Ep. 1 From Mission to Habits: The Start of My IIN Journey
Journey into Integrative Nutrition: Reflecting on Week 1 at The Institute for Integrative Nutrition
Introduction
Welcome to my new series documenting my journey in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition's (IIN) Health Coach Training Program. As I dive into week one, I'm excited to share my thoughts and experiences in hopes that they resonate with those on a similar path or those considering a journey into health coaching.
Understanding the Mission and Role of Health Coaches
Week one kicked off with a slow start, as is typical with any foundational week. The focus was on understanding IIN's mission: playing a crucial role in improving health and happiness, thereby creating a ripple effect that transforms the world. This mission resonated deeply with me, as I've seen firsthand how sharing positive changes with friends can inspire their own transformations.
We explored the vital role health coaches play in healthcare today. They act as a bridge, integrating medical advice into everyday life and fostering personal wellness. I realized that by teaching clients, health coaches are also on a continuous path of learning and self-improvement.
Setting Intentions and Goals
The first assignment encouraged us to set intentions for the year—goals to guide our journey. My intention is clear: to learn how to coach holistically, to enhance lives, and make the world a better place. This task reinforced my belief that the energy and effort you put into any endeavor is directly proportional to what you gain from it.
The Golden Path
We embarked on our metaphorical 'Golden Path', a journey of self-discovery and forward movement. With modules primarily led by IIN's founder Joshua Rosenthal, we had the pleasure of hearing from guest speaker Dr. Mehmet Oz. His insights reminded us that change begins with feelings, not knowledge—a crucial lesson that aligns with my goal to focus on emotional wellness in my practice.
Insights from Dr. Mehmet Oz
Dr. Oz emphasized that change is driven by ease and emotions. His advice to simplify decision-making to foster good habits struck a chord with me. Simplifying my routine—like choosing a nearby gym—has proven effective in maintaining consistency. This ties into my aspiration to help future clients form enduring healthy habits.
Assignments and Personal Reflections
Assignments reflected on the power of reflection and intention. Documenting thoughts through a journal has been instrumental in crystallizing my goals, allowing me to gain clarity and avoid overlooking critical patterns in behavior. Although I adapted some assignments to better fit my style, the essence of self-exploration remained intact.
Time Management and Structuring the Course
Realizing the importance of time management, I plan to adjust my schedule to focus on coursework early in the week, allowing time for a side project with the Side Hustle Society. Week one's structure offered a valuable lesson: refining my time allocation is vital in juggling these commitments alongside life's constant demands.
Conclusion and Invitation to Connect
Week one was indeed an eye-opener, setting the foundation for the 40 weeks ahead. Whether you're thinking of becoming a health coach or are already on this path, I would love to connect and share this journey with you. Feel free to reach out at becomingahealthcoach@gmail.com. Let's inspire each other as we navigate this transformative journey.
Thank you for joining me on this path. I look forward to sharing more insights as I continue to grow and learn in this enriching program. See you next week!
If you are interested in learning more about the Broken Brain docuseries, here is the link: https://brokenbrain.com/trailer/
If you are interested in learning more about the Essential Oils for Abundant Living course, here is the link: https://members.drericz.com/essential-oils-for-abundant-living-course-launch-quick-start/
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Megan J. McCrory: Let's dive into week one. So week one, module one, the first week started out a bit slow for me.
So I was hoping to get right into like meat of coaching. however, The Institute for Integrative Nutrition. So it's shortened to IIN and, they do a lot more than just coaching. I have to admit, that's one of the things that brought me or helped me choose this program because it's not just about coaching.
It's not just about business, but it's also self discovery. So I like that about the program. However, I'm like, okay, let's go. So I am, I'm getting a little antsy. I just want to get into it.
the first week we basically, went over the,their mission. So their mission is
to play a crucial role in improving health and happiness and through that process create a ripple effect that transforms the world. So I like the mission. It's basically saying everybody should have health and happiness and let's make sure that's catching, like a little firestorm.
Let's make, each person,is,affecting their neighbor, their friend or whatever. I like that. I think it's true. I see it in my own life. If I do something and I talk about it with my friends, they try it and who knows, they talk about it with their friends. So,I like the mission.
this part of the curricula this week one really focused on so the mission statement and then we talked about the role of health coaches in health care. We also learned how being a health coach can also really facilitate your own healing as well. You're often, find that what you're saying to your client is exactly what you should be saying to yourself
essentially the whole program is your own coaching. Like they're coaching you how to coach yourself. And then because you know how to have these skills in the end, you can monetize it or use it, for friends and family. I don't really think that, it's a great big secret that the healthcare industry is really not working very well.
and where health coaches lie in, the health industry, is something where I,the approach as I talked about in the first episode or in episode zero, really, you know, that glue where, you know, The doctor prescribes you to do something or diagnoses you with something and basically says you need to do X, Y, and Z.
And the health coach is there to help you get it, to do it, and to really integrate it into your life, to make it most effective for you and so that it sticks. Right.Instead of just like giving the students rote memory review they do a lot of activities.
One of the activities that they had us do in the first week was set our intentions. they, there was a worksheet with some questions, drill down what's your intention for the year. And you're supposed to keep that then in your focus so that throughout the year, throughout the course, you can keep coming back to that intention, especially if you lose focus because there's a lot of information and it's a year, which is a long time.
I like that to start right off with, what do you want to get out of this course? And that's it. Really, the course is what you make of it. Now, I've heard some people say it's not so technical. Other people love it. It's changed their life. I really believe that whatever you do in life, you only get out of it what you put into it.
I'm trying to do this course. I will do the course 100%. I'm okay with that approach of, goal setting and intention because I think it's also valuable skills that once I learn how to do that for myself, I can then give those tools to my clients in the future.
So my intention for the year or what I want to get out of the end of this year is, "I will change my life and my future by learning how to holistically coach people to become their best self and to make a world a better place."
Because, come on, who doesn't like to make the world a better place? That's my intention. I'm improving myself, I'm improving my friends and family, if they, let me. And,that's my goal. So that was one of the activities that we did this week.
Another one was,
the Golden Path and it's,a Golden Path through the forest and, every couple of weeks, they're going to give you more information about the Golden Path and what's going on. likeyour way forward essentially.
So we did the first week of the Golden Path. So I did that activity as well. They have one guest speaker, only one guest speaker. So Joshua Rosenthal is the one who's doing most of the, the courses. He's the one who's, founded the school, but we had, one guest speaker in this module, which is Dr.
Mehmet Oz from, the Dr. Oz show, which I had never actually watched, so I'd never really seen him talking or maybe I saw like a clip here or there on Facebook, but I never really watched his show. No, I take that back. I did watch one Dr. Oz, or at least a rather long clip, and I remember, and I don't know, and I hope this doesn't gross people out, because it was on national TV, so I guess it shouldn't gross you out.
But he had a whole episode or segment on how you can be too rough to your your butt essentially, or how fragile the lining is of your intestines and then therefore your anus. It was funny because they had like somebody going through like they like had people coming out of like an opening acting like the people were the poo.
Okay. It's stuck in my brain. If I find it, I will post it somewhere. But it was basically like "Don't be so hard on your butt. It's gentle. You need to be gentle with your butt." okay. Anyway, tangent over. So he talked about living the good life, which, okay, that's what we all want. He said a lot of good points.
Actually, he's a very good speaker. I can see why he has a TV show. I don't know anything about his skills as a doctor, but he had two points that really stuck out to me. One was that people don't change what they do in life based on what they know. They change based on how they feel. And I can totally see this, that's one of the first things that they're telling us in IIN is that people know what to do, right?
They know that they should exercise. They know that they should eat. It's not doing what people know, it's doing what they feel. So if they start to feel bad, they're going to want to change something. And the problem I see, or that's discussed in the new, functional medicine area, is basically a lot of people don't know how
bad they feel because they've been feeling this bad for a long time. Or conversely, you could say they don't know how good they could feel. Because they're, because of their nutrition and diet habits, have been the same for such a long time. I like the point because people really will start to feel bad before they do something.
And you know what? It really only takes a little bit of good to start to feel good. You know what I mean? You, it's like a snowball effect. Just get off the couch and do a 20 minute walk. You will start to feel better. I know this. I've been through it. Oh, so many times. I just did hear the other day a very good quote because I am a, I'm an exercise stop and starter.
I'm a Boomerang exerciser because,sometimes life gets in the way and I will stop exercising, but I think I've got a good way forward now. My gym is very close. It's very hard to say I can't walk five minutes to the gym and do a 20 minute workout. So I'm getting there, but even this week I didn't work out, because my schedule was too busy.
One of the quotes that I heard from this app that I use called Aptiv. I love it. It's like the best personal trainer you've had. But so this personal trainer, I'll have to figure out who said it. She said, "If you hate starting over, stop quitting." And I was like, oh, that's a good one.
That's a really good quote. If you hate starting over, stop quitting. Because every time you quit exercising for a period of time, you lose what you've done for such a long time and you have to gain yourself back.
So anyway, that all ties back into this Dr. Mehmet, people don't change based on what they know, but based on how they feel.
So I think that's one of the underlying things I'm going to focus on is how do you feel? Not what do you want to do, are you feeling tired? Do you feel foggy in the head and that kind of stuff? So I'm hopefully in my practice I'll try to get those things out.
The second point that Dr. Mehmet Oz made in the lecture this week was that you have to make it easy to do the right thing with the fewest decisions and the easiest path. And again, couldn't agree more, especially in my own personal life. If it's easy, if I have good food on hand, I eat it. If like I said, like I just said, I changed my gym to the gym that's five minutes away from my home, not five minutes away from my work.
And it's easy. I don't have to make the decision. I just go. I, it's just so easy. Even if all I do is go and walk on the treadmill for 20 minutes, I am happy with myself. I can tell you for sure. So this point about making easy to do the right thing and also the fewest amount of decisions.
This touches on habits and how to create healthy habits. Every time you make a decision, your brain is okay, that's one less decision I can make today. So you want to keep your brain power for the decisions that make a lot more important decisions than do I go to the gym or not? Because there are more important decisions in your life. If you can figure out how you best adapt to a new habit, once you make something a habit, then you don't have to think about it anymore. It's like brushing your teeth, you just do it.
If you can createyour individual path and your individual habits to make doing the right thing the easiest thing to do, not only will you succeed in doing that right thing consistently, because that's actually the most important thing is to do it consistently, but you're also going to have more mental ability and mental bandwidth for all the other decisions in your life that are not habit forming that you can't form into habits.
One of the things I want to do in my practice is to incorporate habits and how people form habits and the best way forward with that. So I really think that's a major part, in health coaching is habits. And I'm really excited about that.So those are the good points I found from Dr.
Oz.In addition to those things, so we have some video modules, we have some kind of activities during the module, and after the modules are done, we have assignments. The first assignments that we had, is, learn through reflection. So they really want you to come up with a process, that works for you for reflection because reflection unlocks our ability to process and for new information and to solve problems more effectively.
Now, I don't know if that's true. But I do know that self reflection is great because you're like
"Wait, why haven't I done this, or I keep doing that",
and if you don't write it down, or record it, or do something, you're gonna miss those things. Let's say you're not going to, notice that you've done that thing five times and the consequences. So if you write it down and reflect on it, and you don't have to write, you can do what I'm doing here and honestly, this podcast, is really one of my, is my reflection method for this year. I do, I think I do a pretty good job. I keep a journal. I note things down. I do a lot of self reflection goal setting, getting ideas out of my brain.
I do review, I should review more, but I do review. Some people ask me when they look at my journal and they see it's kind of elaborate, but they say, "Well, do you go back and look at it?" I'm like, yes, I do actually. Maybe not as much as I should, but I do go back and look through it to make sure I haven't missed anything.
So that was really cool. Basically pushing people to, to learn how to reflect on yourself and that's something everyone should do. I think.
Our second assignment was to explore our intentions. Now, okay, the intention exercise I think was great, but now they wanted me to sit for 10 minutes and think about that and then come up with a list of descriptive words or phrases that represent the feelings that I want to invoke by the end of the program.
And then we were supposed to use this list throughout the year to help us figure filter the opportunities and decisions that we have. Now, honestly, I didn't do this because I thought. Okay, I have a limit.Time is precious and I think this is the idea is okay. I actually, I really love the idea of the intention, but I didn't really see how these descriptive words or phrases were going to help align what I'm doing later on.
And maybe I missed it, but I decided, okay, I have a pretty good.I drew the line there.
So the last assignment was based on the lecture from Dr. Oz. And this was again, another thing that I decided that I would do, but in a different way than they asked. So they said, get like a physical jar, take physical pieces of paper
and for the following, activities or areas of your life, you should write down examples of how you can do that experience.the good things in life. So food, fun, beauty, sleep, love, growth, and connection. So those are the things that they said, okay, so pick something for each of those things and put it in this jar and fill the jar up with these things.
And then every week, like pull out a thing and try to do that thing. For example, connection, one, could be like visit your neighbor and have a cup of coffee. So you're making connection and that would be on a little slip of paper in there. Or food could be, make your favorite dish, something like that, or cook with friends and then you get food and connection.
So that's awesome. I liked the idea, but I didn't really like the whole idea of having a jar with a bunch of paper in it. I'm much more of a, like I just said, a journal person. So what I have decided to do is make a collection in my journal that and do that thing, which, you know, but writing down a bunch of things, or you could also do it like in Wunderlist, for example, if you're a digital person and yeah, just make a list of everything around food, which if I did it, it would basically bring me more joy to life. So I'm going to do that, in my own way.
Overall, the week was not hard, but what I did learn about this week was that,I'm still doing too much in the evening, so I need to organize my time.
Now, granted, I had a few extra things this week that I had signed up for. One of the things was this Broken Brain series by Dr. Mark Hyman. Absolutely amazing. Absolutely love it. Let me know if you have watched the series, really amazing series.
I'm not sure if I would pay to get the digital material. but it is a lot of information curated into a very nice package. So I had to watch those within 24 hours because they were only open for every 24 hours. And then I also started an essential oils class, which is also 10 days.
So what I learned about myself this week is that I need to say no to evening activities and really structure myself. I need to work for the first three days on my class. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So Monday I watch the videos, Tuesday I do the assignments and the reflection part and Wednesday I would record the podcast.
And then Thursday and Friday I would actually work on a different course that I'm working on, which is the Side Hustle Society from Chris Gillibeau, who's an author and podcaster that I've been listening to. And I chose to do this extra course at the same time, because this is a side hustle for me.
And so I thought it would be good to learn independently from the health coach or health world, a side hustle. this is a community and, they have lessons and stuff. So I need to structure this better. And that's what I'm going to do for a week three because I'm already recording this at the end of week two.
Because I'm a little late. With that said, I just wanted to let you know, in case you're interested in becoming a health coach, how much time this is taking me. Not like the podcasting part, or blogging, or anything, but just the part for the classes. I spent a total of one hour and five minutes watching the videos and about another hour, maybe more, less, yeah, plus or minus, on the assignments and stuff.
I've been trying to keep my time so I can give you an accurate representation of how much time I'm taking,originally they said it was going to be like 8 to 10 hours a week. Maybe the 8 to 10 hours a week will come later on. So let's see, how that works.
And, yeah, that's all I have for today.
If you, for this week, this is week 1. I have 40 weeks to go. Let's see how it works. Or let's say, it's 40 modules and 4 tests and some weeks off. So it's a whole year. I'm glad you found me. Thanks for sticking around. I hope this is interesting for you. If you're interested in becoming a health coach or you are in health coach training right now, please reach out to me at
becoming a health coach at gmail.com
and let me know if you're interested on coming on the podcast.
If you have any questions at all about anything, you can, email me at becoming a health coach at gmail.com That's it. I'll see you next week. Bye.
