Podcast Introduction
Hello, and welcome to the podcast all about becoming a health coach. I'm Megan McCrory, a Health Coach in training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition!
Each week I review what we’ve learned and how I’m applying those lessons in my life.
Please let me know what you think of the podcast or if you are also interested in becoming a Health Coach!
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Hi, thanks for finding me. My name's Megan McCrory and I am an aspiring health coach and this is my story. I'm starting a podcast series for the whole year to follow me along my journey of becoming a health coach. I just want to tell you a little bit about how I got to this point and a little bit about Health Coaching.
So I have had a very good life. I have had a very, very good life. I have a good family, I have good friends. I've never really had anything bad happen to me. Now a long time ago I had some financial issues that kind of gave me some direction in my life, but otherwise, I didn't really have that drive or a burning desire to do something in my life.
I realized that a lot of things came very easy to me and I think that was part of it. If you have to push yourself to do something, then somehow, it gives you a little bit more drive. Other people may say, “Oh, but you have lots of drive, you're always doing something”. Well, I'm doing a lot of things, but I never finished a lot of things.
Through my self-discovery over my almost 39 years, I realized that it was only when I hit 30 that I stopped and looked at my life, and then I said, I really only have one regret. 30 is a big one and I didn't think it was going to be so impressed upon me, but 30 was big for me and I realized that I had really only wanted to do one thing at that point in my adult life and that was hiking the Appalachian trail and I did not do that in the what, nine years that I had decided that I wanted to do it.
I had made absolutely no strides to that goal. And it was that point when I said, okay, I have got to get my act together. I have got to take these dreams and get them down onto paper, make a goal. Make some milestones, plan it out or it's never going to happen.
I think there's a quote somewhere like a dream is only a dream unless you make a plan and then it's a goal or something like that. But all I remember is having that sinking feeling that, oh my God, I have done nothing in the last nine years of my adult life after university. I'm kind of just floating around.
At that point that I had no debt, which was really I was super proud of considering it had previous financial issues and I decided, okay, I am going to work really hard for the next couple of years. I'm going to save all my money and then I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to go work in the Peace Corps and I'm just going to do the first Peace Corps rotation. If I like it, maybe I do a second one and a third one and maybe that's my career. I'm going to be a career Peace Corps person and I was really jealous actually because there was somebody I knew who had done it, and I was thinking, God, look at that person, you know, they're really going for it there. So I had made that, that was my goal. That was my plan. I had two years, money quit a job, Peace Corps done. Six months after I turned 30 I found that there was an opportunity for me and by the time I turned 31, I had moved to Switzerland. Yeah, never saw that one coming.
That was a complete surprise for me. I was never thinking about really living abroad. I had no idea where Basel was, it's in Switzerland. I don't think I was so naive to think Switzerland was the same thing as Sweden but I certainly didn't know where Basel list. And so on my 31st birthday, I found myself alone, and I've lived one week in this new country, all by myself.
Now, the next couple of years I met my future husband. I had lots of travel. I have lots of friends here. Everything was going quite well. However, I kinda came back to this feeling of, you know, am I just kind of floating through my life am I just kind of taking what's coming and not really thinking about it or planning it. And a couple of years ago I started, okay, let's do some more goals.
Like I mentioned, you know, I do a lot of projects, I have a lot of things, a lot of ideas and none of them really, you know, I know I don't see things all the way through all the time. Let's just face it. But what I did do is I started to think about my job and really what was fulfilling me in my job and I found that I wasn't, what I was missing was really the part where I was actually affecting change in someone's life and supporting someone or helping someone. And for your job to take up one-third of your day every day. I think you should get enjoyment from it.
It's not that my job was bad. It's not that the people I work with were bad and they were all fine. But I guess fine wasn't good enough anymore for me. I needed to find something that would fulfill that missing piece in my life. So I turned after lots of research, I had my way to a nutritionist and I thought, what can I do? Can I go back to school to be a Nutritionist or what does it take to be a Nutritionist or a Dietician?
Especially, since I'm living in Switzerland. I don't really know what the systems are here and I want to make sure I'm doing everything on the up and up. And that's when I found Health Coaching and honestly I'd never heard of it before. I think it's fairly new. Maybe if I had been on the East Coast, I might've heard about it, maybe if I'd been in California, but I grew up in the midwest and we don't have Health Coaches in the Midwest now there are, but not when I was living there.
So after doing some research and figuring out what this Health Coaching thing was and really sitting on it for a couple of days. And that's long for me because I'm very much an impulse person. I'm sitting on it thinking about it, I'm thinking about it again and I thought, you know what, I'm going to sign up for this Health Coaching course and I'm going to get my certification because even if I never actually use it to have a client or you know, make it into a side hustle or something, I'm going to really appreciate all that information just for myself because I'm a fanatic not, well, maybe not a fanatic.
I love this stuff. And so I made the decision then. Okay, Megan, this is a big project. It's a one-year project. I'm going to be going to school, I have to organize my time and get stuff done at home. So I'm going to do that and I'm going to do it for a couple of reasons. One, because it's a big project and I want to start it and I want to finish it and I think that's a really good goal to have. Number two, learning all that stuff for me. So the nutritional part, the coaching part and also the business part because they do give you some business training in this, in this, in this program. So all of those things wrapped up. I looked at the cost, I said, okay, yeah, that's a pretty reasonable cost for the amount of work that's going into it and for the length of time and I hope the content agrees now, I didn't find too many people that were so poo-pooing the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which is where I'm going, which is called IIN for short.
I hear mostly good things about IIN and I really liked their approach, a really holistic, treating the whole person and that kind of thing. So anyway, this podcast, what we're doing right now is my way of structuring my time and I also want to do this journey with my family and friends and for anybody else who doesn't know me and that'd be great. I'm going to do this. It's kind of a podcast web series thing where I'll have the audio for the podcast, but I'll also have the video version so people can choose whichever medium they would like and then also some coordinating blog posts.
So you can kind of follow along with my journey because you may be interested in being a Health Coach. You may be like, what the heck is this Health Coach thing anyway? You may just have heard Health Coaches are bullshit. Yeah, let's just see how much bullshit it is. So I will hope, I hope it's not because honestly, besides the Health Coaching thing, if you have not heard of Health Coaching or Integrative Medicine or Functional Medicine, please look it up because I think, you know, our healthcare system is really broken and I think anything that we can do to be on the preventative side of our own health and our own wellbeing is a positive.
A little bit about what a Health Coach is. A Health Coach is not a doctor. They're not a Dietitian they're not going to prescribe or diagnose anybody, but what it does a Health Coach does, is a support system. When a doctor says, hey buddy, your blood work isn't looking so good, you need to change your food, you need to change your exercise, or yeah, we're going to have to put you on some medicine, x, y, z. then they're just pushing you out the door saying, okay, do it. And you're like, okay, yeah, I know all these things, but how do I get it done?
That's where a Health Coach comes in to give you tools, they're going to be your support system and they're going to be your advocate. They are going to be your accountability partner and they're really going to help you try to figure out all that stuff that you know is the right thing to do, how to actually do it and how to make it stick. Like it's really all about habits and habit change. And that's another passionate area of mine. So that's what a health coach does kind of in a nutshell. And again, I'm super excited about this journey that I'm on because it is a journey for about a year, this whole learning aspect, but it's also, I'm hoping, a life-changing moment for me.
I mean, I already can tell you that just by taking the step forward and making this decision, I've changed so and I think that's great. I think that's a great thing and I really hope that you'll come back and you'll listen to me every week and you'll learn about what I'm learning that week.
It's fine if this is a yearlong me session, okay. But otherwise, I really would like to help you, I’d like to help my friends and family the most and see how that goes. So please come back and, and, and catch me on social media and I will be back every week. I promise and I have to do it now because I've promised that I'm going to do it. So I'll do it.
