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Interview Transcription
Morris: Welcome to CreateGrowProfit: Coaching Stories. I am Morris from creategrowprofit.com and today I’m speaking to Branda Wollenberg who helps people get through a jungle of wellness information and find what works for them.
Brenda’s also going to tell us about how she helps her clients achieve transformation, and get results in their lives and we’re going to talk about how she started as a coach and how she gets her clients. Brenda, thank you so much for being here. Where are you calling in from?
Brenda: I am calling from Vancouver just outside Vancouver BC Canada and thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to it.
Morris: Do you have it as rainy as we do recently or how’s the weather?
Brenda: It has been yes unfortunately but the sun is peeking through the clouds today so I’m happy about that.
Morris. Great! Branda, first question, when did you start calling yourself a coach officially? When did you realize you are a coach?
Brenda: It’s going to be a little bit of backstory about coaching before I knew I was one, okay so started off with you know a lit teacher in university saying you need to be a writer and I said, oh no no I need to make money okay. So I am going to go into social work and social work was kind of coaching but I never thought of it that way. Then we did, we co-ed a faith community for a couple of decades and again elements of coaching but I never thought of it that way. The day that I really landed on it was when I sat down on the coach by my husband and I said, Man alive I really want to go back and take training to become a nutritionist. I said something wrong with me like am I just flighty like I do a career in social work and training and social work. We need this Faith Community.
Now I want to go do you know nutrition like maybe I just need to grow up and you know figure out my life and he said the most wise words he says wise words once in a while but probably ever up to that point and said no this is not about flightiness, this is about you landing on the combination of stuff that you’ve been wired to do which is body, mind and spirit. And I went that’s it, that’s what I am a whole body coach and I just need this last piece of it.
So that was the kind of awakening moment that, oh yeah that’s right these things go together. We are not just one or the other in our body and the fact that I now have we’ll have training and all these elements and can bring them together, I think is going to be really good for coaching people to overall wellness instead of just a little component of it.
So I think yeah it was kind of like my lowest moment of oh my goodness I need to grow up and you know figure out what I want to do with my life too. Oh no, no hold it. This is the missing piece that’s going to allow me to really coach people in a way that will be much more effective. So sorry, long story, long answer to that but I think that was the pivotal moment. Pivotal moment.
Morris: No, that’s great, Brenda and I resonate so much with that sentiment of Am I flighty like right? Am I running away from things? Do I need to grow up because I’ve really struggled with that too?
I first went to law school, started working in corporate, in finance then went into digital marketing with an email marketing agency. Then went into programming worked as a programmer, started freelancing, and started developing apps like all this journey until what I do today and I’ve had several moments where I thought to myself, do I need to grow up but so yeah that’s a but.
I think that’s what makes coaches coaches. As a coach, you need a big backpack so to speak and I see that with a lot of coaches that I speak to. We’re not like special technical specialists. We need more life experience and exposing ourselves to different career paths is one way to do that so I really love what your husband said there.
Brenda: Yeah no, I think it’s right like you said a backpack or just a broader range of tools in our toolkit because everyone that we work with is different, and while we can’t help every single person, I feel like the broader our experience is the more we can bring to the coaching experience. So yeah I agree with you. You’re not flighty, Morris. You just needed to acquire a lot of tools for your toolkit.
Morris: Yeah I was just filling my backpack.
Brenda: Yeah exactly, exactly.
Morris: You mentioned mind, body, and soul correct?
Brenda: Body, Mind, Spirit but it’s the same body mind soul.
Morris: Body, Mind Spirit. Yeah, so what is it that you do with your clients today?
Brenda: So typically we start with whatever is presenting most prominently with a client but that’s usually the body, okay? It’s what we tend to pay more attention to and we don’t actually realize the impact that the spirit and the mind are having on our body. As many famous authors have said of late, the body keeps the score you know when the body says no like the very famous authors Gabor Maté, and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, they are speaking the language of this.
So I usually start with the body though because the body is where you’re going to usually get the most energy. Once you begin improving your metabolic health and your cells are working better and you’re producing ATP more efficiently etc, then it can become easier to tackle some of the Mind issues or some of the spirit issues so I usually start with the body if the client is up for that unless there’s a really like profound issue in the mind or the spirit but usually, we start the body.
Get some energy happening. Get the midafternoon slump stopping. Getting you sleeping better and then now let’s look at what else your body is saying that we can then begin to peel back some layers or cover another part of you.
Morris: So if I understand you correctly it starts with the body with a physical experience but that then frees up the mental space to explore the mindset or the mind and the spiritual parts?
Brenda: Yes exactly and it frees up space but it also like we are not trained very well. We don’t raise very well enough to understand the impact that simple things like what we’re eating or you know our sleep patterns, our sleep hygiene, and how long we stay on our phone before we go to bed. Maybe our movement for example. We’re not trained to realize the impact that is going to have on our well-being so we just ignore when the body is saying every time I eat a copious amount of sugar, my moods just fall like they tank.
Or every time I stay up till 3: in the morning, I notice that the next day my digestion is off like we just aren’t trained to make those links and so when we start start with the body and we start paying attention and we start seeing the improvements and some of these physiological things, then I can help my clients start making the connection with I eat more vegetables, my bowels are flowing better and when I’m less constipated, I’m actually less pissy and angry or whatever. So it’s like helping them connect some dots. That’s the fun part of it.
Morris: Cool! Before we started recording you mentioned Epigenetics, how has that impacted your coaching today?
Brenda: So for over two decades, I’ve already coached in a very personalized approach using something called metabolic typing. This is very old. It’s based on Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine and it simply recognizes that bodies are different. We don’t all need the same fuel mix. We don’t all respond to stress in the same way. We don’t all respond to types of exercise in the same way.
So I was already helping my clients personalized by that but about 6 years ago now, a couple of years before COVID, a good friend of mine who is also a fellow nutritionist as well as being a PhD Biologist botanist, okay? She said to me, I’m taking you, we have to go to this conference, this full-day workshop and she said I’m like what is this and she goes it’s on epigenetics. I’m like what the heck is epigenetics? It actually comes from the Greek word for over or above and Epi that part of it and it simply means the things that we do or are done to us over and above genetic.
So above that strand of DNA that you got from your biological mom and your biological dad that impacts the way genes are expressed. So that means even though I was doing that for 20 years with my clients, I did not know the word of that even though I got healthy you know multiple decades ago by accidentally resetting my genes. We did not have that terminology so she dragged me out to this workshop. I was completely over my head.
It’s been a you know university biology, yes, and biology and organic chemistry and chemistry for becoming a nutritionist but it had been a few years ago and the only thing that saved was the Saving Grace as I glanced over at this PhD scientist and it she was over her head too and I was like, oh Hallelujah good this is new stuff okay?
So epigenetics is simply recognizing that while you now in the last 20 years can find out what your genes actually are what the coding is the either an a, a, c, a, g, a, t, the letters that are part of the gene alphabet. You can now through something as inexpensive as say 23 and Me, or DNA Lure different kind of company that will test your spit test or your swab. You can find out what your genes are like are you more prone to muscle injury? Do you need a higher amount of protein intake? Are you someone that responds well to saturated fat or doesn’t? So you can find that out okay?
And then the field of epigenetics is simply what can you do that better allows your genes to express themselves? You can’t change them like whatever coding you got is the coding you got okay but you can, if you have genes that have a more challenging coding and maybe you don’t respond to stress very easily. You can through diet and nutrition and supplement and mindfulness and centered prayer and whatever. You can alter the way that gene is expressed. You can kind of dampen it so it doesn’t express itself so fully and likewise, if you have a gene you have a really positive coding that allows you to be a great runner or a great weightlifter or whatever. If that has been shut down through things like stress, and massive cortisol inflammation, you can through the things that you do allow that gene to express itself more positively again.
So it is a fascinating study of the amount of control that we have not over our genes that’s due to Mom and Dad, okay but over the way those genes get expressed in our life and that has been for the last five years now five, six years I’ve been working with that talk. Talking about fine-tuning people’s personal wellness plans that are kind of on steroids okay to be able to do that, that’s been very very fun and you just see a lot of positive results, you need less educated guessing and you can go more right to this. This would be the ideal food plan for you. Are you willing to give that a try for say eight weeks and see how you feel about that?
Morris: Oh great! Yeah especially in diet, there is so much trial and error. That’s what we used to have to do. We had to try different foods and see what worked for us and what didn’t, what triggers, a negative response so it sounds like that with epigenetics we can find out literally, quite literally our strengths and weaknesses that are safe in our body.
Brenda: Yes and it’s interesting. The more I learned about it because I mean, I’m no expert on this meaning the human genome was only mapped 20 years ago it’s not like you know and yes it was studied for decades before that trying to find out how genes worked, etc but it’s really quite a new field and so you know there is still a little bit of trial and error about things like did this gene for example, does it actually have something with what’s called penetrant like you got this gene but is it fully enacted in you okay? Well, let’s do a little bit of this, let’s see how you do if we shift this but it gives you such a better platform.
In my coaching I mentioned energy is where I start okay but the other four parts of my coaching are clarity, structure, feedback, and accountability so we’ve got you a little more energy. You’re eating better, you’re moving in a way that is more aligned with who you are. You’re sleeping better. You’re practicing some mindfulness. Now, let’s see if can we get some clarity on what the structure is that is best for you to walk out moving forward and that’s where we then can go ideally, you would literally be eating this many grams of protein per day based on this particular fto gene and you want that divided either into always in three meals, three types of eating because usually, you want to break up your protein three times.
So it’s you have not too much overwhelming your body at once but are you better on intermittent fasting? Are you like my metabolic gene code and I love not eating till 12 or 1 o’clock okay? My body loves that so I’ll just, do two meals and a snack.
I have other clients where intermittent fasting is the worst thing they can be doing and they know it because they’ve been trying it cuz their buddy did it and loved it and they just feel horrible about it. We get their genetics back and I go, yeah yeah you don’t want to be doing intermittent fasting you know you need to be eating within like an hour of getting up in the morning that’s how your metabolism functions.
And people like when I talked about or you mentioned the confusion like it’s so nice when you actually know this is not what I need to eat. Your buddy’s doing keto well you have genes like me where you need the lowest amount of saturation fat intake in a day. I mean, I knew my genetics and I tried to support my husband and one of our kids in their lovely keto-specific genes.
One weekend I said you know what guys I’m going to kill myself. I will, you can cook. I’ll eat something different because even knowing it, I thought, you know how bad can it be? Like eating 60 grams of saturated fat a day when I really only can tolerate 22 probably. The only person in the world who gained five pounds during their first week on keto because her body felt so horrible.
So it’s those specific things that are really helpful. I have clients who are vegetarian. They come to me and they are having horrible digestive issues and weight gain and they’re eating good vegetarian not like chips and pop. They fermenting their beans and they’re doing all this stuff and we pull up their genetics and I’m just like, you know what you have really challenged coatings for carbohydrates like a vegetarian diet even the protein comes wrapped in carbohydrates, legumes and the seeds and the whatever it’s wrapped in carbs.
It is really irritating for your gut. So are you willing to try some efficacy raised like meat, some wild cut salmon, some free range eggs like can we begin to shift things? And oh my goodness differences happen. Almost immediately so yeah if you can nail diet down in a way that’s helpful, you just set the stage for it. Then a whole bunch of cool things happen.
Morris: Brenda, this is so fascinating and I’m really interested in diet too because I had in my 20s I had heartburn acid reflux which is way too young to have that and the doctors were just going to give me blockers, I was like no there’s got to be some other way and I went deep in the nutrition rabbit hole and it was so interesting to see how I respond to different diets and I drew the parallels to marketing, where you know the blanket advice just doesn’t work.
Sometimes it works but it’s like a without taking away, without taking anything away from people who do work hard to get results but it is a coincidence it’s like you make a blanket statement and it applies to some people. It applies to a percentage and it works for them and then we take these anecdotal success stories and say, see it worked for them but it didn’t work for you. So it’s not the fault of the advice. It’s your fault. You didn’t work hard enough or you didn’t follow the diet.
And so hearing you explain that is so freeing like, especially with something as personal as our bodies where I can eat in a way and another person tries to copy what I eat. I feel great and I’m the same way as you by the way I do great on fasting. I wanted to ask you that when you mentioned splitting up proteins into three meals, I do great on fasting but somebody else might feel horrible.
Brenda: Exactly. Yeah and I think you hit a really key point there, Morris is that there can be a lot of shame and embarrassment you know like you said when people are saying, oh well other people have succeeded here, what’s your problem? You just don’t get up early enough, you don’t work hard enough, you don’t know you’re not doing it in the right way.
When my clients come a lot of them are carrying a lot of weight and I mean emotional weight but they will often sometimes be carrying a lot of physical weight as well and you know. First off, I spent a lot of time explaining to them that bodies are all different. It’s not about a better body, this is a better body a skinny body is a better body than a rounder body even when we look at our genetics, we can see that you know like we’ve talked about before, the thing about my husband is German.
Well, yeah he’s a 6’2 German big guy you know size of his thighs or the size of my waist, and we have five kids so some of our kids are going to get more of the genes that have kind of you know just the stockier sturdier German that we think of as German content and some of them had got more of my kind of leaner type of genes and some of them got Dad’s really tall genes and my really lean jeans and some of them you know they’re all taller than me.
You can’t have a six-foot-two data not get some of that. But it’s fascinating to study this and watch my three boys and then the two girls and be able to work with the girls even when they were younger when a lot of times there’s so much pressure to look a certain way and to you know just be this, whatever and to be able to sit with our girls and just say I remember the youngest coming to me one day and she was like two and a half years younger than her sister and you know we didn’t even have a scale in our house but she must have hopped on a scale at somebody else’s house. She was around six and she came home and said, Mom how come I weigh the same as you know my big sister and I’m younger than her. And I said you know what, it’s time for us to have a little genetic talk okay?
And you know I’m so grateful that she managed to get all through her teen years and you know, now you know lovely married the whole nine yards and didn’t struggle with that kind of diet mentality but I need to do this because I need to be tall and thin like my sister.
I’m actually going to be taller and rounder because I’m more like my dad. Just even being able to raise kids with that understanding or to coach people with that understanding that what’s your ideal body size for you? What’s the one that you feel comfortable in so that you can move easily, you can get on the floor and play with your kids or your grandkids? And that’s going to look different than your neighbor and how can we make sure that you feel good in your own skin?
Morris: Yeah. That is so important you say how you feel not how you look and I see these parallels of course that’s my personal bias but I see these parallels to business and marketing too. Where some people just feel great posting videos on social media and others feel better writing emails and this internal emotional experience is so important because else you don’t stick with it. I remember I was skinny and short. That’s what I was given.
Brenda: You got okay. There you go.
Morris: That’s what I got and I was really struggling with that when I was younger because I played American football and I wanted to be like the big guys and I was training like a maniac eating like a maniac. And I felt I mean I grew bigger but I really didn’t feel well. I was forcing myself through that experience for external factors even though my physical performance was fine. It was just a visual thing. I wanted to be strong and big like the other football players, right? And so this what you mentioned with how we feel, it’s so important.
Brenda: Oh yeah and I mean all of our kids were athletic and the youngest wanted to run and we were able to say, hey you know what, what do you think about cross country as opposed to like a 400-yard dash, you know? And now, of course, I didn’t have their genetics then because it wasn’t even available but now we have them and we look at the fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers and I’m like, yes we steered her in exactly the right direction.
She played rugby. You know what I mean? It’s like what can your body or you know want to do? And how can we help steer that in a way that you just have success and you feel good in what you’re doing and you feel like your body is rising to the occasion for what you want to do? So I think yeah it gives a much better language for those of your coaches that are also parents but also even in their coaching to be able to give feedback that’s based on a person, way the person is wired.
Morris: This is such a fascinating conversation. It’s almost rejuvenating just talking about this in a way but to to bring it back to your coaching and what you do as a coach? So we now know what you do, who you help, and how exactly you started as a coach. What did you do to get your first batch of clients?
Brenda: It was accidental, okay. One of the reasons why I did the nutritional certification was I wanted to write. My lit teacher had told me to do 15 years before and so I wanted to kind of what I would say through the coach the written word and so I wanted to go back to get the credentials. So I was writing on nutrition not just as a social worker okay because I already had a couple of newspaper columns and the dietitians were having Hissy Fits and writing letters to the editor because here I wasn’t official, you know nutritionist or dietitian.
So I got my certification and that weekend was going to go speak at a women’s retreat on wellness. And so literally last minute old inkjet computer, you know I’m thinking like oh, maybe I should maybe I should print out some brochures because I am now certified as a registered holistic nutritionist. Maybe I should just maybe someone wants to actually coach while I’m doing my writing, my book, okay?
And literally, the brochures were still probably wet as I took them out to that. This session that I was teaching on a Saturday and I just mentioned at the end, you know I’m just starting now one-on-one coaching and if anyone’s interested, there’ll be some brochures over there. Lo and behold, one woman picked up her brochure and that is how it started.
And so as I was writing my book and my articles and all the other things, I loved about writing the coaching practice gradually grew mainly by word of mouth. Also, I enjoy public speaking so I spoke at a lot of schools at our kids’ schools, and their sports teams when they moved to university. I spoke to some of their university classes and High School classes and just it expanded that way and then I was doing some online work.
I had a couple of online courses that I was teaching and for that, I took some training and a couple of really good courses that helped a lot with that. But then when COVID hit, of course, I wasn’t able to do any in-person coaching anymore and so that allowed me to develop my online presence more. It really expanded there and so now that’s primarily what I do. I have clients in Australia and New Zealand and Africa and Europe and you know the US and Mexico and it’s very lovely.
And then the final piece would be just really got more training in creating really good online courses so that they’re engaging and people want to be there and they learn so one of the biggest ones right now. What I’m doing right now is called a gene reset blueprint and that is a 12-week course that helps people reset their genes. So that’s been the progression from, Oh maybe I should print a brochure to Oh I like the speaking, word of mouth is great, do some free coaching at different groups, and expand from there.
And then now mainly an online presence. So yeah that’s the progression and then I’m just finishing up another book so I get to do all of that.
Morris: Wow it sounds like you did everything right to be honest.
Brenda: Oh well it looks in hindsight. It always looks really good, okay?
Morris: Well not always I have a bunch of stories where in hindsight it still looks very bad.
Brenda: Oh okay. Okay.
Morris: But still like talking about looking back is there anything you would have done differently with everything you know now about growing a coaching business?
Brenda: I’m a student of believing that you don’t get from A to Z on a straight trajectory, you know. Do I wish that I learned some of the things that I know now earlier? Yes but is it possible I could have done that without going through some of the things that I did? I’m not sure. I was so egocentric when we were younger, you know. We have to be. We’re trying to earn a living.
We’re putting paying a mortgage we’re you know putting soccer uniforms on kids’ backs you know like we are focused on doing the things that are on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs much lower, shelter, food all that kind of thing.
The how I coach now is much more based on the higher elements of having done you know trauma work yourself, having done healing work, having restoration connecting with your sense of a higher source it’s much more elevated coaching because it’s based on a more healed well-rounded person but I couldn’t have got here if I hadn’t have made the mistakes that I made and focus too much on my ego.
That’s just life so if I could have a magic wand and get here without some of those painful lessons I learned, sure I would happily take those because I hurt some people in the process okay? But I just don’t think the older I get the more I realize that those are necessary and I just want to stay in those phases for a shorter period of time.
I’ll learn fast, okay have bigger lengths of period in between me pulling up and having those falling off, the main good path you know glitches happen farther and farther apart and are shorter periods of time off the path. So that’s my goal, that’s my progress goal.
Morris: It sounds like don’t avoid making the mistakes just learn from them faster.
Brenda: Yes exactly, exactly.
Morris: Brenda, thank you so much for sharing all of your advice. People listening to this where can they find you to reach you learn more about you and maybe even work with you?
Brenda: Sure, the easiest is just the website, it’s called inbalancelm. The LM stands for Lifestyle Management so inbalancelm.com and they can click a free 20-minute wellness road map call if they want to just find out if there’s a room to move them from where they are to where they want to go. There’s also a free self-check survey on there where they can just see whether or not epigenetic work might be something that would be helpful to them. There are some free resources on that site.
Morris: Okay very good. I’ll put the links below this episode so they can do the checklist for free on your website to find out if epigenetics would be a good first step for them and they can also talk to you personally for free.
Brenda: Absolutely yeah. It’s a big step. People like to have a little conversation first and I totally appreciate that.
Morris: Absolutely! Thank you so much, Brenda.
Brenda: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation.
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