Ep #213: How to Create Everything You Want: An Interview with Corinne Crabtree

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 213, An Interview with Corinne Crabtree.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I’ve got a good interview for you today. I almost called it Weight Loss: An Interview with Corinne Crabtree but I decided not to because we covered so much more than weight loss. If you know Corinne Crabtree, you know that that is her area of expertise and I will let her tell you her story. It is an amazing story but I want you to listen whether you’re interested in weight loss or not because there are just so many gems in what Corinne shares and her story is so relatable.

So often I hear widows out there who limit themselves based on their education or their experience or they want to do things that they’ve never done before but they don’t allow themselves the possibility to learn by doing. They don’t allow themselves the possibility to just get out there and figure out how to serve in the way that they want to as they go. And Corinne, is a brilliant example, not only of someone who teaches weight loss masterfully and has lost over 100 pounds and changed her whole life and health and the way that she talks to herself.

But she’s a tremendous example of somebody who just figures stuff out as she goes. And so I’ll let her tell you all about the story but really rewarding to have a conversation with her. She’s somebody I very much admire and appreciate and just love for her authenticity, for the mark that she’s making on the world, for the example that she sets to other women. About how you can be yourself and create something that you want that’s way bigger than you ever dreamed possible. So I hope you love my interview with Corinne Crabtree and with that we’ll jump in.

Krista: Welcome, Corinne Crabtree, to my podcast. I’m very excited that you’re here.

Corinne: I’m excited to be here too. We have been friends for a long time now.

Krista: From my end I think I feel like I’ve known you probably a lot longer than you’ve known me. But yeah, I went from, I think I’ll do her free course to yeah, really a whole life change and then having you as a colleague and a friend. It’s been a wild ride.

Corinne: I know, this is fun. We’ve been able to spend, I guess more time together since we are both co-instructing and stuff. And literally I tell people all the time, you are a wickedly smart coach.

Krista: Thank you.

Corinne: And I watch every call you do, you’re just a great coach.

Krista: Well, thank you for that. Well, some of my listeners are going to know who you are. Some of them have no idea. So talk to the people who have no idea, tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Corinne: So I grew up, number one, extremely poor and because of a lot of the poverty that I was in, my mom was 17 when she had me. She was 19 when she had my brother and by 21 she was divorced from my dad. So she didn’t have an education. She was trying to raise two kids and so we just ate crap all the time. We literally lived in drive-throughs when I was a kid. And if we weren’t eating at a drive-through we probably didn’t have a meal. There was a lot of missed meals, a lot of eat all you can at a buffet because I don’t know when we’re going to eat again kind of situations.

By the time I was nine I had gained significant weight and then I battled with my weight all of my life. And it was just tough. It felt like I was never going to solve the problem. I ended up getting married in my late 20s and we immediately decided we were going to have a baby. And I wasn’t even thin when we got together but having a baby on top, I was well over 250 by the time my child was born. Everybody was just like, “When you start nursing it’s just all going to come off.” Mine was like brick and mortar and Logan nursed like a Jersey cow.

So I was like, “Where is my magic weight loss?” It never happened. I also simultaneously throughout the first year of his life, not only was I nursing and not losing weight, I was hitting postpartum depression. I had suffered with depression as a child all the way through my teens pretty severely. And it came roaring back that year. And then just this one day I was literally just, I just felt like I was in the depths of despair. Logan was playing on the floor, he toddled over to me as little babies do and I could tell he wanted to play and I said, “Mommy’s too tired to play.”

And it was 10 o’clock in the morning, watching the process right, laying on the couch and I started bawling because I remembered my entire growing up, my mother said that to me thousands of times. And as a kid I always thought, because my dad had abandoned us, I just thought she must not love me, I’m not important, I’m not good enough, whatever it was. She was working two to three jobs most of the time. She was legit tired, I wasn’t, I was tired of my bullcrap. I was tired of being overweight. But other than just taking care of Logan it wasn’t like it was with my mom.

I realized I was doing the one thing I said I would never do, which is eating myself into a position to be so tired I couldn’t keep up with my kid. That day I just decided, I didn’t know what I was going to do but I decided I’m going to figure this out. And I reflected through a lot of tears on why I always failed at diets. And I just for the first time in my life decided to meet myself where I was at. I just told myself the truth, you can’t handle hardcore restrictive diets, you’re going to have to make small changes.

I don’t know if you’ll ever lose your weight but you definitely can start treating yourself better. We can start doing different things. And it just added up, after 18 months I lost the weight. Once I lost the weight I knew I wanted to help other women do the same. So I started a small little online business and then over the last 16 years it’s grown into a weight loss membership. I also now teach women who are very much like me, solved a major problem, you have a passion and a purpose and you want to help other people do the same thing online.

And so I started a business around that. So what brought me here today was all of that stuff.

Krista: Yeah. When you look back on that, your own struggle, did you ever imagine having a business? Or maybe at what point did you imagine that was going to be something more than just something you were doing for yourself?

Corinne: No. So I had a story, when I was growing up, my mom told me thousands of times that I needed to go to college. If I didn’t go to college then I would struggle my entire life. Well, I got a full ride and I ended up eloping. I don’t even hardly ever tell this story but right after high school I had attempted suicide my senior year of high school. And I was literally just a mess. And so that was Mother’s Day of 92, by my birthday which is in July of 92 I ran off and eloped with a guy that I had been dating for six months.

And we went to, I was going to Tennessee Tech which is about 90 minutes from Nashville where I live. And he wouldn’t work. And I wanted to keep the marriage. And I just quit school completely to take care of us and to wait tables and to get a job. I divorced him by the time I was 21. That was never going anywhere. But from that moment on, the next messaging I heard was, well, you better find a good man because you’re never going to be able to make any kind of money. And for now you just need to be able to pay your bills, don’t go homeless. That was always my messaging.

Krista: Where were you hearing that from?

Corinne: My mom. And I have gone back and looked at all of that because for a long time I was pretty angry at my mom for thousands, like most of us, angry at our mother for a thousand and one different reasons. And I finally looked back and I just kind of understand why she was so scared for me. She saw me eloping at 18 which is in her mind, she said this over and over again growing up, “My life ended the day I got pregnant.” And she didn’t mean that she did never, because my mother has loved us and sacrificed and she adores my brother and I to this day.

But in her mind, everything she thought she would be, ended that day because she was going to commit to being a mother and raising us because her mother actually wanted to adopt me and raise me as her child. And my mom did go on and do other things and she said no, she wanted me. My mom didn’t, she never was exposed that women could make money. She only knew that women had to work hard and especially if you didn’t have a college education you were just screwed.

So when I lost my way, number one, I just want to tell everybody, any success story you ever hear about, whether they are a success in weight loss or success in business, rarely start on day one going like, “This is the day I do it all. This is the day. I can just see my future. I’m all the things.” Most of us start with no idea on how to even visualize that we could be successful especially if you’ve never done it before. Don’t think there’s something wrong with you because you doubt or that you don’t think it can happen or you can’t even picture that level of success.

Krista: Or even that you don’t know what you want. I think sometimes we think that’s just supposed to, the clouds are supposed to part and the sun is supposed to shine down and we’re supposed to be, this is my next vision for my chapter of life. And if I don’t have that then something’s wrong with me. Or we get a certain point, at least for me, I wasn’t really taught to dream past marriage and children.

Corinne: Right. And for me when I think about when I started helping women lose weight in my mind, literally the biggest I could dream is I bet I can make enough money to buy tights, gym trainers. It just was, I knew I wanted to help women lose weight but I wasn’t sitting there thinking about, alright, and now I’m going to grow this into an eight figure business one day. I wish that I’d had that in me but I had never been exposed to any of that stuff. I just knew what I wanted, a calling to do. And I got busy answering the call.

And then the more I kept doing that the more I was getting exposed to people who had bigger ideas or bigger thoughts that what could be done. When I started my business I naturally had to start learning, alright, well, how do you do some of these things? How do you get people on an email list? I didn’t even know how to do that. But as I would read about that stuff I would also learn about what was possible in an online business. I don’t think you have to know it all, you don’t have to know where you’re going.

But if you feel like you have a passion to do something, just getting started is enough to get on the path to figuring out where you might want it to go one day. It just continually for me revealed itself as I just kept taking steps forward to helping more people.

Krista: Yeah. The whole time you were doing that, were you thinking of the next goal? Were you thinking of a particular woman that you wanted to help? What was the why that was kind of driving you in those early days?

Corinne: For me it was the person I wanted to help. So it’s transitioned over the years. In the beginning I think it was so important for me to really know who I was helping. I had a passion for women that had struggled with their weight all of their life. They wanted to do something really simple. And they, for me, what I realized is I had done a lot of diets in the past but I didn’t end up liking myself at the end. I would lose a lot of weight, I’d be really proud of that and I’d be excited to buy smaller clothes but I still was terrified of everything I ate, terrified of what people thought. I never learned how to talk nicely to myself.

When I lost weight this last time, the biggest change for me was the reason why I had so much success was because I kept talking to myself differently. I would tell myself, that’s what old Corinne thinks. We really have to have a new way to think about this. And I would have these conversations with myself. And when I lost my weight I was looking for the woman who wanted to also feel amazing at the end because that’s what I created for me. And so I went and I spoke in my blogs and in my emails I was always talking about this idea of we deserve better. We can feel better. We don’t have to struggle with this all of our lives.

And so that was who I was looking for. As time went on, that lasted me for about 10 years. Then I started having more money goals. And that started with, I guess at some level I felt like I was accomplishing my mission. And I was only helping about 150 people for five bucks a month. Corinne was not making it rain by no means, those 10 years. But we had a pivotal moment with our child. He got diagnosed with autism. And then a few years after that he was going to a private school and they told us they just couldn’t help him anymore.

He got to the sixth grade level and he was really struggling. He was in two hours a day of tutoring every single day on top of having to go through behavioral therapy and occupational. My child worked so hard. And I remember a dear friend of mine, she had taught him in kindergarten and third grade. She was the teacher at his school and she came and she was the brave soul that was going to have the conversation with me. And she just said, “We can’t help him. You’ve got to find him another school or he’s never going to make it.”

And she knew how much it meant to me that he figure out his life. Because Logan has always been higher functioning but he needed an incredible amount of help. And so we found a school that was going to take us from 10,000 a year intuition to 50,000 a year intuition. Oh God, yeah, I flipped out. I cried. We prayed. We did all the things. And I told my husband, I said, I’ve always had a good marriage. I’ve been very fortunate with [inaudible]. And I was like, “I don’t want to give up dates and our vacations. These are the only times that we have together and we do this.”

It’s all Logan now and we were getting no breaks. And so that year I was like, “From hell or high water, I’m going to figure out how to make $50,000 in my business and I am paying the tuition.” And for me that was huge. That was the first year where I set a money goal and I hit it. And I was like, “Alright, maybe I should think bigger.” And I started making bigger goals. And it kind of changed. Now I have my mission and I know the woman that I love. And now I have goals that kind of take those things, put them together. And I started feeling kind of unstoppable in it.

Krista: Yeah, that’s a long way from considering suicide at [crosstalk], but I mean that’s a progression. And you’re being very humble, which I’m not surprised at all about. But I don’t know for how long, how long have you been the top earner at The Life Coach School? Forever, since [crosstalk] tracking? 

Corinne: Actually Kris Placky was beating me for a couple of years.

Krista: Yes, okay, now I do remember that story.

Corinne: She was one of my goals. I remember being on stage the first year I won and I started crying. And I said, “I just have to apologize to Kris Placky, my goal all year long has been to beat you.” But yeah, four years running now.

Krista: Yeah, which, if you’ve pretty much only, I mean you kind of probably know how Kris Placky was a big motivator for you at that point when she had it and you wanted it. But I wonder if you could ever really appreciate the amount of people who have gone behind you and looked at you, like me. And said, “If that woman, she can do it, which means maybe I can do it too.”

Corinne: I hope so.

Krista: I know so.

Corinne: I don’t think I think about it too much but one thing that is really important to me. So forever my mission, I have a mission statement like most companies do but it’s really personal to me. For the weight loss side was to teach every woman how to lose her weight for good and feel amazing as she deserves. And then when I started my business membership, I don’t even remember what course I was taking. I was taking some course about starting a business membership, just like everything I do.

I want to do something new, I go back to beginner level. And I learn everything from the ground up. And they said something about having a personal mission statement. And I was like, “What?” I just never thought about Corinne having one. And for me what makes it so personal is I want to help women break generational curses of health and wealth. That’s the two things that I have solved for myself and I want it for other women. I want it as bad for them as I think as I’ve ever wanted it for myself.

Krista: Yeah. For me, as I look at you, I mean the money is impressive, the empire, of course that’s impressive and you don’t really see a lot of women doing that. But for me it’s so much more than that, it’s here’s a woman who is authentic, who is purpose driven, who is heart centered, who every time you talk to her she’s probably going to cry because she cares so much about you and about what she does. And so to see an example of someone who is so unapologetically herself, also such a perpetual learner.

It’s not, yes, the money is amazing but it is just so much more than that. It is who you are and how you move through the world, that is just to me so awesome.

Corinne: Yeah. So people ask me all the time about just being myself. I will tell all of you, it evolved into this. That is not the story that I had when I was a kid. I had a lot of abandonment issues with my dad. I spent all of my middle and high school years desperately trying to fit in because everyone bullied me. I was so overweight. I was always trying to find my spot, even in my 20s. I was always trying to figure out, I’ve always been I guess, funny and I will just say what’s on my mind. But I was not like I am today where I feel like I’m brave enough to put out my honest opinions.

Back then I would be really funny and I would say stuff, just whatever just came into my head but it wasn’t always because it was my honest opinion. It was more about this feels like it’s okay to say this now. I think it’s a learned thing for me. But I definitely do like, I like just putting myself out there, number one because it’s too fucking hard to be anybody else, honestly. I spent a lifetime trying to do it, it led to suicide, it led to being over 250 pounds, it led to terrible relationships with men.

My 20s, I mean I dated some losers. Hopefully they’re not listening to your podcast. I doubt they are. But I think when I got to my 30s and I was kind of figuring out who I was going to be as I was starting my little business and I’d lost my weight. I really just saw that being myself made a better life for me. And I’m also very fortunate that my husband is love him or hate, I didn’t like him when we first met. I just thought he was a total douche. I was like, “This guy, I don’t know who in the world likes him.” But ever like ever stay away and then next thing you know we’re married.

But he’s so honest. He just is, you never don’t know where you stand with him. And it is almost when being around him enough it was so refreshing to be like, “Okay, this works out.” It’s so much easier to navigate stuff when everybody’s just putting their cards on the table.

Krista: Yeah. I think too from what I see when I watch you, I can tell, it’s not a binary, it’s not like, well, I either am myself or I am fully myself because I hate, I’m going on a tangent here, I hate in the ‘self-help’ industry when we present this illusion, you’re going to do this work once and then you never have to do it again. You’re going to be here and then you’re going to do this work and then the angels are going to sing and your life will be forever perfect and you’re done. And so I would love for you to speak to that actually.

What has the progression been like of specifically your self-talk, how have you learned to talk to yourself, be kind to yourself and how has that changed as you have reached new levels of success and faced new challenges, done new things?

Corinne: Yeah. So when I first started losing weight and stuff, I got really good and I still do this today. But I got really good at noticing when I would think stuff. And I would be like, “Oh my God, that sounds like the old me.” And I called it old Corinne a lot. I would say, my best story is there was this day, I was about halfway through my weight loss journey. I was desperately trying to crack 200. And if you’ve ever weighed over 200, you know how important getting into wonderland is. Sometimes people are like, “What’s wonderland?” It’s like when that number starts with a one, you have arrived on that day.

Well, I’d been trying and I had this six week stall and let me just tell you Krista. I was doing ‘all the things’ as we say, but I legit was. I was training for a triathlon. I was going to a swimming pool each day with a book in a Ziplock bag, looking at it on the edge of the why, reading about how you swim, because I didn’t know how to swim. And I had to learn from a book. So I was doing all these things. And then I was eating better than I’d ever ate. I gave up so much of my fast food habit. And it wasn’t that I was eating ridiculously healthy.

It was, I no longer ordered pizza because I had a bad day. I had just transitioned, I had really learned how when I have a bad day, go to bed, get some rest. And so I loved this person I was becoming. So anyway, six weeks in, my scale had not moved, it was just at 201, teasing me every single time. And this day I was like, “This, if this scale is not moving I might as well just go out to eat tonight.” This whole old Corinne stuff came up and it was like a tornado siren went off.

I remember standing there going, “No. That’s what old Corinne does. And we have to keep going. There’s no way you’ll lose your weight if you decide to eat tonight over the scale. It only makes sense, you’ve got to keep going.” And so I was just like, “We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing because our life is better.” It was the first time in my life when I was trying to lose weight, I realized my life’s better because of the changes I’m making and I want more of that. I don’t want just what the scale is saying.

So I was able to be disappointed but not devastated in that moment. Then over the years, I just kind of kept using that old Corinne versus new Corinne. And today, I told my members this last week, sometimes I have terrible body image days. Sometimes I wake up, I go look in the mirror and I’m like, “Fuck me. All those years you were overweight.” I’m [inaudible], my legs look like that of a seven year old, they’re just loose skin and everything. And that’s not easy to see, but in those moments I’ve just gotten so good at saying, “Yeah, you’re disappointed.

No, you’re probably never going to like these legs and that’s okay but your life, these things, these are important.” And I remind myself of what’s good and I’m just like, “This is your thing like we all have that you just don’t like. But we’re not going to stop living our life over it and we’re not going to eat over it. And we’re not going to dwell on it all day. It’s just not worth it. So I’ve just, I think for me I’ve dropped the expectation of loving every part about myself. I think that a lot of self-help, it sounds as if you’re going to uncover things and you’re going to put it to bed and never think about it again.

It’s like no, for me, I have resolved a lot of things in my life but I still get hurt every now and then, even as much work as I’ve done on my mom, every now and then she’ll say something and little Corinne gets triggered. She’s just like, “I can’t believe you said that to me”, or whatever. The same thing with my dad. I talk to my dad now sometimes, in my head I get hurt sometimes. And I’m just like, “It’s probably normal.” I think that’s where I’m at in the whole self-help world. I take what’s good and natural and I ride that like an old horse, I’m like, “Let’s go.”

And then I think the other part, I think I take it with grace now and compassion.

Krista: Yeah. You don’t not expect your brain to offer you things that aren’t [crosstalk].

Corinne: No. I’m never surprised at the [inaudible] my brain can offer out.

Krista: Yeah, but it sounds like you’re really just good at normalizing it and not listening so much.

Corinne: Yeah, I just don’t give it all the oxygen in the room. It comes through and I just usually tell myself it’s alright, today’s just one of those days, everything just feels so hard today, it’s okay. Because I think what I have done is rather than trying to have pure thoughts, I think for me it’s just there’s been some relief in just saying, “There’s just some days that are hard.” And that’s just the way it is. But I know that I am going to keep going. I never tell myself, “Oh my God, that means I won’t be able to do this.” I’m like, “No, that does not mean you won’t be able to do this.”

It just means you have to today make yourself do it. I think we’re really good at making ourself do shit sometimes.

Krista: Yeah. I think for me I’ve noticed the more success I experience the more I notice the same thoughts show up but just in different places. And so it’s like this constant muscle that I’m exercising of how to create safety for myself in the midst of uncertainty, in the midst of fear, in the midst of bigger risk or more stuff. But it’s not ever something where I think anymore that I’m going to arrive at and be done with. I just see it as yeah, of course, my fear rein is going to always offer me that the sky is falling and we’re unsafe.

And my job is to notice that and comfort myself and create the safety that I can create for myself in service of what it is that I want to do next instead of just crapping on myself and saying, “Well, there must be something wrong with you because you’re a life coach and yet still you are not having ‘solved it’. It’s not a linear thing. You don’t just get there. It’s perpetual work.

Corinne: No. Probably my biggest thing is worrying about what other people think of me. And I think it’s such ingrained in me from when I was a child, I worried so much about what people thought about me. That I get activated in that even now. When we were talking earlier about being yourself, it’s not easy being yourself. I think everybody, I think they see me because I’m willing to cry and I’m willing to do this stuff. I mean I am, and I do it but there are times it is so hard to be me.

I know I’m [inaudible] to put out an opinion or I’m going to go do this thing where I am going to be me. And I have panic moments of what’s everybody going to think? Are people going to quit my membership if I do this? One of the things I was working through, we were talking about being humble. I worked on this recently about it’s tough being the number one earner sometimes. You get so much attention.

And for someone who was bullied as a child to have created a life where people genuinely like you and love you and respect you and stuff, it’s scary at times. Because when you want to do things and you’re like, “Will I lose all that?” And it’s like something that your inner child dreamed of and worked so hard for. And so I have all this stuff all the time because I do want to be me at the end of the day. I never want to build an empire for me, I don’t want an empire built on smoking mirrors. But I think that would be a harder life.

I’d rather be scared that people will leave me than to be scared that they’ll find out who I really am. If I’m going to pick being scared, well, just pick one and we can roll with it.

Krista: Yeah. I’m really glad you said that too though because I think one of the things that I notice in grief, well, just any, it’s not just in grief but if you’re rebuilding something or seeking something new, creating something new, and you’ve started at a really low place which for my listeners is death of their person. You really don’t imagine that when you create a particular amount of what you thought you wanted, you don’t imagine the negative emotion that you might actually feel when you get there.

And I know for me, buying this house, I just talked about this in an email the other day, this house, Corinne, that I am in, this is the neighborhood that I used to drive through to look at Christmas lights. It’s called the pinnacle. And when I used to own my fitness centers, I don’t know if we ever talked about that but I literally used to have one a mile away and I put it here in this zip code because of the amount of money that was in this zip code. But never ever did I ever think I would live in this neighborhood.

And when I moved in, all of the thoughts came out, all of the, you don’t belong here, who do you think you are, what if you lose it, you’re not a doctor, you’re not a lawyer, you’re not a this, all the pressure on me to maintain it. It was really shocking to my system to experience because I thought, okay, the worst thing that’s ever going to happen to me or the worst negative emotion I’m ever going to feel is surely after Hugo died. Not that it really compares in intensity, it doesn’t.

But it was still very shocking and still when you’re not expecting your brain to get all obsessed about is the other shoe going to drop, are you going to lose it, can you keep it. It’s not so great. So I actually think it’s comforting to hear that.

Corinne: Yeah, I actually was, I don’t know what I was studying this morning, I was actually reading something. And they were saying, when you are thinking about, I think it was a weight loss thing but they were talking about a lot of people have a fear of success with weight loss, will I become a bitch? A lot of my women have a real fear that their husbands, because a lot of them are eating partners.

Krista: Yeah, that makes total sense.

Corinne: That they’ll have nothing left in common, that they’ll leave their partner behind, all these things come up. And the exercise was so that we don’t get too rope-a-doped into the idea of like when we lose weight now everything’s going to be great. And I think that in weight loss especially, even creating a business, people think, if I’m just making $1 million, I’m just going to be [inaudible]. We just think everything’s going to be great. Imagine, one, the greatness of your thing and then what are all the problems that person is still going to wake up with every single day.

Just like for me with weight loss, it is great to be able to shop and buy clothes anywhere I want and whatnot. But also it’s not great to see all the damage that your weight did to you. Until you resolve it, you’re probably going to go through, a lot of people who lose weight, especially a lot of weight, they go through a long period of being afraid they’ll regain it back. It’s a whole identity shift. And so even though you get this great thing, it’s really good for you to practice thinking about, but what are the problems? So that we’re not over-glorifying it.

So that we actually can fall in love with the process, don’t just fall in love with the result. In weight loss that happens a lot and this happens in business too. People will set their business up in a way, they’re just so desperate for the money and the influence but they do a lot of things that are just not sustainable so they don’t fall in love with the process because they were so in love with the result. They get the result, they’re happy for a minute and then all of a sudden they realize, shit, I’ve got to keep doing this, oh God, it didn’t fix everything.

I still worry about these things. So it was just really interesting. I thought that is so cool for people to think about. The best way, I’m just always all about tell the truth to yourself. It will feel great but it’s not fixing everything. And if it’s not going to fix everything then we might as well only do things that we’re willing to do to get there.

Krista: Yeah. And it’s not just money and business and weight, it’s all the areas. It’s any time we think the grass is going to be greener once we’ve created something else. And I know for me in the beginning of this work, and by this work I mean thought work and what I learned when I became a certified coach and kind of right before I became a coach as a client in a coaching program. I just remember thinking, I can create results that I want to create and then that will solve all my problems. Spoiler alert, making more money, losing more weight, buying more, yeah, doesn’t.

And so now I’m even more convinced that no, the answer to the quality of life that I want is so much less about creating different things and more about my ability to allow emotion.

Corinne: I think something that’s interesting, what you said is when you are sitting there thinking this is going to solve all my problems, write out the problems you think it’s going to solve. And then literally give yourself a few days to think of as many problems as you think, losing weight or starting a business, whatever it is, write all of those down. And then don’t do anything with it for a couple of days, sit down when you can have a cup of coffee, a quiet morning and use your logical brain to argue, is it even true?

Because there will be some things, more money has solved some things for me. I’m able to, one of the biggest problems I had was this fear that we would of course I hope we die before my child does. But that we would die and he would not be able to take care of himself for the rest of this life. Money has solved that. We have set up all of our finances in a trust and we’ve done everything so that it will last Logan for 50 years. He can’t override it. This is just how it’s going to go. So if nothing else, I know financially he’s taken care of.

But what it doesn’t solve is connection with him. Making a lot of money and being able to have more time doesn’t mean that I feel like a better or more connected mother. I still beat myself up all the time about time I spend away from him or my biggest one is we don’t have a lot in common. He has a lot in common with his daddy. We have almost zero in common and it’s taken me years of coaching to let go of feeling like a bad mom because I don’t just enjoy every minute and every word that pours out of my child’s mouth.

Money and solving all that, didn’t solve that stuff. So it’s just thinking through, what is it that I think this is going to fix for me and some of it’s probably true but a lot of it’s not. And if it’s not going to be solved by the money, so that means we now have a mind problem, we for sure have a mindset issue that can be solved with work with a coach.

Krista: Yeah. And even if we do the mindset work which obviously I highly encourage people to do, it still doesn’t ever take away our humanness. It still doesn’t ever take away that. We actually, we do want to experience all of the emotions. We don’t always want to be happy. And so it’s time well spent to get good at feelings, instead of just trying to always outrun them by creating a different version of yourself or your life.

Corinne: Yeah. Because it’s kind of like what we were talking about earlier. A lot of the things that I thought weight loss would solve, I just knew that I’d think I was hot shit every minute, if I lost 100 pounds. There would never be a day I’d feel terrible about my body, that didn’t happen. And now though when I really look at it honestly, there are days I feel great. There are days when I feel awful but what I also do is I never beat myself up or think it’s a problem because I don’t have pure thoughts about it.

That whole ability to just be like, “Corinne, today is just a day, it’s going to run through your mind. It’s a day you’re sensitive to yourself. You’re probably going to get triggered all day long.” I just have days where I just, I’m going to get triggered, I’m going to get triggered and I’m just like, we’re just going to breathe on through it every single time. And I don’t make it a bigger deal. I allow it, I feel the feelings but I don’t put the, what I call mustard on the shit sandwich.

It’s like you’ve already got the shitty thoughts, we don’t need a slab of mustard on there of like, oh my God, I thought I was over this already. When is this ever going to stop? If I keep thinking this way I’ll regain my weight. I’ve dropped all that story. That’s the part I’ve been able to make so much better for myself. That’s been a great relief.

Krista: Such a great parallel there too to what I know a lot of my clients do, which is they do that to themselves in grief. They tell themselves, I’m feeling better and now today I’m not feeling good, that must mean I’m doing something wrong. There’s something wrong with me. I’m backsliding. I should be further along than I am. They have the mustard on the, what did you call it, mustard on the shit sandwich?

Corinne: Mustard on the shit sandwich.

Krista: Yeah, instead of being like, “Oh, no, this is just a griefy day.” Maybe grief actually doesn’t end. Maybe it is okay for me to be sad sometimes. Maybe however I feel is not a problem for me to solve. I can just support myself through it. It’s not something I have to judge or tell myself I’m wrong because it is my experience. It is like what you said, it’s meeting ourselves where we are.

Corinne: Yeah, for sure because the one thing that’s helped me kind of resolve a lot of activation and trigger on just a variety of things is someone told me once that your brain is like a huge filing cabinet, just think of rooms and rooms of rooms of filing cabinets. And there are so many different memories, scents, sounds, unique combination of how things have happened. And you’re just never going to purge all the files. My grandparents raised me. We lived with my grandparents as much as we ever lived just with my mom.

We were always moving in and out because we never had money. And when, especially when my grandmother died, it was really hard for me. To this day I still cry about her. That woman’s been dead over 20 years and I swear, sometimes I’ll go out walking and I don’t know what it is but something will happen that will just make me miss her. And I just always think, I get some kind of peace of just knowing, we just never know what’s going to tripwire us. Sometimes we just get tripped and that’s okay, just cry or do whatever but don’t shame yourself.

Or just don’t make it harder on yourself because it’s happening. There’s so much just separation that happens, I just don’t think people realize, the hardest part to me of feeling and processing emotion, it’s not the raw emotion. It’s the layer of crap we put on top of it. To me that’s the hard part.

Krista: Yeah, the feelings about the feelings, the judgment of the feelings.

Corinne: Yeah, that’s the hard part I think, yeah.

Krista: I totally agree. I love it, even though we do very separate things, I don’t really typically coach a lot of people on weight loss, I will if they want to but it’s definitely not my area of expertise like it is yours. But I see so many similarities in that the door that people come to me through is grief. And the door that people come to you through is weight loss. But then what’s on the other side of that door is so much more. Yes, they will lose weight, yes, they will change aspects about their lives. How do you talk about that when you talk to people about what they’re going to get when they work with you?

Corinne: I talk about mainly about how the diet industry’s failed them in terms of, the cleanest example I have is that almost every woman can follow a points, a calorie or some restrictive plan for a while. It’s where I am different is, we’re not going to give you that. We just have for simple, but I just don’t think weight loss should ever involve math. I’m like, “No, no math.” But where we’re different is we address all the reasons why on a Wednesday night after a bad day you will throw out a good day to eat.

We’re going to resolve the reasons why sometimes you just need a break and you’re eating and you don’t know why. It’s all those moments that you’re like, “I was doing so good but this happened.” We pick up in all of those moments because diets aren’t addressing that part. They are not helping you figure out that root cause, what is the reason why? Sometimes things get too hard, what is the reasons why you cope with food? What are the reasons why at nine o’clock at night when everything’s quiet you just feel compelled to eat?

Because it may be the first time in the day that you have had alone time, that somebody wasn’t needing you. And so we pick up there and I just tell people, “You solve the root cause behind why you eat then the actual weight loss is easy.” Stopping at enough is easy, it’s hard to stop at enough when you’re eating because you’re terrified that you might get hungry later. It’s hard to stop at enough when your whole family’s eating around you and you stop and you worry about what people will think.

Or if you fear wasting food, that was a big thing for me. I had to overcome fearing, for God’s sakes if I got a hamburger some place if I didn’t eat all of it. Oh my God, that’s a whole 30 cents I could be leaving on this plate. A lot of that stuff has to get resolved otherwise what most diets do is they will take away your favorite foods and they take so many calories out that all those moments that you needed to eat to cope with your emotional life, they’ve taken away your one coping mechanism but they didn’t replace it.

Krista: They did not teach you.

Corinne: They did not teach you what to do in those moments. We teach you what to do in those moments.

Krista: Yeah, which you probably don’t lead with this in your marketing but what I know is that on the other end of having done that work it ripples into your life in so many ways that have nothing to do with your weight. It’s the increase and the quality of your life and your relationships and the goals that you’re willing to set and how you talk to yourself and what you’re willing to believe is possible for yourself. That stuff, it’s so much more than I can fit into. Not that it’s not great to fit into the clothes you want to fit into but it’s just like the gateway drug, all the other good stuff.

Corinne: Yeah. In our membership, people say, “I came to lose weight, I stay for the life I’m creating.” They all say that. I’ve got members that have been there four and five years now. They’re like, “I’ve lost my way. I’m never leaving.” They’re like, “This is the best therapy I ever get.”

Krista: Yeah, that’s the exact same way, my program is six months long and then after people will stay and do another round for six months. We call that master’s. And then if they want to keep going after master’s, they can stay on a continuation. And then it’s the same thing where they come and they get what they came for as it relates to grief. But then they realize, there’s so much more here. I love having this community. I love having the support. I love these tools. I’m not leaving and then they stay because it’s so much more than that.

So if people want to learn more about you because I know they will, what’s the best way?

Corinne: If you are interested in the weight loss stuff you can just go to nobsweightloss.com. You’ll be able to find my podcast, everything is over there. I’ve got a free course, it’s all over there. And if you’re interested in an online business, you can go to nobsbusinesswomen.com and then all the information about that is over there.

Krista: I love it. I love that you’re doing something for entrepreneurs. I feel like for a long time you’ve just been doing it for free out of the kindness of your heart. I love that you actually created something that people can pay you for and get your help because you’re so good at both.

Corinne: Well, thank you. I wanted to create the business membership that I wish I’d had. And I’m really working on it just being that one stop shop. I can get my mindset coaching, I also can get frameworks, I can get tools, I can get help. Somebody will answer my questions, that kind of thing. I struggled with finding that place all the time. And so I was just like, “Alright, if I can’t find it, I’ll build it.”

Krista: Good for you. Well, thanks so much for being willing to come on the podcast and share your brilliance with my people.

Corinne: Well, thank you for having me.

Krista: I love you. Yeah. Alright, take care, I’ll talk to you later.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click work with me for details and the next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.