Christ in the mix of that.
So thanks for being on this journey with me. It’s been kind of fun and I appreciate you listening!
Xo,
Laura