Falling Off The Map Has Its Perks

It’s been about one year since I’ve posted, worked on, written about, coached, or marketed anything related to my business—Find Your Stride Wellness LLC. In the Fall of 2021 we had quite a bit going on as a family. I lost a grandparent, we started trying to get pregnant with our second baby, my husband and I were both struggling to keep the balance between work and family life, and I was particularly failing to practice what I preached as a health coach by pulling myself in two different directions while at home with our son full-time and trying to start a business simultaneously. We were also wrestling with the idea of moving out of the city we had just moved to a year earlier, selling our house, buying a bunch of land and building our “forever home.” It was a major turning point to say the least. So I wrote this blog to share some of the highlights of the past year so the extended break from my business and social media may seem a little more understandable.

It has taken me a while to realize that it’s not only okay, but healthy to allow our personal lives, all the messiness, the tumultuous ups and downs, get in the way of and influence our career plans and objectives. Because chances are the things that keep coming up or getting in the way in your personal life need to be addressed, understood and sorted out in order to be our best selves at work and home. Have you ever felt so tunnel-visioned in one aspect of your life that you miss out on some of the most significant and potentially life changing moments? Have you ever been blindsided by an experience, opportunity or obstacle in your life only to shy away, and deny any exploring, learning or growing from it, and instead take the easiest path forward? I know I have. Most of you reading this probably have too. As a health coach, my training and certification process has taught me how to successfully work with people to create goals, objectives and design a plan to improve their overall health. All of which are important steps to developing better habits and positively impacting one’s well-being. While I believe establishing goals, tasks and objectives to be helpful and productive, there is a completely different, nuanced side to health coaching most people don’t talk about. Especially when it comes to working with moms. Last year I learned a great deal about embracing unexpected challenges and experiences filled with nuance and complications so I want to share some of my insights and where it has led my family.

Part of working with clients involves coming up with strategies and personalized methods to establish a sense of empowerment and resilience, during the easy and planned times, as well as the complicated and unpredictable times. This became challenging to do when, as a coach, I no longer felt as empowered or resilient in my own life. That’s how I felt last fall and it was something I decided I had to work on more and further develop before moving forward with my business.

Not only was the fall of 2021 a pivotal time for our family personally, but the world seemed to be even more turbulent. Being on social media professionally and constantly posting quickly became a burden. A couple months into starting my business I noticed myself living my day to day through the lens of social media. You probably know the feeling…when you find yourself assessing every moment and experience in your life as instagram worthy or not rather than just being present in the moment and enjoying what’s real right in front of you. I would catch myself thinking of a good caption when Wyatt was doing something funny or cute. Instead of unplugging during my runs I would see the beautiful scenery on a trail as a potential post on IG.

It wasn’t who I was or wanted to be and I didn’t like how it was impacting quality time with my son, my husband, friends and family. That was breaking point number one. I quickly learned I needed to stop pretending I could handle the emotional load of posting and engaging on social media all the time. I should’ve known better. Some people are cut out for it. I’m not one of those people. So I decided I would need to come up with a different strategy when it came to promoting and engaging on social media professionally before returning to it.

Breaking point number two was not getting pregnant right away once we started trying. This was probably the number one reason I was struggling to prioritize my business, and dramatically impacted my sense of empowerment, confidence and resilience as a mom and a health coach. I won’t go into detail during this blog because this subject deserves its own spotlight. So stay tuned for more on this next month.

Another breaking point for me was that I had never seen the “health and wellness” space more politicized or polarized. Especially on social media. I lost track of the number of people and influencers that were not only claiming to be overnight experts on health, wellness, nutrition, fitness, COVID, the vaccine, etc. but so many people were aggressively telling everyone else how to live their lives. If you didn’t have an opinion yet, used “holistic” or “all-natural” too many times in a post, weren’t actively voicing your opinions or *GASP*, taking time to think, research and reflect on such topics instead of blindly agreeing with the mob then shame on you. It was mind boggling and maddening. I couldn’t even scroll through social media for more than five minutes without getting extremely frustrated, discouraged, angry or all three at once. So I decided one day to step away entirely. No more posting on my business profile, no more engaging, no more caring about what some stranger is ranting about on a random Tuesday afternoon. I wanted to take the time to do my own research and establish my own opinions. It was after this third breaking point that I realized a considerable shift was needed and had already started to take place.

The fourth and primary reason for making a significant change wasn’t a “breaking point” but instead an unbelievable opportunity. My husband and I had a decently concrete short, medium and long term plan for our family. Last fall we were living in Philadelphia, PA after having bought our first house the year before and the plan was to be there for another three to five years. In October of last year we stumbled upon something very unexpected that completely derailed us from our original plan. This open-door led to much discussion about the state of our world, our country, our family priorities, stage in life and our future goals. A few weeks later our life was heading in an entirely new but very exciting direction. We decided to buy a little over five acres and to design and start building our “forever home.” While this was a sizable and somewhat scary first step in the right direction it was only the first of many more to come for our family.

As I mentioned above, my husband and I spent a lot of time talking about the future of our family, but more specifically, how to prepare our children to be successful and the best individuals they can be in the future. In my opinion, not ALL, but much of the world seems to be heading down a specific road, especially the younger generation. One overwhelmed by screens, social media obsessions, self-centeredness, counterproductive distractions, unhealthy foods, poor fitness routines and fads, censorship, victimhood, politicization of EVERYTHING, lack of resilience, depression and decreased ability to be present or think individually under any circumstances. I’m not sure about you but this is not the environment I want to accept or promote for myself and most certainly not for my children. I know, it’s not a pretty picture to paint, but this was part of the weight we felt on our shoulders that led our family to take action and make a positive change.

While the majority of our society seems to be heading toward the metaverse my husband and I decided we want to learn how to successfully pursue an altogether different path for our family. One of our short-term goals is to move away from as many of the distractions and bad habits consuming so many of us today, and pivot to a more grounded and wholesome way of life. This started with us relocating our family, and continues with us rethinking our priorities, as well as shifting our overall focus to the positive aspects of living a more “unplugged” life.

We want our children to grow up being those “free range” kids. We want them playing outside in the dirt, to enjoy being healthy and active, spend weekends hiking and exploring, as well as taking an interest in their local community and meeting real people and making real friends instead of burying their heads in the phone and becoming consumed by the latest fad deemed legitimate by some stranger on social media. As parents, we want to have more of an impact and involvement with our children’s education. We want our household to foster an environment of faith, healthy communication and love, but also one valuing hard work, responsibility and purpose. I’m sure every generation says this but I don’t see how the majority of this next generation can truly benefit from many of the ways we are currently living our lives, and I know I’m not the only mom or parent to have this opinion.

So, instead of working on my business, I started using our son’s nap time to work on designing and drawing our new house. I started reading about organic gardening and learning about homesteading. I spent countless hours researching the many factors impacting fertility, listening to a variety of new podcasts and looking into holistic health strategies for the entire family. We began exploring different homeschooling and education models for young children, as well as ways to get more involved in our soon-to-be new local community. It wasn’t long into our home building process before we were putting our ambitions into action and started building our own garden and wood shed on our property. We started taking on small projects here and there that would support and align with this newly desired life-style. Before we knew it we were selling our house in Philadelphia and preparing to move.

So, in a nutshell, that’s what we’ve been up to over the last year and I couldn’t be more thankful for where we are today. Oh, and I’m coming up on 33 weeks pregnant (YAY!) , but as I said earlier, that’s a topic for another blog post.

The last twelve months have been a bit of a whirlwind but definitely provided me with experiences and challenges that have only strengthened my confidence as a mom, wife and abilities as a health coach. Now that we are mostly settled into our new house and getting a solid footing in our new lifestyle, I’m ready to start working on my business again, and this time with an entirely refreshed mission, more balanced strategy, new program offerings and, despite my doomsday rant above, a very positive outlook :)