Health and Wellness Coaching

My name Is Shannon and I am a Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, a Certified Nutrition Expert, and a mother of four living in Cedar Crest, New Mexico. I have done a lot of inner work that has translated into slowly and surely renovating the shape of my life baby step by baby step. This work continues daily and is part of how I show up in the world. I read once that “a baby step is a great, unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown”( Olivia Smith via Twitter @OliveFSmith) and that is how I think we change our lives. We take one tiny yet audacious lurch into our dream of the future at a time.

Our health culture here in the United States is full of quick fixes and getting on board with huge changes that hinge on our ability to fully buy into and sign up for a method, a diet, a way of understanding health that we didn’t already know before. It tells us that there is always an expert out there that knows more than we do, and if we only listen better to them and not to ourselves, we can achieve our dreams. It is a road fraught with all or nothing thinking like “I am a healthy person if I eat no sugar,” “I am a success if I exercise daily,” and on it goes.

Results by themselves tend to be the deciding factor in our brains of if we are successes or failures. “I didn’t lose 20 pounds and therefore failed,” “ I am worth less because I don’t fit in the clothes I used to,” or any other critical statement we tell ourselves after we have made a resolution and not followed through on it. It is a self-defeating and discouraging road as we all well know and have experienced.

I am here to tell you that expecting huge changes and shaming ourselves when we cant do them is the antithesis to actual growth and change. If we want to meet our goals and create a life for ourselves that feels good and works with our specific body, brain, physiology and self it is going to be a process of baby steps, of compassionate communication with ourselves and others and it is going to take time. Imagine if the inventors of the world shamed themselves and gave up after their first prototype or if scientists expected to skip the scientific method and bam; science accomplished. It just isn’t how we work as humans to know or learn without baby stepping, experimenting, failing and trying again a different way. We deserve to be seen and heard during this process, we deserve to feel respected and supported no matter what stage of the process we are in, and we deserve a life that is as tailored to our personal way of being in the world as we can possibly make it.

If you are in a coaching relationship with me, I will be helping you start by gaining awareness of what you actually want. You will be learning to verbalize it. You will apply the knowledge you gain about yourself and make plans. You will experiment and take those baby steps and see how they feel. You will meet some of your goals easily and you will have times when you don’t meet them. You will become adept at understanding that every time you don’t meet our own expectations it is just another chance to learn. You will come back and talk about those baby steps and how they felt to you. You will reassess, change your mind , get to know yourself and your processes better and then you will do it all over again. The most important thing is that YOU are in charge. This is your health, your body, your brain, your pace and your life and I am here to support you into what you want out of it. You get to dream big, and you get to achieve your dreams and learn more about yourself and what you need and want as you go, and I am here to coach you as you do it, one glorious baby step at a time.