Episode 178: Today's episode is an interview with Summer Innanen. We chat about all things parenthood, untangling self-worth from career success, and building an online business.
Summer Innanen is a professionally trained coach specializing in body image, body positivity, self-worth, and confidence. She helps women all over the world to stop living behind the numbers on their scales through her private and group coaching at summerinnanen.com.
She is the best-selling author of Body Image Remix and host of Fearless Rebelle Radio, a podcast dedicated to empowering women to live life on their own terms.
00:00:00
00:06:40
00:12:30
00:18:35
00:23:00
00:35:30
00:45:35
00:53:10
01:03:40
01:17:00
01:21:50
01:30:40
01:36:25
01:45:55
Links
00:00:00
Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 178 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/178.
Real Health Radio is brought to you by Seven Health. Seven Health works with women who feel obsessed with and defined by their bodies. Using a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that combines science and compassion, we help you transform your physical, mental, and emotional health. Areas of specialization include helping clients with disordered eating and eating disorders, hormonal issues like hypothalamic amenorrhea, and helping clients recover from dieting by discovering how to listen to their body.
We are currently taking on new clients. If any of these are areas you’d like help with, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel, and this week on the show, it’s another guest episode. It’s actually a returning guest, Summer Innanen.
Summer is a professionally trained coach specializing in body image, body positivity, self-worth, and confidence. She helps women all over the world to stop living behind the numbers on their scale through her private and group coaching at www.summerinnanen.com. She is the bestselling author of Body Image Remix and host of Fearless Rebelle Radio, her podcast dedicated to empowering women to live life on their own terms.
Summer first appeared on the podcast in Episode 16, so over 4 years ago. Since that time, we’ve kept in semi-regular contact. We jump on Skype and every now and again and have a chat, so this conversation was actually really overdue. There were two main areas that I wanted to cover as part of this.
One of them is all around parenthood. Summer has a 1-year-old child called Dylan; I have a 2-year-old son called Ramsay, so I wanted to talk about what we’ve been through as new parents. And this isn’t just me asking Summer these questions. I share a lot about my history and what we’ve done as parents. I touch on miscarriage, co-sleeping, sleep deprivation, baby-led weaning, and the various ups and downs of parenthood.
Then the other topic that I wanted to cover was the business side of things, so running a coaching business and what that looks like, and then actually the coaching side and being with clients. We talk about what it looks like in terms of building a business, as we’ve both been in this for over a decade, and then we talk about content creation, the writing process, courses that we’ve done that have really helped us, when in conversations, not shying away from difficult areas or difficult emotions, the power of laughter in client sessions.
This felt very informal, and like a conversation between two friends – which it is. I probably talk more in this interview than in most because it was so much like a regular conversation.
Before I get on with this episode, I just want to mention that this will be the final new episode for the year. Next week will be a rebroadcast episode. I really can’t believe that 2019 is coming to an end. It feels like it’s just flown by so quickly. It really has been an incredible year in so many ways, and I’m incredibly excited to be ending it by taking on two new members of the Seven Health team, Lu and Amanda. I’m really looking forward to 2020.
Thank you all for listening to this podcast and for providing feedback. I feel incredibly lucky that this is a component of my job and how I get to spend some of my time. Have a wonderful holiday season and new year. I hope you are getting some time off to spend with friends or family. We will be back with the podcast in the new year, with the first episode being my annual favorite books, documentaries, and podcast episodes from the year.
So let’s get on with this week’s show. Here is my conversation with Summer Innanen.
Hey, Summer. Welcome back to Real Health Radio. It’s a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Summer Innanen: Hi, Chris. Thanks so much for having me back. It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?
Chris Sandel: It has. I was looking into this before we started recording, and it was November of 2015, so over 4 years ago.
Summer Innanen: Wow.
Chris Sandel: I think you were somewhere around the eighth guest that I interviewed, so yeah, very early on in my podcasting career, when I was still a newbie to all this. I think in the intervening years, there’s lots that has happened in both our lives and in our businesses, and that’s what I want to cover as part of this episode. We both now have kids, so I want to talk about that piece and the whole parenthood piece. You’re a more recent parent than I am.
And then you also have a really great series of emails that are directed specifically at coaches, and I know that we’ve had some private conversations over the years about wanting to do programs or trainings that are directed at practitioners. So yeah, I want to cover some of that too. I think that will be some of the skills for being a good practitioner, but also giving an honest representation of what it’s like running a business, because there’s a lot of hype online. There’s a lot of people who feel badly just because they’re trying to live up to some unrealistic expectation of what it should be like running a business.
I also think we’ve gone through a lot of similar things in terms of how long we’ve been practitioners, so I would love to be able to chime in and share my perspective and my side of the story. So please feel free for you to ask me questions as well, so it’s not just me trying to interview you, but us having a conversation around all this.
Summer Innanen: Sure. Yeah, sounds good. I love talking about all of those things.
00:06:40
Chris Sandel: Awesome. To start with, for anyone who missed our original episode or doesn’t know who you are, do you want to give a bit of background on yourself? Who you are, what you do, what trainings you’ve done, that sort of thing.
Summer Innanen: Sure. I’m a professionally trained coach that specializes in helping women with self-worth, confidence, and body image. The evolution to get there – I’ll just give an abbreviated version of the story, because I probably gave a more in-depth one when you first had me on 4 years ago – which I can’t believe. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: And I will put a link to that in the show notes as well so people can then check out that first episode. Even though I think I was probably pretty terrible as an interviewer, it’s worth a listen from Summer’s side.
Summer Innanen: Well, I was going to say I’m probably going to be embarrassed if I were ever to listen to it again, because I’ve evolved and changed, as I’m sure everybody does. And that’s a good sign, if you can look at your old stuff and think, “Ooh, I could’ve said that better.” It means you’ve grown.
Personally, I really struggled with my body image growing up, and I was a chronic dieter for decades of my life. Decades of my life were wasted on obsessing over food and obsessing over my body. I became hyper, hyper-focused on nutrition, and at one point in time got really into paleo nutrition and all of that stuff.
I was working a corporate job. I’d been working in the corporate world for 10 years, and I remember saying to myself, “I can’t do this for 30 more years. I cannot do this job for 30 more years. What do I want to do with my life?” Because I was so entrenched in diet culture and obsessed with food and working out, I thought, why don’t I make a career out of that and become a nutritionist?
One of my first trainings was going back to school to become a nutritionist, and I actually started a nutrition blog – I think it was in 2009 – and I started practicing as a nutritionist shortly after that. Eventually quit my corporate job to do that full-time.
But I kind of went through my own rock bottom moment during that time where I realized that my “obsession” with health was actually damaging my physical wellbeing, as well as my mental wellbeing. My hormones were the same as a postmenopausal woman, and I just wasn’t feeling great. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t change the size of my body anymore, whereas in the beginning, diets did work – in the short term, always. [laughs] But then they actually just stopped working completely. It didn’t matter what I did; nothing could change my body.
I knew at that time, it really wasn’t about my body; it was really about changing my relationship with food and detaching my self-worth from my body size, and really doing the deep inner work on my body image. The catalyst to that was going to see my naturopathic doctor who I was working with around the hormone stuff, and she was looking at the foods I was eating and shaking her head and being like, “Do you eat any carbohydrates? Okay, you’re going to have to start eating carbohydrates, and you need to stop doing CrossFit,” and all these things.
I just started crying because I was upset that she was telling me I couldn’t go to the gym anymore, or I had to take time off, and I had to eat foods that I had been religiously avoiding. So that’s when I really had my wake-up call moment. I was like, I’m more upset about that than I am about the fact that she said to me, “I’m surprised you’re alive because of your hormones and everything else.”
So that’s when I found intuitive eating. I started to read some books on self-compassion and body image, and I worked with some coaches there, and it really made me realize, oh my goodness, all the things that I was preaching with clients are so disordered and coming from this place of propping up fatphobia and diet culture – which I apologize to anyone who ever received that information from me.
But I realized there’s this other way, and there’s not a lot of other people talking about this. We can really eat what we want and look after ourselves from a place of compassion, and it doesn’t involve hating yourself and all of this other stuff that’s promoted in our culture.
So that’s when I really did a major pivot in my business, and I went back and took two different life coaching programs. I mentored with Tara Mohr; I did her facilitators training program, which she specifically focuses around helping women with self-doubt and fear, which is a huge part of healing our body image and just living a bigger life. Plus I trained at the Coaches Training Institute for their life coaching.
So yeah, completely rebranded everything that I was doing, and wrote a book 5 years ago called Body Image Remix, and launched the podcast about 5 years ago too, Fearless Rebelle radio. And now I have group programs and I help people all over the world with helping them to feel better about themselves and really detach their worth from their appearance.
00:12:30
Chris Sandel: I think that whole piece I’m going to come back to in a second. Let’s start more with the parenthood piece. How old is your son?
Summer Innanen: At the time of this recording, he is 14 months old. We are entering toddlerhood. I kind of thought things get easier, and now I’m realizing they don’t. [laughs] They get more chaotic, I would say. Whereas he used to just – I could just leave him on the floor and leave the room for 5 minutes, now it’s like I’ve got to make sure that he doesn’t kill himself. I need to be always within arm’s reach. [laughs]
And he’s got a lot more opinions now, like very strong opinions on things. He was a real easygoing baby, and he’s gotten more of a – like his parents. Like his mom, mostly. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: When did you decide you wanted to be a parent? Is this something that you’d been wanting to do for a really long time, or it hit you later?
Summer Innanen: Yes, it hit me later. I never wanted kids. I never had that inclination. I never had what people call that “clock is ticking.” I always said I don’t have a clock. [laughs] My clock didn’t come with a battery. And we designed our lives that way, my husband and I. We’ve been married for 11-½ years now, been together for 16 years, and it was just something that was never on my radar at all.
Then when I was 37-½, it was August, and one day I was in my bedroom folding laundry, and all of a sudden this feeling came over me that said, “I think I want to have a family.” It was one of the strangest moments of my life. I remember it so vividly, so viscerally. It was so strange. It was like all of a sudden that clock turned on. I tried to push it away, I tried to ignore it. My first reaction was like, “Who the hell just said that?” [laughs]
But I tried to push it away and ignore it because I was like, this intellectually makes no sense. Where is this coming from? Intellectually, I was like, “I don’t want a kid. This doesn’t fit with our lives.” It wasn’t until a month later that I actually had the conversation with Mike, my husband, and said, “I think I want a family.” He started laughing and said, “You’re joking, right?” [laughs] I started to cry and I was like, “No, and I’m so confused.”
We really sat with it for about a year, because I didn’t want to pressure him. He really needed to come around to this idea. In that timeframe, I said, “Why don’t we just go to see a couple doctors? Let’s just see if this is even possible for us,” because I had that history with my hormones not working optimally. Although I had not been on any kind of hormones for a few months, I was still experiencing quite terrible symptoms around my period, and my cycles were really short. So I just wasn’t sure. And my age. At the time that we went to see a doctor about it, I was 38.
So we went to a fertility clinic, and she tested – I think it’s called your AMH, whatever tests your ovarian reserve. She said, “You really don’t have” – I was in the range of someone in their forties versus someone who was not quite 40. She said, “You could give it a couple months and then I would intervene.” We, again, sat on the decision for a few more months, because I really wanted to try to heal from the stuff that was going on with my menstrual cycle. I saw a couple functional medicine doctors about that.
Anyway, fast forward a couple months later, I was sitting there and I think I was talking to the fertility doctor again for some reason – maybe that was when I got the results of the test; I might be messing up the timeline a bit here. In any event, my husband said, “Listen, are you going to regret not doing this, and not trying?” I said, “Yes. I’m going to regret it if we don’t at least try.” So he said, “Well, let’s just try.” And then I got pregnant a month later. [laughs] So clearly my body was like, “Don’t change your mind. We’re throwing a Hail Mary pass down the fallopian tube. This one’s gonna win.”
I’m so lucky, because I have a lot of colleagues – not colleagues, sorry, a lot of clients – I do have colleagues, too, but clients and friends who really struggled with infertility. I do feel so fortunate, because the odds were not stacked in our favor, and it happened so easily for me.
Now I think both Mike and I, we can’t imagine our lives without Dylan and without parenthood. I think we both love it. It’s our favorite – it’s the best part of our lives.
00:18:35
Chris Sandel: Nice. I and Ali, my other half, we are those people who it took a lot longer for. We think for us, it was nearly 3 years, somewhere in that ballpark. We had three miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy that resulted in emergency surgery as part of all that. So yeah, we had quite a journey getting to the place of actually having a child. We’re similar ages, and we just didn’t have the easy time of it.
That’s definitely given me a lot more empathy when talking with clients around this stuff and having more of an understanding of what it’s like. I would say miscarriage is something that really isn’t talked about very much, and same with ectopic pregnancy isn’t really talked about that much, and then when you look at the statistics around it, just how common both of those things are.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, and I always wonder, why is our culture that way? Why is that the norm? They say wait to tell people until it’s been 12 or 13 weeks – which I understand from a social media/public post perspective, but wouldn’t you want people to know so that if something happens, you can then reach out to them for support earlier?
That was always my feeling about it because I would want to help a friend if they went through a miscarriage. I don’t feel there should be so much secrecy around it. If people want to keep things private, I understand that. But yeah, I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, but I always felt like we should talk about these things more openly because it just happens – it’s so common, and now other people open up about it.
Chris Sandel: I’m trying to remember back to what happened with us. I think probably with the first one or two it was still a private thing, and then – and when it would then happen, we would open up to friends or select friends and talk about it, but I think it was more – and even with the ectopic, I think my family, the first they heard about it was when I’m messaging them from the emergency room saying, “Hey, just want to let you know, Ali’s about to go in for surgery.” So yeah, I don’t know.
I’m not a particularly superstitious person, but I do remember when Ali then got pregnant that then resulted in Ramsay, we told everyone, or we told certain people very early on. Part of that was also we found out when we were out in Australia, so I think we found out and then next morning had breakfast with my parents and we’re like, “Hey, by the way, we’ve got something to tell you.” I think at that stage we were talking about it earlier, but yeah, it definitely felt like something that every time it happened, it was something that was more just for us. And I don’t know why that is.
Summer Innanen: Yeah. It’s obviously a personal choice, but yeah, culturally – I just feel like that’s a cultural norm that you don’t talk about it.
Chris Sandel: And then when you would talk about it, there would be a lot of “Oh yeah, we went through that.” It was just like, I wish I’d known this more at the start, like more people went through this, as opposed to you find out after the fact, so that when it did happen, you could know to reach out to specific people to whom it had actually happened as opposed to finding out some way through the grapevine that that had occurred.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, because I imagine there’s a lot of grief around it. Very difficult. Yeah, I think that that would be so hard.
00:23:00
Chris Sandel: You said parenthood is wonderful, but tell me about the first 3 months or 6 months. How were the early days with it?
Summer Innanen: Hard. [laughs] So hard. I still look at other new parents and I’m like, maybe there’s just something wrong with me. I just don’t have my act together. [laughs]
I just found it really tough in terms of the impact that the sleep deprivation had on me. I’m a terrible sleeper to begin with, so one of the biggest things I struggled with was having to wake up and then having to go back to sleep. There were so many nights where he would wake up for the first feeding of the night, and then I would not be able to fall back asleep. Then I would just be even more of a disaster all day.
I felt like a real zombie for several months, I would say. Initially, my maternity leave was only going to be 6 months, and then as I neared 4 months, I thought, there’s no way I can go back right now. I cannot focus properly or remember things or speak coherently in a way that I would want to be able to communicate on my podcast or on social media or with clients. So I extended it. That wasn’t the only reason I extended it. I wanted to just spend more time with him. I wasn’t ready to have him go into care.
But that was the thing that surprised me the most, was just the impact it had on my brain, on my ability to really think clearly and creatively – and spell. [laughs] And things like that. Write a proper sentence. It was so significant for me. So I really struggled with the sleep anxiety, insomnia, and then the residual impact to the way my brain was functioning.
We had a lot of breastfeeding challenges, too. That was a real struggle that got a lot easier after, I would say, 2 or 3 months. We finally were able to figure that out. But yeah, I was never one of those people who could go out in public with a newborn and not worry because I could feed him anywhere. I was like, “I have to be home because this is such a clunky mess.”
I probably wouldn’t care so much if I were to do it again because I really wouldn’t care what people think, but being a new parent, I was just like, “I don’t want other people witnessing this, or I don’t want to have to deal with this. It’s just easier for me to stay closer to home.”
I didn’t really get out much the first 3 months, and that’s when I made the decision to just get out and start doing some classes, some mom and baby stuff, and meet other moms and go for coffees and make those connections. That made the whole thing so much easier. And also, once you get past that 3-4 month point, things start to become easier, I would say. Relatively speaking.
Chris Sandel: Did the sleep get better by that stage?
Summer Innanen: Well, we sleep-trained at 5 months, so yes. [laughs] It got better. I know that’s not for everyone. We made that decision collectively between my husband and I to do some gentle sleep training when he was that age, and still do a night feed. But that honestly was such a radical change for me to help with some of that anxiety that I had around bedtime.
Also, my back couldn’t take bouncing on a ball for an hour to get him to fall asleep. I was falling apart physically and mentally. [laughs] So yeah, his sleep got better, then it got worse, then we did sleep training, and then it got better. He’s actually a pretty good sleeper, and now he’s a great sleeper. Did you sleep train? I know that’s more of a North American thing.
Chris Sandel: No, we didn’t. Sleep deprivation is just the worst, and I can completely – like walking through treacle and brain turning to mush when I’m not getting good sleep. The thing is, for both Ali and I, before Ramsay was born and even now, sleep is on our top of to-do list. Even before he came along, we would be the ones who were taking ourselves to bed at 8:30 or 9:00 or 9:30 and getting a solid 9 hours’ sleep. Gone are the days of us being out late drinking and going to parties and all of that. We just like sleep, need sleep, and prioritize it. When I do that, life is so much easier.
So when that was taken away because you’ve got this newborn child, neither of us cope well without sleep. So that was pretty apparent. The first handful of months is just a mess, and sometimes it would be good sleep, sometimes it wouldn’t; it was just all over the place. But he was pretty good as a sleeper, but the caveat with that was he was pretty good as a sleeper because he stayed in our bed.
We had a cot in our room that I think got used very, very infrequently. I remember there was a period for about – must’ve been about a month where we could get him to fall asleep and put him in the cot, and then he would wake up at some point, and it would then take me the best part of about 2 hours to try and get him back in the cot. I’d have this point of just walking around the room with this weight in my arms, trying to get him to sleep for about 2 hours to then have him fall asleep, maybe, and then wake up a little bit later.
At some point I was like, “Okay, this is nonsense. I cannot do this.” So he then just came back into our bed. And actually, both of us really enjoyed having that. Again, I know it’s not for everyone, but we really liked having him in our bed.
We won’t be having any more kids. I’ve touched on this in another podcast, and maybe we can get into it here, but Ali had a pretty horrible first year in terms of health stuff from having Ramsay. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and then had to have a number of operations for an infection. She was just in a bad way for pretty much a whole year.
With the rheumatoid arthritis, part of the juggling act that your body does when you get pregnant is to get your immune system not to identify the fetus that you’re growing as non-self and try to kill it. It does this juggling act so that that is allowed to grow, and that can then have an impact on a lot of autoimmune conditions – because that’s part of the problem with autoimmune conditions; you’re misidentifying self as non-self and starting to attack it. So for a lot of people with autoimmune conditions, whether that be rheumatoid arthritis or Hashimoto’s or other conditions, pregnancy can have a real impact. Some people get way better during pregnancy, and then afterwards it comes back and it hits them like a ton of bricks, or sometimes it gets worse during pregnancy.
We had such a year that neither of us are wanting to roll that dice again. So knowing that that’s not going to happen again, we were very much happy to have him in our bed – and we got really good sleep. After the initial period, he would sleep really well. He’d wake up and there’d be times where he’d be having feeds, but then when he stopped having feeds in the night, he would just wake up, want to have a cuddle, have a cuddle, and he’d just fall straight back to sleep.
In a fairly short amount of time – I don’t know how many months it was – we were back into a routine where we were getting 7, 8, 9 hours of sleep a night, which is pretty highly unlikely for a lot of new parents. There was part of me that was like, why would I want to change this? When I prize sleep so much and I know how much better I feel with it, why would I want to be doing something that’s going to jeopardize that?
Summer Innanen: Yeah. I think that’s the thing. As a parent, you have to make the choices that work best for you, and that can look a lot different. Like I would never be able to sleep with Dylan in our bed. First of all, the mattress, it would not work. But I always have a fan blasting on my face. [laughs] It wouldn’t work. I’m the lightest sleeper in the world. It would not work. I can’t wait till he’s a little older and then he can, because then I think we can probably make it work.
But I think it’s one of those things that you have to do what’s best for you, and it’s okay. I don’t know if you notice this too, but there’s a lot of judgment or non-acceptance for people who do it the other way, for people who choose to do things in a different way. I think that’s really unfortunate because people are not robots. Babies are not robots. You have to make different choices that are going to be best for you and your child and your family. I just wish people would be more accepting of those things and not be so critical of other people’s decisions.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think that often comes to light for parents when they have a second child, who is then completely different to the first. They’re like, “Oh, hang on a second. I thought it worked because we were doing all of those things right.” It’s like, nope, they’re just now a completely different person and things are very different with the temperament of that individual and with the ability or lack of ability to sleep or whatever it may be.
I’m very much trying to be like, look, this has worked for us. It’s not going to necessarily work for other people. We didn’t have a second room at the time when he was first born, so the second room was what I was using as my office, and then subsequently we built an office in the garden, and he now has his own room.
We moved him into his own room and instantly moved him into an adult-sized double bed so that in the night, if he wakes up and wants a cuddle, we can go in – Ali goes in and then can just sleep with him for the rest of the night or sleep with him for as long as he wants, without having to cramp into a tiny single bed and get horrible sleep.
Summer Innanen: That’s smart. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: So he got the exact same bed that we have from IKEA, just in the double bed size.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, that’s smart. That’s great.
00:35:30
Chris Sandel: I mentioned a little bit about Ali and her physical stuff after birth. How are you physically recovering from that?
Summer Innanen: I think I was pretty lucky. Midwives kept telling me I was made for having babies. I probably should’ve started years ago. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: If only you’d been given a clock. [laughs]
Summer Innanen: Yes, if only I’d been given a clock. My recovery was not too bad at all. I was really gentle with myself, though. I worked with a pelvic floor physiotherapist towards the latter half of my pregnancy and then in the first few months postpartum, and she was really skilled and really had me preparing for pelvic floor health and what would happen, and then afterwards, doing the rehab around that.
She kept me out of the gym for 3 months. I was like, “When can I start to maybe go back?” She’s like, “Nope, not yet.” I did a lot of walking, and as I said, bouncing on a ball. So I was active in a way, but I wanted to go back to doing some of the stuff that I enjoy with a barbell and things like that, and she was like, “No, no, no. “Whereas a lot of other people give you a pass I think at 6 weeks – doctors are like “after 6 weeks you’re good to go” – she really made me wait.
I think that was a real gift, because I have not suffered any ramifications – other than my neck or my back from carrying him around. I’m more sensitive to those types of injuries than I used to be. [laughs]
But one thing that was really great – so far, which could still change. I mentioned having horrible PMS symptoms, and for me that was always excruciating cramps. They actually think that maybe I had undiagnosed endometriosis, but that’s a sidebar conversation. And I haven’t had that since I had the baby. I don’t know if that’s going to change, because I’m still breastfeeding, so there’s still hormonal shifts that will take place when we fully wean, but that has been one great thing that my body somehow changed. [laughs] Not having debilitating cramps that last 7 days where I have to sometimes miss work, where no painkillers would help me.
I guess contrary to Ali, I didn’t really have too much that happened, which was a gift.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think you got some good advice in terms of just take it slowly. When we were getting things checked out – because she’s like, “Things don’t feel right. I shouldn’t be in this much pain 6 weeks on or 8 weeks on. I shouldn’t be struggling to be able to walk.” She was just brushed off, like, “Things take time to heal after pregnancy,” and in the end, we found out that wasn’t the case and there was something much more sinister going on.
But it definitely depends on the person. I was out last year at Christmas in Australia, and my brother and his partner had their third child, and we went to the beach 3 or 4 or 5 days after the baby was born, and Liz, the mom, was playing with the other kids, jumping in and out of the rock pool – you would’ve never guessed that she had given birth 5 days prior. It was just insane. Sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. There was nothing that Ali did differently to what she did. Bodies are different, pregnancies are different, births are different, and they affect things differently.
Summer Innanen: Yeah. We don’t need to praise people who do get back into things faster, too. That was always something that I think we feel pressured to do, to “get back into things” and be “in shape.” The pressure to be the Supermom, I guess. It infuriates me how much our culture praises that and puts that as someone of higher value. It’s like, “Wow, look at her. Good for you. Look at all you can do.” I’m more of the opposite. I’m like, “Good for you for resting! Good for you for slowing down in spite of all the pressure not to do that!”
There’s this amazing book called The Fourth Trimester which I’ve talked about a ton on my podcast because it’s just so good. It really tells you the first 6 weeks, you should just rest. You should not do anything, other than look after the baby, look after yourself. But no cooking, no cleaning. Have people to do all that for you – which I know is a privilege – but round up a village, so to speak. Which is what they do in every other culture. In Asian cultures, the whole family comes around and the woman doesn’t do anything for 6 weeks. It allows that time for your body to really heal.
It’s such an important thing to account for and to try to prepare for in advance. That was something that I put a lot of – I asked for a lot of help around that. I made sure that we had family with us for the first 6 weeks, because we live on the other side of the country from our immediate family. That was such a godsend, in a way, because I was able to really take that time to rest and stay as horizontal as possible, so to speak. [laughs]
Obviously you go for walks and you start to do really gentle things, but the first 6 weeks to really try to focus on resting and napping and sleeping as much as you can, even though it’s all disjointed and not restorative in the same way. But it’s important for other people listening to know. That I think takes a lot of strength, to rest, actually, and to push through all the “should’s” that we feel like we need to be doing in order to measure up, to be a good parent.
Chris Sandel: I had a slightly different experience as well. My parents live on the other side of the world in Australia, and then Ali’s parents are separated and they’re in Scotland in different locations, so we had Ali’s mom come down I think 3 days or 4 days after Ramsay was born.
But then we also moved house 10 days after he was born. [laughs] We were trying to buy a house through that year, and everything got held up and held up, so we pushed it back. We were hoping he would be 3 or 4 weeks old by the time we moved in, and in the end, he was just way late. So yeah, we had to move house 10 days afterwards. The best money I’ve ever spent is removalists who packed everything up for us. [laughs]
Summer Innanen: Yes. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I was like, there is no way I can do this. And that was really great having Ali’s mom helping, because then her and Ali would be able to do stuff with Ramsay, and I was able to sort out the house for the first week. I think what often happens when you move house is that 3 months later, you’re still like, “we need to finish off some of those boxes.” I was like, I’ve got to get this done now, while we have some help here. So I think I had the whole house pretty much set up, bar certain furniture that we needed to get, within 5 or 6 days.
Summer Innanen: That’s ambitious. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: That was good. But yeah, top tip: don’t move house 10 days after having a child. That is not something I recommend. [laughs]
Summer Innanen: I almost feel like 3 or 4 weeks later would be even worse, though, because the sleep deprivation starts to really catch up to you around then. I feel like Week 4 was one of the harder ones for me, if I can recall. You’re still running on adrenaline in the beginning.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It was nice that it happened afterwards, though. We were initially trying to see if we could get it to happen beforehand, but it meant that those last handful of weeks before Ramsay was born, we were able to just chill out and enjoy ourselves. We weren’t trying to pack up a house and move things around and all of that. We were like, “We know we’re going to be here, so we can just take this time.” That was good. But yeah, I guess moving house any time around a child being born is not advised. [laughs]
Summer Innanen: [laughs] That’s a solid piece of advice.
00:45:35
Chris Sandel: What about pre-mom, pre-parenthood life? Is there any bits that you mourn or struggle with, or in some ways wish could come back?
Summer Innanen: I think that I wish I had really enjoyed the freedom that we had before a little bit more. [laughs] Not even enjoyed, but just appreciated it. My husband and I joke around that our fantasy is to go to a hotel for 24 hours and not even talk to each other and just sleep with blackout blinds. [laughs] That’s our fantasy now.
We always joke around like, “We used to talk about how we were too busy before kids. We had so much time! What were we doing with that time that made it seem like we were busy, when really we weren’t at all?” So yeah, we joke about things like that.
But I think for me, because I waited so long – I’m 40 now, so I was approaching 40 when I had Dylan. I had lived my life in terms of going out and trying restaurants. We were at a point where we were going to bed earlier on weekends and I would be like, “Oh, I hope we don’t have any social engagements this weekend. I just want to lay low.” So I don’t really miss that. We traveled a whole bunch. We did a lot before because we waited until we were later in life.
It was a hard year in that all of my good friends, we all turned 40, and they all live on the other side of the country, and I had to miss out on all the celebrations. A bunch of them did weekends away and things like that that I probably would’ve been able to attend a couple of them, would’ve flown back for them, had I not had Dylan. So yeah, I was pretty sad about that.
But in terms of anything else, I don’t really have any mourning over it because I feel like I enjoyed the time I had before to its fullest and really got to experience a lot. I think coming back to work, it’s hard because I don’t have as much time to focus on it as I did before. Like we were talking about before you started recording, we used to be able to get in more hours and use that to resolve any issues and things like that, and now you have to practice – at least I do – letting some things go, not being so hard on myself because I just don’t have the capacity that I used to.
That’s certainly, definitely been a bit of a mental struggle that I’ve had to walk myself through, because life has changed. It’s chaos in the morning, then work, and then chaos at night, and there’s very little downtime. [laughs] I miss the downtime, but I don’t mourn it because I’m happier overall now.
Chris Sandel: I am in agreeance on that in terms of missing the downtime. I think that’s been, for me, the biggest challenge. I used to spend so much time on my own, and I really like alone time. I’ve been reading a lot around introverts and extroverts. I really like Susan Cain’s Quiet book. I’ve read The Highly Sensitive Person book by Elaine Aron. So I’m like, do I identify as being highly sensitive? I’m not sure that I do with all of it, but there’s definitely characteristics of it.
I need alone time in the same way as I need sleep, and I think that’s been the biggest difficulty. That doesn’t happen to any degree that it used to, and the time that it does happen is when I’m working, but that’s not the same as having downtime where there is space to just be and to just think, and where you’re not trying to get through a list of tasks because you’re now trying to do a 60-hour week in 35 hours or 30 hours or whatever it may be.
Summer Innanen: Right.
Chris Sandel: So that’s been the biggest challenge so far. I need to work out how we sort that out – because it’s not just from my side. I know Ali wants space and time alone and all of that as well, and how to figure that out in a situation where we don’t have parents living nearby. So any time that we need him looked after, it is paying a childminder, paying a nanny, that kind of thing. It’s just not as easy as it could be despite us having huge amounts of privileges in lots of other ways.
Summer Innanen: I get really jealous when I see a grandparent walking a child or taking them to some class. I’m like, “Oh, that would be so nice.” [laughs] We’re in a similar situation. The grandparents are all on the other side of the country. And it was our choice to live here. But yeah, I remember I was walking down the street one day and this mom is like, “Okay, you go with Grandma! Mommy and Daddy will be back in a few hours.” I was like, “Oh, that would be so nice!” [laughs]
Yeah, we get a babysitter sometimes. But yeah, it’s an expense. It turns a $100 night into a $160 night or something. It’s not something you can do all the time, and then you end up sacrificing your sleep too. We don’t really want to do that all the time. It’d be nice to have a daytime grandparent that you could just have take the child. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Yeah. My parents came over recently, and Ramsay’s now at an age – my mom’s been great. She’s come over six times since he’s been born, which is no small feat considering she lives in Sydney, and then my dad’s joined her for three of those or two of those or something.
But Ramsay’s now at an age that he knows who they are and he asks for them and we can chat on FaceTime and all that, so when they were here, we did have some times where he would go off with them. And I was like, ah, this would be just a joy. I know that my folks look after my brother’s kids lots and just love doing that. But yeah, alas, I made the decision to move to the other side of the world. So that’s on me.
Summer Innanen: Yes, I know. It’s on us, I know. But it’s okay. We survive. [laughs]
00:53:10
Chris Sandel: What about then with Dylan and eating? Where are you at, at this stage?
Summer Innanen: In terms of him eating and self-feeding?
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Summer Innanen: We did baby-led weaning when he was 6 months. I actually took the Feeding Littles course. I don’t know if you follow them on Instagram. I love their approach to eating.
Chris Sandel: I don’t, so that’s good. I’ll have to check it out.
Summer Innanen: Love their stuff. They have a toddler course too, which I haven’t taken yet, but I plan on taking it. Very much about using the Ellyn Satter approach and intuitive eating approach from birth, or from when your child starts eating. Again, this is one of those things – I chose baby-led weaning. There’s nothing against doing purees or another approach or anything like that. This was just something that I’ve wanted to try. It aligned to my values, the way that I like to think about food and feeding and things like that.
So yeah, he self-feeds. He’s become a little more picky than he was in the beginning, like when he was 6 to 10 months old. He would just eat whatever. He would try whatever we would give him, and now he definitely has different preferences. I feel like that’s probably going to get even “worse,” so to speak. I hate to call eating good or bad, so I’m using “worse” in quotation marks. But he may become even more selective.
It’s been so interesting to watch, based on the work that you do – and I’m sure you felt the same way watching Ramsay eat.
Chris Sandel: Definitely, yeah.
Summer Innanen: It’s fascinating. It’s like observing an experiment. I don’t intervene at all. I let him decide. “You provide, they decide” is the Ellyn Satter way. So I’ll give him a variety of foods, and sometimes he’ll eat all of the stew, let’s say, for example, and then another day he will not touch it at all, and he only wants to eat peas. There was one day last week where he was shoveling broccoli in his mouth, and then he started taking it off my plate and eating it. He hadn’t eaten it in like a month, and I was like, “Okay.” [laughs]
You realize they have – if you trust them, and they can trust themselves, they do have this really interesting ability to self-regulate. Definitely from a hunger/fullness perspective, but also in terms of getting a balance of nutrients and things like that.
I don’t express this out loud or to him or anything like that, but because of my background with food issues and my training as a nutritionist and all that stuff, I always have to – I’ve overcome a ton with myself, but now being a parent, some of that stuff has fired up again. I’m like, “Oh, he hasn’t had any protein today. He needs protein.” Things like that. So I’ve had to really step back and trust, because he really does self-regulate. He’ll all of a sudden just eat a whole bunch of chicken if he hasn’t had protein in a couple days. [laughs]
It’s been really cool to witness and see that when you let go of the reins and let them decide, they can become really competent eaters. I know every child is different; you can still use all these approaches and tools and still have very selective eaters. There’s a lot of sensory things that come into play, and genetics I think is a huge thing for picky eaters. You can do all the “right things,” so to speak, and still have a child that’s a very picky eater. So I’m not saying that you’re doing something wrong if you have a child that does that.
But it’s been so cool to watch. I love watching him enjoy food – which I’m trying not to love watching that, because that’s what my mother loved, and then food was love because she was always like, “Oh, you’re not going to eat that?” or “Please eat it!” She was so excited when we’d eat stuff.
I’m trying not to do that, but I really do actually feel very excited when he enjoys the food I make for him. Because I’ve put my heart and soul into it. When he just throws it on the floor, I’m like, “Oh.” [laughs] I’m so hurt by that. At the same time, I don’t want to give him food issues, so we’ll just not say anything, and then when he goes to bed I’ll talk about it with Mike and tell him about how sad I am that he didn’t eat his chicken quesadilla that I spent half an hour making. [laughs]
So what’s your experience been with that?
Chris Sandel: We did baby-led weaning as well and the Ellyn Satter approach. He’s been a great eater. I really liked the baby-led weaning once you get over the phase where you think he’s going to choke and there’s lots of gagging. But once you get through that, it’s fine. They’re just exposed to so many different tastes and textures.
And even outside of the eating side of things, I think that probably helped his hand-eye coordination more than anything else, because he’s having to sit down, he’s having to pick up things that are slightly slippery. So for reasons outside of eating, I think it was really beneficial.
You said Dylan’s going through a more selective stage at this point, and we’ve had lots of times like that, and then he gets back into eating lots of things again, and then he’s not eating as much – but you’re right, as someone who is a big believer in intuitive eating and teaches it to adults, it’s wonderful seeing someone learn that from Day 1 or be presented food in a manner that means they naturally have that occur to them.
Ramsay is now two and two months at the point of recording this, and he can speak a lot. He speaks in full sentences. It’s phenomenal to watch how that has come along and understanding tense, like “the gate is closing, the gate is closed.” But he can verbalize so much now and can tell you what he’s thinking about in terms of food. Meals now are us being able to have more of a conversation, and “What did you get up to during the day?”
Mealtime for us is a really enjoyable time – and that’s not to say that that’s the case every time. He’s definitely going through a phase where he picks up a thing of water and pours the whole thing on the floor pretty much every meal at the moment. [laughs] But I know for a lot of people how much mealtime is a real battleground and is such a fraught experience where they’re trying to get their kids to eat and all of that.
There is probably a good deal of luck that we’re not in that place, but to be able to have a meal and have him enjoy that – and also for me to be like, “I know he’s going to be able to sort this out.” If there’s a meal where he barely eats anything, it’s fine. He’ll get hungry again. He will eat more at the next meal.
So yeah, despite studying nutrition and being able to put on a nutrition hat, there hasn’t actually been a really strong pull with him and trying to intervene, because there is this real belief that his body will tell him what he needs to do. We are preparing him with lots of different variety and lots of different food that he can enjoy, and it’s then up to him to choose how he wants to do that at each meal.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, it’s so fun to watch and watch them get excited about certain things. He can use a spoon, and he’s just figuring out a fork now on his own. All those little milestones are so exciting.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Ramsay has wanted to start being involved more in the cooking process now, so he wants to help me whisk the eggs in the morning. I don’t know how or when it started, but we started making banana bread, and he just wants to make banana bread all the time now.
Summer Innanen: Nice.
Chris Sandel: That’s his favorite food at the moment. He just wants to have banana bread for snack all the time.
Summer Innanen: That’s a good thing to want. I like banana bread. Do you have one of those learning towers?
Chris Sandel: Learning towers, no. What’s a learning tower?
Summer Innanen: I’ll have to send you the link to one. I was going to put it on Dylan’s wish list for Christmas. It’s this little stand that the toddler can stand on, so then they’re at the counter level with you, and they help you, so you can give them stuff to help. It’s almost like a stool, but it has a – I don’t want to say a gate around it, but it has sides to it so they can’t fly off of it. I’ll send you a link to one. It’s called a learning tower. You can bring it over to the sink, and then they can like “wash dishes.”
Chris Sandel: Ramsay just pushes his high chair over.
Summer Innanen: Oh, yeah, you found the more resourceful – you’ve saved yourself some money. [laughs] Instead of having a whole other thing. That’s great.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, the washing the dishes thing is the thing at the moment. It’s basically just him using a ton of water and wetting every part of the kitchen.
Summer Innanen: Yes. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: But yeah, he enjoys it, so what the hell?
Summer Innanen: Exactly. Mess is good for them.
01:03:40
Chris Sandel: What about the – and this can be us transitioning to talk about the more work side of things – how was it for you taking maternity leave? Were there fears around this? How were you thinking about your business?
Summer Innanen: As I said, my initial plan was to just take 6 months, and then once I was in it, I really wanted to extend it. I decided to extend it for a couple more months, and then it was July and I was like, “I’m not going to come back in July, because the summertime here is just so amazing.
We were able to go to the beach, and he was at that age where he would sit on a beach blanket for like an hour, and I could just lay there, and he would entertain himself. I was like, “this is a great way to spend the summer!” [laughs] He would sit in a high chair on a patio for an hour, and I could hang out with a friend. I was like, “this is the sweet spot age.” So I didn’t return to work in the summer because I really wanted to enjoy that time together. [laughs] Plus, the woman I found to look after him couldn’t start till September anyway.
Anyway, that’s beside the point. I set up my business so that it would run automatically for 6 months because I knew I was going to be on maternity leave for 6 months. With the podcast, I did classic episodes – because the podcast has been around for 5 years, so I had episodes from 4 years ago that I was like, I’ll answer a listener question in the beginning and then replay an old interview. So I had that going for 6 months, and I had old blog posts that I was re-sharing to my email list, and I had social media that had recycled. Then some of that expired after 6 months, but the social media, I’d just replay it again.
To anyone who’s a coach who’s listening to this, or a business owner, the biggest piece of advice I ever got when I worked with – I worked with Kelly Diels, who is a feminist marketing consultant, and she said, “You want to build the machine. You don’t want to be the machine.” In terms of content creation and things like that. So I spent a few months leading up to my maternity leave building this machine so that I would be able to go away and hit play, and things would still run in my absence.
That worked out really great. Like I said, there were a few months towards the end where I had nothing. I was just on radio silence.
Coming back, I had a lot of anxiety and fear coming up around, first of all, childcare. I think that’s a massive transition in life. And then secondly, just worrying and self-doubt around like, what’s going to happen? Am I still relevant? Are people still following me? What is that going to be like? A lot of it was obviously the voice of my inner critic.
The other thing, too, was that I had gotten so comfortable not being visible. When you’re building an online business, visibility is a key component to that, so getting your message out there. Whether it’s podcasting or social media or YouTube or however you build your business, you have to be more visible. That’s how you get people to find you. I think that for some people, that’s very vulnerable and it opens you up to a whole host of varieties of self-doubt in terms of fear of rejection or fear of judgment and all these things.
I’ve overcome a lot of that over the years that I’d been working because you get more comfortable outside the comfort zone and your comfort zone bubble expands, and you don’t worry so much about those things. But having taken a year off – and especially having gone through that transition where I really felt like my brain wasn’t functioning the way that it used to – my comfort zone got quite small. I was just very comfortable not being visible.
The idea of writing new things, producing new content, and putting my voice back out there, I had so much fear around it, and nerves. I was getting into that perfectionist over-editing and over-tweaking things. So I had to work through some of that stuff again. After a few weeks, that went away again, but it was hard at first.
It was easy getting back into coaching. As soon as I had a couple client sessions, it was like I hadn’t been gone. That was another thing I was thinking about. But it’s just second nature. When I work with people, it’s very much part of my way of being now. Which was great, and that got me fired up to do more.
But yeah, it wasn’t the easiest transition back. There were definitely some hurdles because a year off is a long time.
Chris Sandel: With the content you were talking about where it was difficult and it felt more vulnerable, was that for content across the board? Or was it where the content was more about you and sharing your story and you being front and center as part of that?
Summer Innanen: No, actually. I feel like when it’s me, I’m more comfortable sharing those things, for some reason, even though I’m not with closer people in my life, but for the internet, I have no problem talking about my personal life. [laughs] Figure that one out, I don’t know.
No, it was more like coming up with the writing, whether it be blog posts or social media posts or things like that. Yeah, I don’t know. I was like, am I making sense? Have I said this before? Overthinking things way too much, and thinking, who’s going to like this? Also in terms of launching my program and stuff like that.
It was an interesting thing to go through, just because I hadn’t had to deal with those demons in a while.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think it is like a muscle; the more you’re regularly doing it, the more you get into the groove of that, and then the longer you have a break – for me, anyway, especially with writing, I find that more difficult if I’m not doing it on a regular basis. It feels more challenging to start.
And it’s amazing; there can be articles that will literally take me 8 to 10 hours to write, and then there’ll be something else that I can bash out in 2 or 3. And that’s pretty much as short as it’ll take me. I know there’s people who are like, “I can write something in half an hour.” That is just not me. But I definitely know that there is a difference with when I’m in the right mode and the right headspace versus when I’m not, and how much it feels like the cogs are turning so slowly.
A lot of the time if I have that feeling, even within about 20 minutes, I’m like, scratch this. It’s not going to happen today. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Because this is going to be a colossal waste of my time, and I’m going to pick it up tomorrow and rewrite a lot of it anyway. So I’ll just start again tomorrow.
Summer Innanen: Yeah. The other thing that I was going to say around that – and I don’t know if you notice this too, because we both mentioned that we’re trying to do the same amount of work in a lot less hours – I don’t have time to mince my words. I don’t have time to over-edit like I used to. I would write something and then reread it the next day and then tweak it, and then come back to it a few days later and tweak it again. Now, I don’t have time for that. [laughs] So you get my first draft and that is it.
Obviously I edit it and I usually give it a day, but I don’t have time. I think because of that, it’s also helped me be more honest, more real, just get stuff out there that I want to say, instead of going back and maybe watering it down or taking out some stuff that I’m like, “Ooh, are people going to like that?” I don’t have time to do that. It’s a little more unfiltered, which I feel like has actually probably landed better with some people. And it’s a positive thing for me too, because I just don’t have time for the doubt. It’s like, “We don’t have time for this. This has to go out now, so it’s going out as-is.”
I think that’s an interesting experiment that people can do for themselves, even if they don’t have children. Don’t necessarily go with your rough first draft, but write one and then try to only edit it maybe once and then send it out. I always talk about not letting your perfectionist tendencies stall your growth because it can really cause you to play small, and you get stuck in that editing cycle, and it’s really just a hiding strategy.
When I didn’t have time for my hiding strategy, I just had to hit the gas and put stuff out there. I don’t know if you’ve had the same thing because you’re trying to do things in less amount of time.
Chris Sandel: I used to spend a lot of my working time basically writing an article in my mind. I’d have an idea and I’d mull it over and I’m like, okay, that would be good and I can connect that to other people. So I would be constantly thinking things over so at the point at which I then had to write it, I had a bit of a concept of how it would go. Then sometimes I would finish the article and it would be different to how I thought, and that was just what came out. But there was a lot more thinking and editing and all of that going on prior to actually sitting down.
What I used to do, my process was in the early days, I’d send it to Ali to proof and just make sure grammatically it was correct, and then I had an intern, and she would do it. More recently I had another intern, Drew, who is now Operations & Marketing Director here, and she’s the one who then edits it and will give me good, honest feedback.
I recently wrote an article and I sent it over to her, and I was like, “I think this is a bit rambly and I think I might not have hit the right points here, and I think I might be sounding like I’m standing on a soapbox,” and I got a pretty blunt email back and I’m like, “Cool, this needs a complete rewrite.” [laughs] So yeah, that won’t be seeing the light of day for a while.
But yeah, I’m also of the opinion if you’re getting to the end of it and you’re like, “I think I’ve done a good job here. I think I’ve got the points that I want to make,” then put it out.
I was listening to a podcast called How to Fail, I think, something like that, by a lady called Elizabeth Day. She interviews different people on their failures in life and what they’ve learnt from those failures. One of the episodes was with the author James Frey, who wrote A Million Little Pieces. He talked about the fact that his first draft is the final book. He was like, “I don’t take notes, I don’t take edits. The first draft is what people see, because that’s the way that I write.” I was like, okay, that is something I’ve never heard before from a published author, especially someone of his ilk. But if that works for him, that works for him.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, that’s so interesting. Well, I don’t know if it really worked. I mean, it’s a great book, but it’s not all true, right? [laughs]
Chris Sandel: It’s not all true, and he actually talked about that part of it. He was like, “It doesn’t matter that it’s not all true. It’s meant to be a narrative, and I’m trying to tell the story.” He talked about going on Oprah and being publicly shamed, and he was like, “It didn’t actually bother me too much. I’ve been a drug addict for many, many years. There’s a lot bigger things that have happened to me that I care about than Oprah being upset with me.”
Summer Innanen: Yeah. Fascinating. I’ll have to check that one out.
01:17:00
Chris Sandel: I think it would be good to go back. We’re talking more recently, but go back through what it’s been like for you running your business. I know you touched on this a bit in the intro, but I think this is a quote from one of your pieces, where you said: “The reality is that entrepreneurship is filled with moments of failure, disappointment, self-doubt, and feeling defeated in our tear-soaked pajamas, and everything takes longer than you think or want it to.”
So tell me, or tell the listeners, your journey from start to here, just because I think it can be quite instructive. I’m going to do the same, because I think people have this real misconception because they’re not seeing what goes on behind closed doors.
Summer Innanen: Yes. I love talking about this stuff. It’s one of my favorite things to spill in the coaches emails that, obviously, you read. [laughs]
Yeah, it’s such a misconception – and this was something I talked about when Kaila interviewed me for her Your Body, Your Brand podcast. You have this idea that you will start a blog or start a website or get a coaching certificate or nutrition or whatever, and then you’ll have clients come to you. Or you just have to come up with one really great idea, like an online program, and then you’ll be sitting on piles of money.
I think very, very rarely that happens. I think maybe in some extremely rare cases, that can happen – because I don’t want to say that it’s impossible; however, I do think a lot of times those people have driven themselves into the ground to do that as well.
I think it’s such a learning curve. In terms of my journey specifically, like I said, I started my first nutrition blog in 2009, so that was 10 years ago. I’ve certainly had a lot of failures and disappointments since then. Just learning curve things along the way.
One of the biggest things is that so much of our job, at least in the beginning – maybe not for you now; for me a little bit, because I’m back from maternity leave – is doing the marketing and the sales around yourself and selling yourself and coming up with programs and things like that and marketing them. You don’t really get taught that in whatever coaching program you’re in or whatever nutrition program you’ve taken. They don’t really talk about the business side of things or teach you that.
There can be a lot of mishaps that happen as a result if you’re not really focusing on that strategically. And even if you are focusing on it strategically, you’re still going to have moments of failure and disappointment because you are so passionate about this thing that you’ve created. So if you don’t reach your targets or your goals, if you don’t get the likes that you’re anticipating, I think for a lot of people it can take a giant hit on your self-worth.
Having to untangle that from self-worth has been something that I have done a lot of work around myself. It’s something that I help other coaches within my mentoring with them, because if you are looking at your business as part of you, as like your business is your baby – which a lot of us do – then you’re going to be crushed if you get negative criticism or feedback, if you have somebody asking for a refund, if you launch something that is to crickets. I can talk more specifically about some of those if you want. [laughs]
All of those things are hard to take regardless, but extremely hard to take if your self-worth is linked to them, and actually can then cause you to play small, stay more hidden, because you don’t want to have to go through that again – because it is so traumatic if your self-worth is connected to the success. Detaching those two things is super, super important.
I don’t know if I answered your question. I feel like I might’ve jumped to a slightly different topic. But that’s really the evolution. [laughs]
01:21:50
Chris Sandel: Cool. If I’m thinking back to me, I started my business in 2009, similar to you, and it took I would say the best part of 5 years to get a decent amount of traction. For good chunks of that, I was having to work another job or multiple other jobs and then quit, and then realized I wasn’t able to do it and had to go back and find other jobs to get to a place – and even after that, it wasn’t like I then hit financial freedom. It was still working many, many hours every week and trying to eke out an existence to get to a place where the business could be supporting me in a decent way.
I think there’s this misconception that you’ll start out and it will instantly be there, or even “I’ve been doing this for 2 years or I’ve been doing this for 3 years; why isn’t it there?” My thoughts are it just takes a lot more time.
And it takes time because just because you’ve done a course – and it doesn’t matter whether that’s a weekend course or you’ve done a 4-year dietetics course – you still come out a complete newbie with everything and still unsure of “How do I work with clients effectively? How do I build up a practice effectively? How do I talk about what I do? How do I reach people so that they want to become clients?” There’s so many different components to that, and it really does take a long time.
So I just want to make sure that people are aware of that so they don’t think, “Why after 2 years am I not hitting the big-time?”
Summer Innanen: Yes. Similar to you, it was over 4 years that it took me to have it be my sole source of income. I always had side gigs prior to that. Even then, I still – I was teaching the business course at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition. That was more of a passion project than an income generator, but it was still a side gig. I was paid for that as a part-time job. I eventually had to stop that just because it was taking too many hours away from working on my business.
But when I taught that course, I would tell people how many years it takes, and help them understand, like, “Okay, pricing your services, let’s break it down. How many clients do you have to get to make X amount of money?” Sometimes it would be almost like Scared Straight. [laughs] Because they would realize “Oh my God, I have to get this many clients to get not even that much income? How am I going to get those clients?”
But the reason why I did that with them was to really show, one, to generally price your services higher than you think, because most people undervalue themselves, especially women. And two, to give yourself time and think about this stuff strategically. Don’t just get out of school and think “Okay, I’m going to do this, I’m going to make money.” Get a side job. Do that. Work this on the side and build it up. That’s so important.
So yeah, it took me years as well for it to be my sole source of income, and even then there were some times where I would be awake at night, just stressing about what was going to be coming in the next month. It wasn’t until the last small handful of years that I really felt comfortable, like it’s going to be okay. And I was able to fund my maternity leave, which was a big deal for me.
There’s a lot of false marketing out there. A lot of the business coaches sell this overnight success story or “I made $30,000 with my first launch.” Yeah, some people do and those things are possible, but the one thing they don’t always say is what the profits were. I think that’s a good follow-up question. “Did you have adrenal fatigue afterwards?” is another good question. [laughs]
In rare cases it is possible, but that’s not the way that I – when I coach other coaches, I really have them look at the long-term game and hone your craft, build up your business, build up a network of colleagues, really figure out what you love to do, where you want to spend your time, how you best work with people. Don’t just come out of the gate with a group program that you think is going to make $100,000 an expect it to. That’s probably unrealistic.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I also think there’s something that’s good about it being a slow burn and you building up there. The thought of me coming out when I qualified and then suddenly making headlines in the newspaper and getting a book deal and all that – that terrifies me, because I don’t have the ability to do those things. I shouldn’t be making it into the public eye in that way, because it’s early days.
I often think the “overnight success” people, it’s like, how are they feeling about that? It takes so long to get over the whole imposter syndrome, and that’s getting over imposter syndrome when I’ve got a blog that barely anyone’s reading, let alone doing that when you’re getting huge amounts of attention.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting because people who are really big on social media will then come out and say, “Actually, I’ve really been struggling with terrible anxiety for the last month.” You realize that sometimes it’s really taking a toll on people’s mental health to be so visible. Depending on how you structure your business, because not everyone needs to be Instagram famous to have a business, like at all. [laughs] But I think there’s a misconception that you do, and some people do, and that’s the route that they’ve chosen, which is totally fine.
But you have to ask yourself, what am I taking on? Can I handle that? Do I want that responsibility? And shift your business so that it’s going to also give you the mental health that you want as well. [laughs] I think if I had a million followers on Instagram, it would probably take quite a toll on my mental health. But I suppose then I could spend a lot more money on therapy. I would have a full-time therapist to help me. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: The thing is, I don’t know if that necessarily always translates into having a bigger business.
Summer Innanen: I don’t think so.
Chris Sandel: I think there are a lot of people with a lot of followers who also still struggle to translate that into actually making money off of it.
Summer Innanen: I agree. I 100% agree with that. I don’t think it always – you make a lot of assumptions. I think what we’re both getting at is that you make a lot of assumptions. I think you see other people and you think, “Oh, it was so easy for them” or “Oh, if only I did that, then I could be ‘successful’.”
We really don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes in a person’s life, in their headspace, in their bank account, but our mind pieces these things together in the same way that we do with diet culture. We assume, “Oh, if I lose weight, my life is going to be great. I’ll become more desirable, meet someone, I’ll have a really happy life and I’ll be confident,” when that’s not necessarily true at all.
01:30:40
Chris Sandel: You maybe touched on some of this earlier when you talked about certain courses you’ve done, but what have been some of the things you’ve done where you’re like “this helped me the most as a practitioner, in terms of I really learned some good skills here that really helped me to be able to help people”?
Summer Innanen: I really loved the course I took with Tara Mohr because it is so focused on self-doubt and fear. Just taking her model and her tools and applying them to more body image specific concerns and looking at self-worth overall, that to me really gave me a lot more confidence in niching with the body image and the confidence and the self-worth, because I was able to have a lot of tools to work with people around that.
But it’s just like honing your craft. With any coach, you have to find your way of coaching. I know this gets like woo-woo, but a lot of it is really instinctual. When I’m working with people, it’s very instinctual and intuitive. It’s just being in the moment. I’ll adapt and throw things in and do stuff with people that really ends up resonating, and sometimes I’m like, “I don’t know where that came from,” but it just was there.
I’m not trying to say like “I have the special gift,” but I think that if you’re trying to be like another coach or you’re trying to follow a coaching handbook, it doesn’t always translate into good coaching. The more that you can really be present, be in the moment, just listen and go with your gut, the more impactful it can be. And that might be slightly different for you because maybe you do more prescriptive stuff, especially with nutrition and things like that. But with me, it’s more getting to the feeling stuff underneath, and that can happen really nicely in the moment if you let it and you take the preconceived agenda out of it.
Chris Sandel: My sense with your description there, though, is your ability to be intuitive is also because you’ve done so much of this work. You’ve worked with so many people, you’ve read so many things. Your intuition is pulling on all of those things unconsciously.
Summer Innanen: Yes.
Chris Sandel: Someone straight out of the gate trying to use intuition I don’t think is necessarily going to work, because they don’t have intuitions to be able to guide them.
Summer Innanen: Yes, that is a good way to say it. I don’t think it’s all that, but I do think that there’s pieces of it in there that are important to include once you have the tools and the skills from a coaching program.
For example, the CTI coaching program. That’s a life coaching program. They don’t talk about body image or anything like that in there. But having done so much reading and researching body image and things like that, and then taking those tools and being able to see, okay, if I adapt it this way, I can use this technique related to helping someone work through a photo or helping someone stop comparing themselves to somebody else. That’s how I am able to take those frameworks and modify them or make them my own with a particular issue around confidence or self-worth.
It’s hard for me to say what helped me the most, but honestly, I think it’s honing my craft. Just experience, and the number of people that I’ve had the gift of working with over the years.
Chris Sandel: I think that ability, as you say, to be able to take something and then take the good bits or to reframe it in the way that you’re going to be able to use it or to see how that would fit into this other thing that you do is super helpful.
One of the things, if I’m thinking of programs, that really helped me was the Precision Nutrition Level 2 program – but I have a lot of issues with the program. I have a lot of issues with Precision Nutrition just because they’re not coming at things from a Health at Every Size approach. There is a lot of focus on weight loss. But at the same time, there was a huge amount of really great stuff that I got out of that.
Summer Innanen: Yes.
Chris Sandel: It is just so well-rounded. I was able to be like, you know what? There’s a good chunk of this that is not for me, but there’s other parts where it was really enlightening. I’m really grateful I did it. Yeah, it’s that thing of being unsure of how I would recommend it to someone or if I would recommend it to someone, or I’d recommend it in these circumstances, but I’m able to get out of it what I need to and just leave the rest.
Summer Innanen: Yeah, which is great. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t something that is like that that doesn’t have the diet culture infused in it.
01:36:25
Chris Sandel: Yeah, definitely. One of the things that you talked about in one of your emails that I really want to focus on was around being able to validate clients’ feelings and not going into fix mode, because I think that’s often the tendency. Just talk a little about that.
Summer Innanen: Yeah. I think our tendency as coaches is to help people feel better – and in life, generally, even just as a friend or a colleague. You want to help the people around you feel better. But as someone who’s a coach, as a coach, we need to help them feel their feelings and get to some of the stuff underneath.
When I talk about fixing feelings, that really involves skipping over some of the discomfort to focus on things more positive as soon as possible. I’m trying to think of an example. If a client is feeling upset because of an experience they had – maybe they saw themselves in a picture or they felt judged – fixing their feelings would be like trying to brush over it, like “It’s just one picture. What’s positive about that memory? What can you focus on instead?” Or if they’re feeling judged by somebody else, saying something like, “What people say has nothing to do with you. What’s something positive that we can say to ourselves?”
That doesn’t necessarily sound like bad advice. Those things are all valid. But what we’re really missing there is helping clients to feel their feelings and really acknowledge their feelings. That would look a little bit different. It would look more like, “That must be really hard. What feelings come up when you look at that picture?” or “What was that like when that person said that to you?” and staying with that feeling.
I think a lot of times it’s uncomfortable to be in the discomfort with somebody else. Even when someone is going through something hard, it’s hard to stay in that space with them. Most of us want to avoid discomfort with a 10-foot pole. [laughs] So we try to be the positive one, or like, “Well, at least you don’t have cancer,” something like that, which is just horrible. [laughs]
But it’s getting away from saying things like that and really trying to empathize and let them feel their feelings and be in it, because when they’re in that, that’s actually when I think the bigger shifts happen. Otherwise, we’re just bypassing some of the more difficult things, and we’re not really validating that it’s okay to feel that way.
Then, therefore, they may internalize it as like “Discomfort is bad, I shouldn’t feel this way. I should really be more positive,” which is not the outcome that we want. We want them to make space for those feelings, know that they’re safe, know that they’re okay, know that they’re validated, and then let’s talk about moving through them or ways that we can comfort and be compassionate with ourselves as we experience them.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I agree with you as well; it’s in those moments that it’s good to do some exploring around, “What are you feeling? How is this coming up for you? What was it that’s so difficult about this?” and getting to better understand that, and also having clients and just people in general be better with sitting with and dealing with discomfort and not have the knee-jerk reaction be “I’ve got to change this this instant,” but being able to be like, “Okay, this sucks, and this is also interesting, and what’s going on here? Why am I feeling like this?” Yeah, being okay with that and not being afraid that “I’ve got to get out of this place instantly.”
Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. I think the best way to approach it is with curiosity. Even within ourselves. As a coach, we can approach it with curiosity with our clients, but within ourselves, we can be curious too. Just like, “Hmm, what is that feeling I have in my chest right now when I talk about this?” or “What is it about that experience that really made me feel heavy?” or anything else that comes up.
When we approach things with curiosity, it lightens it a little bit. It allows us to still feel the harder stuff, but without it defining who we are, making it feel like we’re going to be trapped in that space forever.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. With consults or when having chats with clients, there are times where it is more difficult and there’s things like you were just referring to there, but it’s always a good sign when there’s also laughter as part of that. Not at always the exact same moments, but throughout it, where you can see that there is that ability to be able to laugh about things, to not take things so seriously, and also be able to see how emotions can change in a very quick moment. So yeah, for me when there is just a little bit of lightheartedness, it feels like there’s movement more in the right direction.
Summer Innanen: Yes, I 100% agree. My dad died like two months ago, and when I went to find a counselor, that was something that I put. I was like, “I need a counselor with a bit of a sense of humor.” [laughs] I need those little punches of it. And she’s really good at that. She’ll just punch something in at the right time just to – not really see the ridiculousness in grief, because that’s not really that applicable. [laughs] But I guess the circumstances around some of the stuff that I’m going through.
I do that with clients too. Especially when we’re talking about diet culture, it’s important to see the ridiculousness in that, too. It’s like, what are we really expecting of ourselves here, the way that society has told us to be? Like, “Don’t be too loud, but you want to speak up” and “Don’t be too nice, but you don’t want to be mean.” All these things. When you can see the expectations that have been put on us, it’s definitely ridiculous. That’s one thing that I like to infuse when I’m working with people too, just a little bit of humor amongst – sometimes there’s tears, but that’s okay.
Chris Sandel: I think it then brings in a human element, where this is what happens when you’re having conversations with friends, and that there is an ability to have a laugh.
I’m going to have, at some point, Josie Geller on the podcast, so I’ve been going through a lot of the research that she’s been doing, and it focuses a lot on how to be a better practitioner. It’s looking at motivations with clients and how you can be best working with those kinds of things.
Some of the qualitative research that she’s done where there have been people that have been interviewed with fairly severe eating disorders, they talk about the fact that by having their practitioner be able to laugh and share a joke, they’re able to see that they’re able to get past the difficulty with it all. It doesn’t have to be all so medical and all so serious. It adds this lightness to it, where a lot of times they don’t get any of that.
Summer Innanen: Right, yeah. My friend Keri-Anne Livingstone is really good at that. She does really deep emotional work with people, and then she just is hilarious at the same time. That’s where I got that quote. There’s a quote I always repeat, and it’s “Somebody hates you.” Sometimes I’ll throw that in with clients. We’re really exploring fear of being judged and stuff, and I’ll be like, “Well, you know, somebody hates you.” [laughs] It’s like, “Yeah, that is true. Okay, we can make fun of that.” [laughs]
But I think it is important to have that variance, for sure. That’s something that you have to look for if you’re working with a coach or a therapist or anything like that. You can find someone who’s going to have the things that you want, and if you want those things, find someone else who has them.
01:45:55
Chris Sandel: I know we’re running short on time now, but one of the things I wanted to ask you about or give you a chance to promote is your program, “You, on Fire.” Tell the listeners a little about that.
Summer Innanen: Sure. I have a 3-month group coaching program that is dedicated to – it’s really a body image and self-worth makeover, so to speak. It’s about discovering who you are beyond your body size and dieting and food. I think that once people have done some intuitive eating, oftentimes they realize they’ve still got some fear of weight gain or some body image stuff, or they don’t know who they are outside of their focus on food and exercise or their “health.” (And I use “health” in quotation marks when your focus on health is unhealthy.)
So this is really about discovering who you are outside of those things and helping people to develop new beliefs about themselves and operating in a way that values who they are. We cover specific things like overcoming comparisons, overcoming fear of weight gain, working through seeing yourself in pictures, changing your relationship to movement now that you’ve healed your body image, and discovering your values and who you are and things like that.
That’ll run again – it runs two times a year, at least for now, so anyone can go to my website, www.summerinnanen.com, to get on the waitlist for that and find out when the next cycle is going to go live.
I also do mentoring with coaches, as I alluded to. I have a coaches email list that is at summerinnanen.com/ – ooh, I should probably know the URL. I’ll give it to you for the show notes. But I send out a specific email to coaches once a month. It’s one of my favorite things to write.
I do mentorships with that, whether it’s coaches who want to incorporate body image work into their practice, or if you want help around business strategy or working through the self-doubt that comes up around being an entrepreneur. I do all of those things, either at once or depending on what you need, one of those specifics things, with other coaches, which I love doing too.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I would highly recommend for people who want to check out Summer’s program to do that. For any coaches, I love getting Summer’s email. I can’t remember at what point, but I got one of them from you and I sent an email back saying, “I would like to have you on the podcast to chat about this, because this is some really good stuff in here.”
Summer Innanen: Thanks.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I’m glad that you’re sending them out. They are really beneficial.
Summer Innanen: Thank you. I love writing – and those ones I write really quickly. I don’t know, they just roll off my tongue. I feel like I have a lot to say around stuff like that. Not a lot of people talk about the – I don’t want to say dark side, but the stuff that goes on behind the scenes and the doubt and overcoming some of those things. So I love to bring that to the forefront.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We can do this again in 4 years’ time and do a Part 3. [laughs]
Summer Innanen: [laughs] Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Sandel: That is it for this episode. As I said at the beginning, we are in the process of taking on new clients. If you are wanting help, please get in contact. You can do that by going to www.seven-health.com/help, and you can read more about how we work and apply for a free initial chat.
Thanks for listening to Real Health Radio. If you are interested in more details, you can find them at the Seven Health website. That’s www.seven-health.com.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page.
Also, please leave an honest review for The Real Health Radio Podcast on Apple Podcasts! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and I read each and every one of them.
Policies
Social
Copyright © 2012 – 2023
seven-health.com · All Rights Reserved.
![176: Interview With Lu Uhrich [New Practitioner] - Seven Health: Eating Disorder Recovery and Anti Diet Nutritionist](https://seven-health.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/lu-uhrich.001.jpeg)
Share
Facebook
Twitter