Tell me if you’re like me. (Hint: If you’re reading this, you probably are.)
When I started helping people eat healthier more than 30 years ago, it was kind of a hobby that I was naturally good at. I became the designated “person who knows about health”. So people would ask me their questions about everything from weight loss to allergies to…you-name-it.
As a giving person, I enjoyed giving away free advice. Especially since I loved talking about eating well and living a healthy life.
Then, I noticed three things:
1) People seemed more likely to follow bad advice that they paid for while ignoring good advice that was free.
2) I was struggling to make a living doing a job that I didn’t care about, while not earning a dime from what I was most passionate about: healthy living.
3) While pretty much 100% of people are confused about what to eat--spending billions on fad diets--there’s almost nowhere to turn for real help.
As I thought deeply about these things, I decided to try an experiment.
I started charging for advice.
What amazed me was how people started following my recommendations once they were paying for them.
Over time, with lots of trial and error, I figured out how to create a practice around coaching people.
As word got out, I was busier than I could have ever imagined, with more clients than I could possibly handle. As more people got better, word spread further, and that brought in even more people.
With a healthy income from paying clients, I was able to designate part of my practice to helping people in need. People were getting better, and I was helping more people than before…a dream come true.
Once I figured out how to do this--help people get better with the knowledge I had about health and make a great living doing it--I realized that other people would want to do the same thing.
If I could help people make careers out of this with a proven system for getting there, I dared to think that we could actually change the world.
And so the seed that led to Integrative Nutrition was planted.
More than 30,000 graduates later, the system has been refined through and through since those beginning days 30 years ago.
Now, I’d like to share with you a class segment where I talk about going from giving health advice without getting paid to making a living and earning a real income doing work you love:
