Meet Alison Heilig

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alison Heilig. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alison below.

Alison, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, any confidence and self-esteem I came into this world with were dismantled my father and largely stripped away by mean kids in school in the small poor, rural Pennsylvania town I grew up in. By my late teens, there wasn’t much there.

But my achiever personality and strong, stubborn desire to prove the people who didn’t believe in me wrong, I kept reaching for big goals and hoping there was something bigger and better out there for me. This meant doing hard things, failing a lot, dusting myself off, and trying again. And over the decades that followed, my confidence was rebuilt brick-by-brick by getting lots of reps in. I climbed the corporate ladder until age 34 when I walked away from that career to start my business from scratch which I have grown on my own for almost 10 years now including through a pandemic.

Given all that, I would say that my confidence and self-esteem came from overcoming obstacles and numerous failures along the way. I kept my head up and found ways over or around walls and I keep picking myself up after many devastating outcomes. Without these heart-breaking moments and the courage to continue in spite of them, I don’t know that I would have a full appreciation for who I am, my value, and my worth.

Coming back from things that could easily have taken me out and creating success where there had only been failure has taught me how to trust myself and my abilities. Every time I question myself, I look back at my track record and my confidence grows.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I am the Founder and Head Hypewoman at Miles to Go Athletics — an online strength, endurance, and nutrition coaching business for active, athletic, and adventurers women (and those who aspire to be). We’re about to celebrate our 10-year anniversary which is quite a feat for a female-owned small business. I am so proud of the number of clients we’ve helped live happier, healthier, and more resilient lives over the past decade but I’m also so proud of how many other women-owned small businesses that my business has been able to support as well.

In December 2023, my business acquired another business, Fit Bottomed Girls — a large, 16-year old diet culture free health and fitness blog that I used to freelance for years ago. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the founders were looking to sell it but the only prospective buyers were companies that the founders felt would not honor the mission. So they reached out to me and asked if I would take it over because they knew my work and trusted me to continue the work they started. I’ve been busy since working to revive the brand and will be relaunching the blog and podcast in October 2024 with the intention to dive more into the subjects of perimenopause (I’m 44 and in it now) and menopause for active women. We’ll be creating compelling, empowering, and educational lifestyle, health, and fitness content for active, athletic, and adventurous women (and those who aspire to be) through every era of life. Because, after all, fit bottoms come in all shapes, sizes, and ages!

I am also the author of the book, The Durable Runner: A Guide to Injury=Free Running.

When I’m not busy building an empowering empire to support active women doing bad-ass things, I’m lifting heavy in my garage gym, training for and running ultramarathons, hiking with my two rescue dogs, Duke and Samson, or writing flash essays for my Substack called Fragments (in Flash).

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I would say that self-compassion, growth mindset, and cognitive flexibility have been the most important skills for my journey. Doing hard things is hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Learning new skills is hard. Growth is hard.

Self-compassion is key because the road to success is paved with failures and if you immediately criticize yourself and make yourself into the “problem” every time you’re disappointed in the outcome of your efforts, you won’t make it. Self-compassion helped me look at the outcome with curiosity rather than judgement so I could learn the lessons and adjust my approach. This shift away from self-criticism comes from recognizing that everyone struggles, adjusting your self-talk to be kind to yourself, acknowledging your emotions in the moment without over-identifying with them (“I am” vs. “I feel”), and then objectively looking at what you could do differently in the future.

Growth mindset is such a handy skill to develop too. It’s the belief that things can change and you can grow. It’s about shifting your focus away from obsessing about all the things you don’t control and toward the things you do have control over. Growth mindset helped me focus on incremental improvement and growth along the way so I was better able to persevere in the face of obstacles and get more creative in my approach to problems because I believed that I could improve. It also helped me be less threatened by and defensive in response to feedback which was crucial to my success.

For most of my life, I struggled with all-or-nothing thinking. If I couldn’t do something perfectly, I would do nothing. This way of thinking always made me feel like I had only two choices — perfection or complete failure. So when life got lifey, I would fold because I knew I wasn’t able to do it perfectly so I didn’t even try. This mentality left me stalled out a lot in my goals. Learning to see things in shades of grey, developing more cognitive flexibility, and adopting an all-or-SOMETHING mindset was the key moving the needle in my business and my life. Knowing that even 1% effort is still something worth doing and over time those tiny efforts compound exponentially.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

I am looking for amazing active, athletic, and adventurous women to come on the Fit Bottomed Girls podcast, especially coaches and subject matter experts who are passionate about helping other women through evidence-based approaches that are uncomplicated and free of diet culture BS.

To pitch yourself, reach out to [email protected].

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Tina Leu Fotos

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