Finding My Way
Becoming a personal coach has been a dream of mine for a long time. I’m not even sure when I first allowed it to enter my mind. Probably sometime after I first had my own coach back in 2011 but the idea has been lurking for many years. I say lurking because it took a long time to fully surface since I would push it back down with all the reasons that I could not or should not do it each time it appeared. Reasons like, I don’t have my own life figured out or I can’t afford to be an entrepreneur. But thankfully, the things we are meant to do have a way of persevering until they are undeniable.
There are sometimes years of our lives that are highly transformative and 2023 was one of those for me. I had decided to face some minor but persistent declines in my health with the support of a doctor, rather than relying on my own semi-haphazard methods (I’ll save the details on that for another post). I had discovered the existence of functional medicine doctors sometime before and finally overcame my inertia to follow through and make an appointment. My new doctor recommended that I get a routine mammogram. I agreed it was probably time as I had been cavalier about the need for these since I was so low risk for breast cancer…or so I thought.
Being diagnosed with cancer is devastating. For the first time, I really contemplated how much time I might have left to live. I wondered how my death would affect the important people in my life. As a mother, I still feel responsible to keep living, even though my children are grown. Being in my 50s, I knew I was likely in the second half of my life but now I was suddenly looking at 5-year and 10-year survival rates and each decision about my health and treatment seemed vitally important. Which choice will have the best result? And what’s going on with my body to allow this to happen?
Our conventional medical system has it’s good and bad qualities. As a person with good health insurance, I had the option to jump in the river of conventional health care and allow it to take me toward those calculated survival rates. That would be the easiest thing to do. And there is an almost endless array of alternatives: books and podcasts, boutique cancer centers, and online forums, all claiming to have the answers. I didn’t want to be treated as a statistical probability, I wanted to know what was right for me. But who could tell me what was right? Who can you trust? In the end, I chose the river of conventional care but I also chose to have my own boat so that I could steer a bit, giving myself permission to put together my own team of doctors and choose what I wanted off the menu. There is a lot of pressure from well-meaning people to follow one protocol or another and there are no right or wrong answers.
When looking for root causes with conventional providers, one thing I found interesting was the common and somewhat dismissive response telling me that it’s not my fault that I have cancer. This response generates two feelings in me. At first, it just feels disempowering. I wasn’t looking for root causes because I thought it was my fault, I was looking for them to empower myself to choose a healthy direction for the future, to give myself the best chance to age long and well. But later I had a second feeling, because there is a way in which, when we take on the challenge of recovering from complex health conditions, we feel something akin to perfectionism. That feeling of being overly responsible for something that is out of our control. Like every move we make has to be perfect or we won’t achieve our desired outcome. Is one glass of wine okay but not two? Do I need to be vegan or is that actually unhealthy? What if my body doesn’t even know how to sleep anymore?
As I came through all of this and started wrapping up my rush of cancer treatments, I was reminded of the value of a coach. A health coach is a role and perspective that is conspicuously missing in our conventional health care system though it is becoming more common at functional and naturopathic clinics, wellness centers, and even health insurance companies. Health coaches can help you sort through and evaluate the myriads of options and advice that is meant to improve your health, they can be the grounded presence that believes in your ability to choose and follow the path that is right for you, and they can bring awareness to the underlying barriers we face when we try to make lasting change in our lives. I knew I wanted to provide that kind of support to others and I knew I would benefit from it myself at this moment in my life. This inspired me to enroll in a health coach training program and clarified for me what my own coaching role could look like.
Next was the moment where I got a glimpse of the mysterious beauty of the universe. In the weeks leading up to the first day of class, I began to feel so excited about the opportunity to become a coach. I even thought to myself “I wish I could start now!” instead of waiting for a few years, which was what my husband and I had outlined in our practical financial plan. You can’t imagine my surprise when my supervisor called me in for a meeting on the day my class opened to tell me that I was being laid off. My jaw was on the floor as I swam through a pool of mixed feelings ranging from gratitude to betrayal.
So here I am, after a much shorter time than anticipated, thrilled to be opening a wellness coaching business where I can serve someone like you on your journey toward health and wellness. My life is still a work in progress and always will be. And there is no time like the present to live our dreams.
Julie Alessandra is a holistic health coach specializing in cancer recovery and prevention. She has degrees in biology and education and is certified as a practitioner through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and the Institute of Applied Quantum Biology.