We were lucky to catch up with Hadlee Garrison recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Hadlee, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
Purpose has always been a big priority in my life – even before I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I knew that I wanted to help people, to make a positive impact on the world.
My parents raised me reading things like Chicken Soup for the Soul in elementary school, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens in middle school, and Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens in high school. I even have a vivid memory of them making me listen to Tony Robbins on my iPod while raking leaves in the fall of freshman year.
But I didn’t know at first what that purpose was.
I initially wanted to be a doctor. But not so that I could see patients one-on-one. I thought that if I became a doctor, I would have the credibility to be able to speak on large stages, to work with groups of people on their physical and mental wellbeing.
Because I was not only raised with a deep reverence for purpose, but I was also raised with health being top of mind – growing up in the rural midwest, my family was the only one around that was eating organic granola bars and prioritizing daily exercise.
Unfortunately, the way I perceived health took a toll on my relationship with food and my body. Growing up, even when I was as young as ten years old, I was very self conscious about how my body looked.
And at the same time, I was disconnected from my body in that I couldn’t tell when I was hungry or full, relying on external portion sizes, trying not to eat, or binging until I felt sick….
So while I was attempting to be healthy and had a deep desire to help others with their health, mine suffered silently.
Throughout high school and college, I struggled with restricting/binging, psoriasis, exhaustion, depressive symptoms…. All culminating junior year of college.
I saw that there was this disconnect between behaviors I wanted to be doing and actually doing them. I also saw that the same was the case for behaviors I didn’t want to be doing.
And I struggled in silence for a long time, never telling people about these tendencies, pretending I had it all together.
Until one day my friend started telling me about her fraught relationship with food and how she was struggling so much with it. I remember thinking: other people struggle with this too?? I just thought I didn’t have enough willpower with food and needed to get more motivated to finally eat healthy and lose weight!
And then I started talking to more people about their relationship with food.
The more I did, the more I realized that almost everyone was in the same boat.
In fact, as I talked to people about their struggles in wellness, I found that most people were frustrated with themselves and their efforts in health. I found that most people wanted to take control of their own wellness and lifestyle, that they had these big, beautiful visions for themselves, but that ultimately they would “fall off the wagon” and give up until motivation kicked them back into gear some time later, only to have the same thing happen again.
I also found that this struggle with health was closely tied with people’s relationship with food, their bodies, and their self-worth.
I had thought it was only me, but I realized that almost every woman I talked to had a version of her own food struggle story.
It was then that I started studying this intersection of health behaviors, body image, and food during my Master’s in Public Health at the University of Michigan, and also decided to get certified as a health coach at the same time so that I could start my own health coaching business after I graduated.
Now I blend cutting-edge behavior change psychology with the habits that are essential for the healthiest possible body AND mind, using holistic modalities such as Ayurveda, to provide my clients a path to a more sustainable and intuitive relationship with food, and deeper appreciation for their bodies.
Through a roundabout way, after a failed organic chemistry class having derailed my dreams of becoming a doctor, frustration from the typical health & fitness model promoted online, disenchantment of the jobs promoted by the school of public health… I finally found what I had always truly wanted to do but didn’t know was even a possibility!
Now I truly feel that I’m not only in my purpose in business, but living out my purpose every single day of my life. And I’m so grateful to all of the mentors, teachers, and lessons learned along the way.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
After having found my purpose through my own struggles with physical health, mental wellbeing, and being on and off the wagon with behavior change, I’ve built my health coaching business over the past 5 years to help my clients finally drop the ‘all-or-nothing’ and start living their healthiest life from a place of whole-person wellness.
The most rewarding part of my job is watching them achieve the energy, confidence, and capacity to achieve their dreams. Because so often, when we’re struggling with our health, when we think we just need to ‘be better’ but don’t have the tools to actually achieve the health transformation we want so desperately, it drains so much of our energy.
We keep beating ourselves up and thinking there’s something wrong with us, when really there’s just something wrong with the way we’ve been taught health.
My signature health coaching program – Happy Healthy Habits – is based on three pillars that I have found to be imperative for whole-person health and wellbeing:
1. Fundamental health habits
2. Nutrition and food psychology
3. Nervous system regulation and emotional agility
I’ve found that if you’re missing one of these pillars, the rest tend to crumble as well.
And then the magic happens once you’ve got these three under your belt: it’s like it unlocks this capacity and passion for life that makes you excited to pursue your purpose each and every day, and not just once in a while. You become so much more lit up by life, gain so much more mental clarity, and feel more aligned in all areas of life.
This is why I do what I do.
And the other thing that makes my program stand out from others is that it’s group-based. And not in a throw-you-in-a-Facebook-group-and-call-it-a-community kind of way. My clients interact Live on a weekly basis, and actually help each other along the way. The group activities I facilitate help them learn from each other in a way that they simply wouldn’t be able to if they were in a one-on-one setting. While I do absolutely believe in one-on-one work, and offer additional one-on-one coaching to my group clients if they feel they’d benefit from it, there’s something pretty magical that ends up happening in this dynamic community. They constantly talk about how the best part of Happy Healthy Habits is the feeling of belonging, support, and growth they are able to experience with the community.
Happy Healthy Habits isn’t always open for enrollment, but if you’d like to get on the waitlist to hear about when I next launch it, you can do so at happyhealthyhadlee.com/hhh-program/
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Coming from someone who was a perfectionist and would only do something if she thought she could do it ‘right’, someone who thought of the world in a black or white way, someone who tried so hard in every area of her life and constantly thought she just needed more willpower and motivation…
The three things that made the biggest impact on my journey were:
1. Allowing myself to be a B- student.
Throughout childhood and into young adulthood, I constantly thought I needed to be an A+ student. My go-to phrase was “if you can’t do it right, why even bother?” This was reflected in my health, telling myself I would ‘start tomorrow’ with healthy eating, and binging the rest of the ice cream I had taken a few bites of. It was reflected in my fitness, not exercising unless I was following the next workout in my fitness plan. It was reflected in the state of my room, letting mess pile up until I had the time and motivation to actually clean the entire thing. It was reflected in school, not starting a project until the very last minute because I didn’t have the time to get it all done in one go.
Allowing myself to do things messy, to shoot for an 80% (a B-), was revolutionary. It made me stop second-guessing myself and just recognize that if I could have a B- in all areas of my life, life would actually look a lot better than the lopsided way it was looking while I was trying to do it all perfectly.
The irony was, the more I allowed myself to do it messy, the better I got at everything! My grades actually improved with this mindset, I started my business right after finishing grad school, and my health and wellness obviously improved drastically.
This one shift also makes a massive impact on my clients’ lives, who have similar shifts in their health, but also in relationships, in workplace dynamics, and even in hobbies and projects they pick up because they’re not so afraid of not being good at them right away!
2. Viewing the world and myself not from a lens of morality, ‘good’/’bad’, but from a lens of nonjudgment.
I used to pretty much see everything as good or bad, and when I started shifting my relationship with food, I noticed that by labeling foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ we were actually creating a really troubling relationship with all foods. And actually, if we view food as neutral, we’re much more likely to choose foods based on how they make us feel, and will choose foods that make us feel good and stay away from the ones that don’t make us feel as good.
But I also started noticing that I could apply this mindset in all areas of life. Instead of thinking of myself as ‘bad’ if I did something I wished I hadn’t, I learned to come from a place of neutrality. It’s not that I pushed it aside and didn’t think about it, but rather that I acknowledged the internal feeling I got from making that decision, and now could make an informed decision about what I wanted to do going forward.
For example, if I ate something that didn’t make me feel good, I would take note for future reference from a place of nonjudgment, recognizing that I could make a different decision in the future if I wanted.
But also, if I said something that I wish I hadn’t, I could view myself not from a place of shame and blame, but instead from a place of nonjudgment, making apologies where appropriate but not feeling like I was a terrible person.
And again, the irony is that when we come from a place of nonjudgment and neutrality, only then are we able to actually make changes. If we feel like we’re inherently ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ when we do something out of integrity with our values, we’re more likely to get defensive or hide from it. By coming from neutrality, we can take stock and make changes wherever we desire to make them.
3. Implementing and automating the habits I knew I needed!
This one might seem like a given, but I seriously wouldn’t be where I am today without having not just started doing the health habits I now teach my clients, but actually automating those habits.
What I mean by automating is just that – doing them on autopilot. They become so much a part of your life that you no longer think about them.
This frees up your mental capacity so that you’re not thinking about all the things you have to do for your health and wellbeing – you just do those automatically and then get to save your brainpower to think about all the things you’re truly passionate about!
So I spend my days not worrying about food or whether I’m going to exercise or meditate or whatever – I get to spend my days actually immersed in projects that I’m lit up by, coming up with solutions to problems in a way I never could have before, having all sorts of fun coaching my clients and helping them come home to them Selves and experience the very same thing – where they uncover that purpose and passion that was dormant inside of them!
If you want to start automating your habits too, it comes down to consistency. But not just consistency in terms of doing it perfectly all the time. Allowing yourself to take the tiniest step every day – for example, if you want to start meditating every day, start with 1 minute! Or if you want to start exercising every day, start with 10 pushups or 10 jumping jacks and build from there. The goal is to become the kind of person who does these things every day, and if you allow yourself to do something that’s so easy you can’t say no, you’ll actually be more likely to stick to it!
Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
I love working with ambitious women who want to finally get a handle on their health and wellness so they can feel free to live their purpose in the world. They know they’re meant for more than the life they’re currently living, and they know they could feel so much better on a day-to-day basis.
Most of the women I work with feel like they’re either “on” or “off” the wagon when it comes to health – and even when it comes to procrastination in other areas of their lives! They know all the things they ‘should’ be doing but for some reason just can’t find the motivation to stay consistent.
Another thing I see with the women who end up working with me is that they know that they’re not “supposed to” want to lose weight. Now that our society is embracing body positivity slightly more than in the past, it’s almost taboo to talk about wanting to lose weight. But at the same time, our society still values thinness, but now requires it to be effortless. So that’s become super confusing to them, and they constantly hear online that they’re supposed to “listen to their body” and eat intuitively, but they have no idea what their bodies are communicating with them.
I help them with all of that. I help them go from knowing they “should” love their body but not knowing how to actually change their perception of their bodies, all while also making the changes they actually want in their health and their lives.
My ideal client is someone who wants more mental clarity, more energy, more joy, and more capacity to do what she’s truly passionate about. And she knows that optimizing her health and her relationship with her body and Self is the key to finally getting there.
Contact Info:
- Website: happyhealthyhadlee.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/happyhealthyhadlee
- Facebook: facebook.com/happyhealthyhadlee
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/hadlee
- Youtube: youtube.com/@happyhealthyhadlee
- Other: Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/holistic-inner-balance-natural-mental-health-podcast/id1506869161 TikTok: tiktok.com/@happyhealthyhadlee
