Ashley Logan is a wellness entrepreneur opening her own coaching practice, Ashley Logan Wellness.
Watch her interview here:
https://youtu.be/s6OguCMEpf0
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Alice: Ashley Logan is a wellness entrepreneur opening her own coaching practice, Ashley Logan Wellness. After working ten plus years in corporate advertising and marketing, earning her MBA in International Business, and raising her three kids, she had to sort through her own stress related health issues. It was only when she took a holistic approach that she started to experience a shift. This led her on a journey to turn her lifelong passion of Health and Wellness into her profession. She became a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and registered two hundred hours as a yoga instructor.
We are so excited to talk to her today about her business, her life, and bringing the mind, body and soul, and balance for Better Health and Optimal Wellness. Welcome.
Ashley Logan: Thank you. I am happy to be here.
Alice: Thank you so much for being here. We just start the podcast off with some random, fun questions. What is your favorite word in the dictionary?
Ashley: I have a lot so it is hard just to pick one. But given the current times, I would say “tenacious.” I feel like we all have to channel a lot of tenacity right now.
Alice: That is a word I do not ever use. But I should. Tenacious. That is great. What is your favorite TV show you binge during quarantine?
Ashley: I have already watched the whole thing: The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston.
Alice: It was so good.
Ashley: Did you watch that too?
Alice: I did.
Ashley: I thought it was so powerful. The acting was phenomenal in it and the characters were so well developed. The story was relevant to past events. I will not give anything away, but I highly recommend it. It is riveting.
Alice: That is awesome. What is your favorite wellness tip that you have ever received?
Ashley: I have to say, putting your own oxygen mask on first and then putting it on the people you care about whether it is children, a parent. It is so important. I have three kids so I relate it to my children, but it is really taking care of yourself first because you are not able to fully take care of other people until you take care of yourself first. I spent years putting other people ahead of me and my health suffered for it. Once I started to prioritize my own health, I realized I was stronger to be able to serve those around me.
Alice: Ashley, that brings us to your professional life. You have gone through so many different avenues, from an MBA to marketing and now into your wellness journey. Can you talk a little bit more about that journey and how it all developed?
Ashley: Sure. I had ten plus year of career in corporate advertising and marketing, and when I was pregnant with my first son–I have three boys–I had a choice to make, “Am I going to continue the corporate route or stay home with my kids?” because I knew we were going to have a couple more kids at least. I decided to stay home. I just realized, for me, it would have been hard to juggle both. So, I made that choice to stay home with my kids and, during that time, I subsequently had two more children.
After about ten years as a stay-at-home mom, I started to get the itch to get back to work as they grew older and became more independent. I really considered going back in to corporate marketing because I had a great job. It was very comfortable, but I was not really fulfilled. I had a choice to make then as well, “Do I want to go back to what is comfortable or do I want to take a risk and do something different?” even though it is pushing out of my comfort zone and it was really scary to think of just reverting back to what I knew. But I chose to go in to become an integrative health coach by accident, almost. I was trying to think of different things: what I am passionate about, where I really feel fulfilled and on purpose. The theme for me was health and wellness.
Then, on Instagram, I saw Gabby Bernstein. I love her work. She has written a bunch of books about spirituality and finding your purpose and manifestation. She is a great author. But anyway, she posted something about IIN, which is in New York City, and I researched it. I was so blown away by the program and ended up taking a leap.
I did the year-long program, and while I was doing that I was also getting my yoga certification, which I have[?] also been a lifelong Yogi, so I was formalizing that. I started my own business, incorporated and it has just been a really exciting journey for me.
Alice: That is amazing. When did you start your business officially?
Ashley: It has been about a year and a half.
Alice: Amazing. What do you do with your coaching? Do you integrate the yoga practice into into your business as well?
Ashley: A lot of the principles in yoga are very aligned with the Integrative Health Coaching Model because a lot of yoga is breath work, it is body awareness, it is mindfulness. It is almost a moving meditation in a sense.
A lot of what I work with clients on in the Integrative Health Coaching Piece is just developing that awareness, mindset, being aware of how your body feels, being aware of your thought patterns because we are integrated beings, and to really achieve optimal health we have to begin with self-awareness.
Alice: What I heard last was yoga is about meditation and breathing and so you are integrating that with your clients.
Ashley: Yes. A lot of the principles in yoga transfer to the health coaching because I work with women not just on diet or fitness–those are certainly components but we also look at mindset, we look at relationships, career fulfillment, every aspect that might affect how a person looks and feels and shows up each day. In yoga, a lot of those principles can be applied, if suitable, to health coaching program that I developed for a client.
Alice: Are they specific for each client then?
Ashley: Yes. I can work with clients I have coaching calls or someone just wants to set up a coaching call with me, just to get a feel for it, I offer that. It is à la carte coaching. I also have two programs: one is a four-week program and one is a six-month program. In those programs, I create a program customized to the client and what they are hoping to achieve.
For the four-week program, it is about one to three goals, depending on what they are. If it is one big goal, we will just do one goal. But if it is three smaller ones, I will make a program for the three smaller ones. Then the six-month program is much more intensive and that six goals. I try to really meet women where they are because we are all different and I do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach because we are all at different points in our health journey. We have different needs, we have different scheduling issues. I really try to be flexible to help women, as many women as I can.
Alice: That is amazing, Ashley. Can you talk a little bit about a client’s experience and how you knew you made a difference?
Ashley: Yes. A lot of the women I work with are working moms, whether they have their own business or they are in corporate America, and it is hard to balance both. It is hard to be a mom, working corporate, be a daughter, sister, whatever other hats we wear.
I had an attorney who came to work with me, she had two small kids and she had a pretty demanding career. She was having trouble prioritizing her health goals. She wanted to have more energy, she wanted to lose those last five pounds, and she was having trouble finding time in her day to exercise, which is something she really enjoyed but she just could not find the time. I hear that a lot, “I don’t have time to do all this stuff.” Go to the store and cook healthy meals, exercise, meditate. “When am I going to meditate?” A lot of it is the mindset around our time and how much time we have in a day to do the things that we want to do.
In her particular situation, we really got to the root cause of where she was spending her time. A lot of it is time management and her mindset around time. Once we were able to really develop a schedule, I worked with her and her schedule to really show her where she could carve out time to accomplish those goals on a daily basis because most change, most effective long-term change, occurs in a small daily actions we take. It is small steps each day get us to where we want to go. It requires a lot of patience and you have to really play the long game when you are trying to create a lot of change in your life. But as she took small daily steps towards goals–bite-sized goals each day–she began to notice the difference. Once she carved out, say, fifteen minutes in the morning to go for a walk, then she realize, “I actually can bump that up to twenty minutes,” and then it became thirty minutes, and that did not happen in a week, that happened over a several weeks. But once we began getting positive feedback from our changed behavior, it incentivizes us to prioritize that healthy behavior and we begin to see tangible changes in our life.
It is really about taking those small deliberate steps each day. When we are in a state of overwhelm and when we feel like we have no time or stretched so thin, it is really, really hard to believe that we can create the time for ourselves, but it is possible.
Alice: I think that is amazing just taking that fifteen minutes. Where can you carve that out, because everyone can have fifteen minutes or ten minutes? It is hard to say, “I do so much,” and try and be healthy. But, I love your idea of the fifteen minutes or wherever you can find that. Just incredible.
Ashley: It is very effective.
Alice: Can you talk about being a female business owner? What has been the most difficult as you have opened your business in this year and a half? What has been difficult or most challenging?
Ashley: I think the one thing I miss about the corporate environment is the camaraderie with co-workers, those water-cooler conversation, being a part of the team, having that built-in network. I miss that because entrepreneurship can be isolating especially with COVID. I have really made an effort to reach out and become more involved in virtual events but I think that is probably the hardest part of entrepreneurship, the isolating factor of it. You really have to make a bigger effort to get connected and to meet new people. I do not just mean clients or prospecting, I mean peers, other female entrepreneurs just to connect with, to share ideas, to support one another. I think that is so important as a business owner to find and continually look for new people that you can meet and support and bounce ideas off of.
Alice: I think that is so awesome. Something that we talked about on the podcast every time is, “What does womanhood mean to you?” It is interesting that you are already talking about this idea of finding other women to always connect with as an entrepreneur. What is womanhood for you?
Ashley: That is a big question. It means a lot of different things to me. But I believe women have a gift of empathy naturally, and to lead as a woman with empathy is a very powerful thing. If we can really stand in our empathy and our ambition simultaneously we can move mountains. That is what it means to me today.
Alice: I think that is great. That is really what you are trying to do, move mountains little by little with each of your clients. That is amazing. What advice would you give to a woman who is just starting on their wellness journey?
Ashley: It is similar to what I said earlier. I would just encourage them to pick one thing that they want or one small goal that they want to achieve for themselves in their health and wellness. Start with one goal and break that goal into little steps each day that they can take because we are list makers and a lot of times clients will come to me and they will have a really long list of all the things that they want to change or do differently. What I help them do is to prioritize that list and say, “What are really the key things that you want to change?” A lot of times there is a similar theme. I find a lot of it has to do with our sense of worth and what we feel we are worthy of because if we put other people’s needs ahead of ours, we are subconsciously telling ourselves that we are not worth putting ourselves first. So, a lot of what I do is help women realize their worth, the goal that they want for themselves because if you believe you are worth it, then you’re going to prioritize it, and if you prioritize it you are going to take those small steps each day to achieve it.
Alice: That is such a great sense of shifting of a mindset of “You are worth it.” How do you get to that goal? How do you try to build to accomplish it moving that little mountain or big mountain but little, climbing it a little bit each day? Is there anything else you would like to add? How do our listeners get in contact with you?
Ashley: My website is fairly comprehensive about my programs and offerings. I have loads of resources on there–free resources in my blog. It is ashleyloganwellness.com and I have a new guide–The Ultimate Guide–to achieve your big, audacious goals, which is intended to help people set goals for 2021 but to also finish 2020 strong because we still have time to finish off those goals for 2020. I think so many of us just are ready for this year to be over. That is where people can find me.
Alice: Amazing. Is there anything else you would like to add to our listeners today?
Ashley: I just thank you for the opportunity to talk about these important issues and topics. Thanks for having me.
Alice: Thank you so much for being on, Ashley. It was a pleasure.
Ashley: Thanks Alice.
If you liked this article, check out the rest of our interviews on our podcast Weekly Woman.
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