My guest today is Agape Garcia. Agape is a post traumatic growth strategist, a whole life coach and an energy consults certified high performance coach. She has a tenacious attitude towards empowering others. Over the past 35 years, she's navigated through domestic violence, privacy, safety, vulnerability and the mindset to endure personal adverse events in life. Her survival of a double attempted homicide, well, eight months pregnant, and the desperation to survive became the catalyst to the foundation of BYI s which she will explain momentarily, while achieving an undisputed outlook of independence. Agape his personal journey of post traumatic growth has led to dedicating her life and developing transformational programs, various forms of coaching certification courses and establishing a nonprofit to help real time victims with real time resources. Her commitment is to provide lifelong transformational habits that can restore your powerful internal sense of awareness and control. One of her personal statements you don't live anywhere but in your head, is why some of her laser focus teachings are on aligning your mental and emotional belief system. So let's start our work in today with Agape Garcia.

I teach people how to hold space as part of trauma informed coaching and instruction. The purpose of holding space in that way is to create enough safety to calm the nervous system. Why would we want to do that? To find common ground, to be able to speak to each other from a place of bi directional tolerance and understanding, to be able to listen to each other, to be able to learn from one another. Notice I didn’t say to always agree with one another. I think it’s ok that we disagree sometimes. But I want to be very clear here. Being trauma informed and following these principles does not mean that you won’t trigger someone or that they won’t get offended. As an instructor or coach (or just a regular person) you can’t be held responsible for anyone else's emotions or experiences. That’s not what trauma informed means. In order to hold space for others and truly be trauma informed you need to create your own internal safe space that is stable and untouchable. A deep calm so that when things go sideways you know which way is up.

My guest today is Allie Cass. Allie is a former bodybuilding pro turn functional health and fitness coach who helps stressed out women optimize their metabolism up level their mindset and shift from surviving to thriving. We discuss movement, metabolism, nutrition, stress and mindset to get and stay healthy.

The real magic, the secret to any business success actually comes behind the scenes through the work you do on yourself to set the stage for your business. Without it you and your message can get lost in confusion and overwhelm.

There’s only one skill you need to master if you’re going to succeed in the fitness industry (or any industry really) and it has nothing to do with sets and reps, macros and calorie balance, alignment or movement modifications. You can be an expert in all those things but it means nothing if you can’t safely self regulate your nervous system. Wellness work is based on relationships. Physical, mental and emotional dysregulation is the fastest way to kill personal and professional relationships and guarantees burnout. 

For many of us establishing strong boundaries is an ongoing evolutionary process. I have heard so many clients, mostly women, and colleagues, again mostly women, complain about a lack of boundaries and how they struggle to stick to them. There’s definitely a lot to unpack there for women. We could blame the patriarchy, “good girl” syndrome, people pleasing, codependency, imposter syndrome…really any and all the cultural things out there. But I believe a big part of our problem setting boundaries is actually in our understanding of what a boundary is. And what it should do for us.