80-Being Fat, Fertile and Safe Being Successful In Business with Nicola Salmon

Being fat, fertile and safe being successful in business with Nicola Salmon. 

In this interview with Nicola Salmon, author of Fat and fertile and host of the podcast of the same name, we explore safety and its lack impacts all of us.

Being fat, fertile and safe

Nicola Salmon shares her origin story and why coaching fat people in their fertility journey is her life’s work.

And what she has done to create safety in the process of building her business.

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on being fat, fertile and safe:

• Nicole origin story that led her to discover her life’s work
• The role of safety in all aspects of life and business
• Being fat and successful as entrepreneur 

Mentioned in the show:

Non-Diet Coaching Certification

Free Resources 

Going Beyond The Food Show podcast Episode 226 – Too Fat to Get Pregnant, Really?

Connect with our guest:

Website – Nicola Salmon

Instagram – Nicola Salmon

Book – Nicola Salmon: Fat and Fertile

Podcast – Nicola Salmon: Fat and Fertile

Transcript:

Undiet Your Coaching Ep80-Being Fat, Fertile and Safe Being Successful In Business with Nicola Salmon

Welcome back to the podcast, my dear colleague. Today, I’ve got a treat. I’ve got a very powerful interview to share with you. My guest is Nicola Salmon. She is a feminist, fat positive fertility coach. And the breath of this interview, everything we went through has been very powerful for me, and I’m sure it will be for you as well. So I’m gonna stop talking and I’m just gonna have my team to roll in the interview right away. And I hope it inspires you as much that it inspired me.

Stephanie: Welcome to the podcast, Nicola.

Nicola: Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie: I’m excited to have this conversation and we were just talking the last time we did a podcast together was actually a few years ago, and it was my first threesome podcast.

Nicola: And it was spectacular.

Stephanie: I know. It was actually a kind of a live coaching interview. It’s going to be on the food podcast feed. You guys should go and check that out and I’ll link it in the show note. But we actually were helping, someone who wanted to get pregnant in a fat body and helping them think about that differently, was one of our listener.

Stephanie: But today, it’s gonna be about you. And as I was preparing for this interview, we have been in the same circle for probably almost five years now, we’ve known of each other. I don’t even know your origin story. So please introduce yourself, tell us what you do, and then. Tell us how you came to do that.

Nicola: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m Nicola Salmon. I’m a fat positive fertility coach. And it all really kind of started this journey to this very unique job that I do, when I was 16. So over 20 years ago now, I was diagnosed with a condition called P C O S or polycystic ovarian syndrome. And the doctor told me when they diagnosed me that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant.

Nicola: So, given this kind of life altering diagnosis without any kind of counseling or support, nothing. In that 20 years ago, we didn’t have the internet, so I couldn’t go away and Google what it was, what it meant. I didn’t know anybody else who had it. So it felt like a really difficult thing to process, especially as a teenager, because I didn’t really have any coping processes. I didn’t have any tools in order to navigate that, what that meant for me. So yeah, I spent my teens, my twenties, thinking that I would never be able to become a parent, which is something that I really wanted to become. The only information that I was given by my doctor about P C O S was that I should go on the oral contraceptive pill because that would regulate my cycles, which I later found out wasn’t really true, and to diet because that would help me lose weight and then that would fix my P C O S. Again, later found out that was total rubbish and absolutely not true. But that’s what I thought. So I spent so much time, when I was an early adult, trying to lose weight, trying to make my body smaller in order to fix it, in order to fix my menstrual cycles, cause they were super irregular, and in order to become a parent, because that is what I wanted to be ultimately. In that time, kind of as I was navigating that, I went to uni, got a job, and then changed directions in my early twenties. I trained to be an acupuncturist because I found it really helpful for me. I went through like a traumatic incident and got a post-traumatic stress disorder. And I found it so supportive and so helpful that I immediately had to figure out exactly what it was, exactly how it worked. So I trained for four years as an acupuncturist. And because of my own fertility stuff, because of my own hormone stuff, I wanted to learn more about hormones and acupuncture. So I ended up specializing in fertility, which is how I kind of got into the fertility world. But all this time I was still very much, weight centric, weight focused, because that was my experience. That was what I was told would help me. And then, what happened was I got pregnant. I married my husband. We decided we wanted to get pregnant, and we did. And it was really quick. It was really easy [oh]. Even though I was like at my biggest way, even though I was expecting to go through this whole process of like a million diets again to get down to this weight to get pregnant, it just happened. And I spent that nine months of that pregnancy totally anxious about something was gonna happen. I thought everything was gonna go wrong, cuz that’s what we’re told, that everybody in bigger bodies’ experiences all these horrible symptoms, side effects, problems during pregnancy, but nothing happened. Totally unremarkable, boring, ordinary pregnancy. But I was so anxious through it, and it was not the joyful experience that I wanted pregnancy to be for me.

Nicola: But at the end of that pregnancy, I decided that I’d wanted to have a home birth. I wanted a waterbirth. I wanted all of these things for me, and I was told I couldn’t have them because of my bmi. And that was the very, very first time that I’ve ever thought, hang on a minute, like this isn’t right. Like I shouldn’t just listen to what the doctors are saying and just, just believe it and go along with what they’re saying. I did a lot more research into it around the risks, the real risks for people in bigger bodies and having home births and water births and found it was totally rubbish that people can have waterbirth, they can have home births, and they can be really safe and really, really helpful choices for people to make. And it was the real, the very first time I knew about what body autonomy was and that I could make decisions about my healthcare. And that blew my mind. I was like, I just couldn’t believe that I’d spent like nearly 30 years of my life just going along with what people had told me and not even questioning it. So I’d had that taster, I’d had that like idea of like, oh my goodness, like I can make decisions about my own body.

Nicola: And then my son was about six months old, I had this moment where I was in the kitchen and we were just, I was talking to my husband about going on your end of the diet or changing my body in some way. And I just had this epiphany of like, I don’t wanna talk about this around my son. I don’t want him to hear the words that I’m saying about food, about my body, about all of this stuff. Like I don’t want that for him. And that was the point for me where I was like, I’ve got to do something different. I have spent so much time, energy, money, trying to make my body smaller and nothing has helped, nothing has been the magic pill that’s gonna fix me and make me acceptable in the eyes of doctors.

Nicola: So, I’m just gonna spin it all. I’m not gonna lose weight, not gonna weigh myself anymore. I’m not gonna lose weight. I’m just gonna be and see what happens. And luckily around this time I was in Instagram and I found all these incredible people, including yourself who were just talking about this stuff, and people in big bodies who were just happy and not dieting and not trying to like find this elusive, thin goal. And I just was like, thank God for that. It felt like such a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Nicola: And as I was doing like fertility, acupuncture, I’d also done a fertility coach training thing. So I was dipping my toe into like how I could support people online, like outside of acupuncture. And I realized how, kind of how much those two worlds collided, like how much talk about diets, weight loss, and how problematic the fertility industry was around food and bodies. And I just couldn’t find anybody that was talking about it. I couldn’t find people that were explaining, like how problematic it is that we tell people to go on keto diets or to lose weight, to get pregnant, and all these barriers that we have to healthcare.

Nicola: So I just had to start talking about it. I had to just say, like, this is not right. Like we should not be denying people healthcare based on this. We should not be denying them the opportunity to grow their families because of their body size and it’s so detrimental to their health that we are telling them to do this diet or out this food group and it’s just making everything so much worse. And then I just haven’t stopped talking about it since then.

Stephanie: It’s been how many years now?

Nicola: It’s been five years now. So it’s been a long time that I have just been talking about this, but it feel, you know, it is so important to me and it’s so critical for me just to keep talking about this because I know there are so many people out there that need it and that are affected so, so, you know, harshly by this and by the way that we treat people through fertility,

Stephanie: That is a powerful story with many trigger event. But what I take from this story is that this is your life’s work. [Mm-hmm.] Like this is your life’s work. It’s not just a gig, a job, a business. It is a business and it is a job, but it is your life work. That’s what fuels you.

Nicola: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It was every single day. It was what gets me out. Yeah.

Stephanie: And that’s a beautiful place to be in as a person to be able to do your life’s work. That’s what I do. That’s what you do. And to pick a sacred cow like fertility, like that’s what it is, that’s why nobody talks about it because it’s still a sacred cow in our society that fat people should, it’s okay to tell fat people that they should be smaller, to have children. Nobody’s picked at it yet, and that’s what your life work is.

Nicola: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it feels, especially at the very beginning, it felt very hard to have these conversations. [Mm-hmm. I’m sure.] I had a lot of pushback from other people in my world that I knew, but the more I research this, the more I speak to people about it, it just becomes more and more urgent to me to talk more about it and to share more about it.

Stephanie: And you have a podcast. Remind the people listening the name of your podcast.

Nicola: It’s called Fat and Fertile.

Stephanie: So, we’re not gonna get into the depth detail of fat infertility, but if we were to sum it up for people listening [mm-hmm] and you had like one to two message to get out to people about fatness and fertility, like two big lies, what would they be?

Nicola: So I guess the two biggest things are that. Just because you’re fat, that doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant or you’re gonna have any fertility issues, like that is a big one that so many people believe, that their fatness will get in the way and it absolutely no reason to believe that it will.

Nicola: And the second one is that you absolutely deserve to get that any fertility care and support that you need. And so many people feel that they have to jump through that hoop of weight loss or dieting before they are worthy in quotes to get that care. And that is absolutely not true.

Stephanie: And it’s beyond, and again, just because I’ve been around you for so long, it’s not just self worthiness, it’s some country. The system will deny people at a certain weight to get fertility treatment. If you didn’t, you’re listening to this podcast and fertility is not your thing, know that it is a fact. People are being denied fertility care because of their weight today.

Nicola: Yeah. And it is still somehow socially acceptable for that to happen.

Stephanie: Yeah. Like we’re gonna re-listen to this podcast. We’re gonna watch your work 20 years from now. We’re gonna say, how could this be? [Mm-hmm.] It’s like segregation of people of color in this state in 1965. [Mm-hmm.] We’re looking back at this, we’re like, how in the hell did we think that was okay? And when I look back at fertility, the fact people will be the same logic. Like, how could we think? [My gosh.] Oh we’ll.

Nicola: That is my dream. That is the whole goal of my work is really just to be like, I don’t need to do this anymore. Like, I want people to have the access, the care, just the respect to be able to make those decisions for themselves.

Stephanie: Well, the same care respect, not more, just the same care and respect as people in quote unquote, body that fits the bmi. [Absolutely. Yeah.] Just equality, not more. [Mm-hmm.] Just equality.

Nicola: Yeah. It’s not too much to us.

Stephanie: We’re just, the work you’re doing is just to bring people back to basic equality, independent of their size. By the way, we call that sizeism, where we judge people based on their body size. And that’s what it is with fertility, we would draw their ability to get service even if they pay like insurance based service in the state, they’re still being denied.

Nicola: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Stephanie: So your podcast and you have a book is filled with all the details on how this is possible. Because I’m sure people are listening to this, you’re like, what? I’ve heard the opposite. Like go in the book, go in the podcast and get the details.

Stephanie: So how do you help people with that? Let’s move on to like, what does that look like, getting support and working with you infertility.

Nicola: So there’s lots of different kind of core ways that we do it [Okay] and most of it breaks down to safety. For fat people who are trying to navigate this, it feels so inherently unsafe because of experiences they’ve had with doctors in the past because of all the messages that we get around what it means to be a fat person navigating that. So the root core of it is really about bringing people into a feeling of safety, knowing that they can trust their bodies, knowing that they don’t have to lose weight or diet in order to feel safe, in order to be able to access that fertility within them.

Nicola: Like we’re told that you have to cut out food groups and massively restrict your diet, and that is just not true. What your body needs is enough nutrition, enough nourishment in order to feel safe so that it knows that when it gets pregnant, you are gonna have the resources available to take care of you and baby. So it’s about really reframing what that means to be healthy and to want to get pregnant in that way. And also we do a lot of work around advocacy. So specifically for fat people, it’s around being able to access that healthcare that you might need. Because whilst we want to change the systems, because those are the things that are at fault, they just don’t happen quick enough for people who want to get pregnant now. So we need to learn the tools of how to advocate for yourself. We need to learn like how we can figure out which doctors are gonna be the best ones to talk to, to refer to who can give you the treatment, and how to support yourself emotionally through that process. Because it is work that you should not have to do, but we’re in a world where we have to advocate for ourselves if we are gonna get the care that we need.

Nicola: So it’s all of these different ways that we are looking at being in a bigger body, how that impacts us, being in the culture that we’re in now, and also really retraining our brains to believe that we are worthy and capable of doing the work that we need to get there.

Stephanie: It’s funny because I interviewed a doctor on OEM PIC last week [Ooh] and we were talking about access to care for all people. And I was sharing with her how difficult it is for people in larger body or any disability form to advocate for themselves. And this is where, to me, coaching comes in because you have, through how society function, you’ve been judged, you’ve been criticized, and very little people have helped you create self-esteem and self confidence. And now you have to stand in front of a doctor. You have to stand in front of fertility clinic and advocate for yourself. [Yeah.] That’s like difficult when you don’t believe in yourself.

Nicola: Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. And it’s skills we’re just never taught, right? Like, and very intentionally so. Like, especially as women, we are not taught how to have that power, how to go about creating that change and to have that body autonomy to say, actually, I disagree and it is my lived experience and my voice that is the most important in this conversation. So, it’s really groundbreaking stuff.

Stephanie: Yeah. And like I said, like you can have a, in the beginning, my days as a coach, I used to give like a script to people, [Mm-hmm] Which is nice, right? [Yeah.] Here’s what you can’t say. But people would get in front of their doctor and their had no voice. Like, they couldn’t do, he couldn’t stand up for themselves and they had to build themself up. And again, like you said, it’s work we shouldn’t have to do [mm-hmm] but we have to.

Nicola: Yeah. And it just takes practice. Like most of us are never gonna go into that situation and know what to do off bat. Right. We need to be in a safe place to have those conversations. [For sure.] To practice them coming out of our mouths, saying those things, believing those things about ourselves, and know that we’ve got a support system to fall back on when that big scary thing happens.

Stephanie: I love your, the parallel you drew between activism as a society level and into the legal system, and we shouldn’t have to do this work. And that activism work needs to be done globally at the society level. [Yeah.] But then the work you’re doing is the activism at the individual level. [Mm-hmm.] Do you see it as that?

Nicola: I’ve never seen it quite in that way before, and I love the way that you share, you kind of painted that picture because, yeah, my work is really of two halves. Like it’s the work that I do with people and I love showing up for folks who are navigating this. They get such a lot of reward and benefit from the work that we do together, but, for me, I can’t do the individual work without also having the bigger picture work as well, because, I don’t want, as much as I love working with these people, I don’t want them to have to do this work. And I want to influence and make change in a bigger sense. And that looks like talking to clinics and educating them on the research that I’ve found around how problematic that their policies are and you know, helping them change their policies and, hopefully that will filter up into like, government level and making changes on a wider scale. But yeah, it’s big and it feels,

Stephanie: Well it’s 5, 10, 25 years up there [Mm-hmm.] like I’m pointing out to the sky, but the big machine. [Yeah.] But then there’s the person today [mm-hmm] that wants to have a child. [Yeah.] The work we’re doing in at the highest level ain’t gonna help this person today.

Nicola: No. The machine is slow.

Stephanie: But I love that the work you do does both the activism at the global level society level and teaching people how to advocate for themself, how to do their activism at the individual level.

Nicola: Hmm. Yeah. I think it’s, I think being, doing that is almost like sowing those seeds, right? You’re giving everybody a little seed packet to go away and then sow their own seeds, and hopefully over time we get enough momentum to really make a big difference.

Stephanie: Well, and it gives people the fuel that to get pregnant today, it gives that person the tool to maneuver the unjust system. [Yeah.] Because without those tool that she shouldn’t have to go get, but she has to go get in order to maneuver the current systematic issue that we have with fertility and healthcare and sizeism.

Nicola: Yeah. And these people make incredible parents. Like, ugh, they’re, [I’m sure] it is breaking generational trauma on so many levels because the tools that they’re learning now, they’re teaching to their kids and their kids are growing up knowing how to advocate for themselves, knowing that diet culture is rubbish. You know, it’s just, it’s just beautiful.

Stephanie: It must be very motivating to do the work at the individual level when you see the big picture like this.

Nicola: Yeah, I mean, it’s the individual level that really gives me the energy myself to go for the big stuff like the small wins, the being able to stand up to the doctor, the positive pregnancy test, that stuff is the fuel for me to go bigger and to make bigger, [to do the big work.]

Nicola: Absolutely. And I would not be able to do it without it

Stephanie: Because for people who’ve never done activism at a bigger level, that is energy draining. [Mm-hmm.] Right. Like that requires a lot of energy to work at that level. So getting the victory at the individual level and seeing like the ripple effect [mm-hmm] is what fuels the energy we have to spend on the bigger work.

Nicola: Yeah. Because it often feels like you’re just banging ahead against the brick wall. Like, you’ve gotta try so many doors before one will open and it just, yeah, it really is magical, you know? And these people should be getting this care already. They shouldn’t have to pay me to get it. But I feel so honored to be able to walk along that path with them for a short while.

Stephanie: And what’s the name of your program that helps them lauren at Bolt Safety and Advocacy level?

Nicola: So it’s called Supported. So it’s like a 12 month program where we go through all of the different tools and things that they need, and it’s a really beautiful community container so that they can access support both from me and from other people who are also navigating similar situations

Stephanie: Because when of the side effect of any discrimination or any injustice is isolation. [Mm-hmm. Yes.] You think you’re the only one. [Mm-hmm.] When in fact you’re not, but the way the system works is isolating you. [Yeah.] So being in community like that, just by doing that is healing.

Nicola: Yeah. It’s so powerful and it’s beyond magical because there’s so much more that people get from being in a container like that. And because of the very nature facility, that itself is isolating and because of then the added layer of the guilt and the shame that so many folks feel through this process. They don’t wanna talk to their friends, they don’t wanna talk to their family, they don’t wanna reach out. So it’s like this double layer of isolation. So it’s, yeah, it’s beautiful to watch.

Stephanie: So, I wanna get into, also for people listening to this, because there’s a lot of professionals and practitioner that listen to my podcast. I wanna talk a little bit about you as an individual creating a business like that. Like we’ve talked about, like activism and all of that. But how has been your journey of building that kind of business?

Nicola: Mm, it’s been…

Stephanie: Have you ever talked about this publicly before? This is your first, okay. We’re like revealing the curtain. We’re pulling the curtain people.

Nicola: Oh, it’s been amazing to run a business. Like it has been the quickest, like self acceptance, self exploratory process ever. Like it has been a whirlwind of delving deep into who I am, who I thought I was. And what it means to be a person doing this work. But yeah, I mean I have had many highs and lows. I have a billion different ways I’ve tried to run a business and different, different ways that I’ve used as measures of success and I’m coming to terms slowly with how my brain works now.

Nicola: I have a feeling that I may be autistic, I may have a D H D, and so really leaning into how my brain works and how I like to do things and what works for me over the past six months has been really powerful in helping me get to a point where my business feels not only sustainable, but exciting again, because for a long time, it’s been up and down and like things have gone really well and then I’ve crashed and then my energy levels are super low, and then I feel like I’m gonna have to go and get a job again. And then I feel okay again and then things go really well. And it’s just been this rollercoaster and I’ve been bringing up babies in the meantime. Like my business is as old as my oldest, oldest child now,nine years. So my business has never existed without me being a parent at the same time and navigating that identity and how kind of the patriarchy defines what the role of a mother should look like and how to navigate wanting to work on my business and what that means about me as a person when I’m also being dragged into parenthood. Like it’s been a real interesting ride for sure.

Stephanie: I love that you say it’s been a journey of self-discovery, [mm-hmm] of like uprooting things that you would’ve never otherwise uprooted and faced.

Nicola: I feel so honored and so lucky to have had the opportunity to do that. I feel very privileged and I am privileged to be able to be in a position now where my business doesn’t have to bring in the full money that my family and my household needs in order to run. And I want it to be there eventually. But because I have my husband and he works full-time and he has a stable job, like a proper salary job that gives us the flexibility for me to be able to be, yeah, to follow my dream, to really follow my instincts about what I want my business to look like and how I want it to work and how I want it to run. And that’s, yeah, I know it will come to fruition and be able to financially support me really soon.

Stephanie: You talked about the ups and downs. [Mm-hmm.] Can we dive into that a little bit in the sense like, it has happened to me, it has happened, it’s happening to many people, no matter which business you are in, like your own business. What you sell is irrelevant, but when you’re building your own business, you often have those ups and downs. If you look back, what is one thing that you’ve learned that creates those ups and downs or that exaggerate the ups and downs?

Nicola: I think the biggest thing for me was my expectations of what it should look like. So, [oh,] when I first started my business, I had no real concept of what running a business looked like. So I had the expectations around like revenue, like I should be making X dollars per month. And I didn’t have any real concept of the fact that most businesses, because I didn’t really take myself seriously, a business at first had like capital that was invested. [Mm-hmm] and had you know this like startup fund of thousands, millions of pounds and dollars, and I had no real concept of that.

Nicola: So when I wasn’t immediately out the gate making money, I thought it was a me problem. I thought there was something wrong with the how I was doing things. And it was like my expectation of what that should look like was really skewed because of what we see in this like little bubble of online business of how things should look.

Nicola: So, I think that really exaggerated the lows for me because I thought I should be so much further along than I was, and I was comparing my like chapter one business to people’s Chapter 20. So of course it wasn’t gonna look similar, but I didn’t see behind the scenes of their businesses. I didn’t know what was going on behind the like perfect picture Instagram photos. So it’s been an eye-opener to really understand that it’s okay that I’m not making millions, like I’ve been bootstrapping this from the very beginning. I’ve been resourceful. I’ve beeninvesting in myself. I have been creating this reality of now we’ve moved from the suburbs of London to this glorious house in the countryside, and that is my vision. That is my drive. I’ve created this reality for myself.

Nicola: And whilst my business isn’t where I’ve dreamed it to be yet, that it’s non-negotiable that it’s gonna get there. It’s just a matter of when. And knowing that it’s taken me nine years to get there, now is okay, because I didn’t have millions invested at the beginning. [Mm-hmm.] I have been investing all that time and I’m really proud of what I’ve created and the body of work that I have created because, it’s so much more than just being financially viable. Like I know that the work that I have done has touched thousands of people’s lives in a really positive way.

Stephanie: And it will continue [Mm-hmm. That’s it] because it exists as a body of work for people. Like Body of Work is when you create your own theory or your own methodology, your own processes, like that Body of Work, those podcast episode, that book is gonna help millions of people in years to come. [Mm-hmm. Just, yeah.]

Stephanie: The gap. And I just wanna, because I’m a coach at heart, I can’t stop coaching, but I just wanna point out, you talked about your glorious house [mm] in the suburb, in part, your business offered you that. [Mm-hmm.] Because would you have worked in a office in London, you would’ve not had the freedom to move to the countryside?

Stephanie: [Absolutely.] Can you see that? [ Yes. Oh yeah.] It may not be the traditional Chiche money, money. But it offered you the freedom.

Nicola: Yeah. And it also offered me the, I think the insight to be able to really explore what I wanted and not settle [Yes] for less.

Stephanie: Yes. To design the life that you want [Mm-hmm] In the way that you want.

Nicola: Yeah. Without business building, without going on this entrepreneur journey, that would not even have been on my radar.

Stephanie: No. And, and as you are exploring the current, where your brains are functioning, if you try to fit yourself in what I call like oppressive business culture, you’ll never fit in the mold, in the box. You creating your business and being aware of that and creating the business that fits your brain, fits the way you think, that’s a massive anxiety, stress release for yours to come, [oh] instead of trying to fit yourself into a system that is not made for you.

Nicola: Yeah. And it changes the system, right? Like the more people that, that come in and do things their way, we are changing how it works. [Yes.] And it gives permission for other people to do the same.

Stephanie: Yes, it does. I. I have one more question that I want to get into is the whole concept of coaching. [Mm-hmm.] So you did the acupuncture for four or five years, then you started the online business I’m an advocacy level. And then recently you came to me and you did a training with me on coaching. [Yes.] How has that impacted or has an impacted or changed the way you work with people in your relationship to your business?

Nicola: Yeah, in a huge way. I think the biggest gift it gave me was, whilst I could coach, I had no confidence in my coaching and I had no confidence in the work that I gave to the world. So the very beginning thing that we did was the self coaching, and that has just been transformational for me and for my business because it has given me the tools, which I never even knew that I needed to, to reflect on what’s working on what’s not working, to give me the capacity to be able to make decisions better in my business from a place of knowing, rather from a place of, well, that’s what that person did, or that’s what that person did.

Nicola: It’s just given me so much confidence in my own intuition around that and around what my getting my needs met and feeling safer in my business. And that foundation has just given me a springboard to be able to go and make really good decisions about what’s gonna be good for me, what’s gonna be good for my business and the people that I work with. You know, what’s good for me is good for them because I show up in a, from a place of feeling energized, from feeling confident, from providing that space to feel safe. So it’s just, yeah, it’s transformed how I feel about my business and how I show up in my business, and I know that is just gonna have a huge ripple effect on every other aspect of my business.

Stephanie: I just wanna highlight something again, and just because I’m a coach, you said that your program you’re offering to people is centered around safety [Mm-hmm] and advocacy. [Yeah. ] What you just said that coaching gave you was safety to do the way you wanted to do your business, to advocate through this oppressive online business structure to do it your way. [Mm-hmm.] Do you see the parallel?

Nicola: Oh, I love that. I love how that’s mirrored in that. I think that’s really magical.

Stephanie: it’s mirrored. And people like, I just want people to hear that, that it is your work or not. The people you work with, that you hire to give you something can only give you as much as they give themselves. [Mm-hmm.] Right. So if you were to look at a scale of one to 10, you were at a, I don’t know, five or six, in your ability to provide a safe container for people working through their fertility issue. [Mm-hmm.] But by you making yourself safer through your decision, your thoughts, your feeling, you will amp up the safety you are able to give to people. Can you see that?

Nicola: Yeah. And I didn’t even know that I needed that. Like I didn’t even recognize at the beginning that that was the issue. I thought it was, yeah, I thought I was doing a great job showing up but I was just being really hard on myself. So seeing how that can grow and seeing how that, it just spreads. It just feels really, yeah,

Stephanie: But you were showing up amazingly to the capacity you had two years ago? [Mm-hmm. Yeah.] Do you know you had a capacity of six and you were showing up at six?

Nicola: Hmm. But I didn’t even realize then that I only was at a six. Like I thought that was my 10.

Stephanie: But in the way it was your 10, it was your six outta six. It was your a hundred percent safe that [Yeah] you were able to give people. Absolutely.] You’re just grown your own safety and you will continue to grow your safety [mm-hmm] and that will grow the capacity for you to offer safety to other people even more and at a different level. [Mm-hmm] That’s what I find magical about human product, which mostly are call coaching, counseling, [hmm,] right. We’re not talking about water bottle here. We’re talking about like human product, of working with human being, is that when you do your work from a place of wanting to help other people, you have no choice but to upgrade yourself. [Mm-hmm.] Not because you were broken before, just because you want to be able to offer more to people, and the only way to offer more is for you to be more, not because you were deficient, just because you’re growing and expending yourself.

Nicola: Mm-hmm. And I love that that’s, I feel, for so long I thought I put everybody else’s needs above my own. And I love that putting my own needs first is the thing that will help everybody else, right. It’s that like, [yes,] I get to put my myself first in everything and that will overflow to help everybody else.

Stephanie: For people that are in that pattern right now [Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.] of people pleasing, [Mm-hmm] what is the one thing you would advise them? Like what is the one shift that you’re now able to talk about it this way, to put your needs first and not feel guilty or shame about it?

Nicola: Oh, that is a good question. [Yes.] I think for me, the very first shift that I did that really helped me get out of that people pleasing mode was to notice when I was saying, sorry. Now this sounds, it sounds really interesting, but for the longest time, anytime anything bad happened I would just be like, sorry, sorry, sorry, and assume blame for everything. And then at one point, and I can’t remember when it was, I decided that I didn’t need to be sorry for my existence all the time, and I switched it.

Nicola: So I started, first of all, I started noticing when I was saying it, and then I started to be more intentional about what I was saying. So rather than saying sorry automatically for everything, I started saying, well, if I needed to say anything at all, which half of the time I didn’t because I didn’t have anything to be sorry for, instead of saying, sorry for being late, I’d be saying like, thank you for being patient while I was a little bit late. And I just, it was that change in, instead of apologizing for my existence, it was acknowledging that I am human and that I don’t have to say sorry for everything and I don’t have to make everybody else feel more comfortable at my own expense. And I think that like, that tiny tweak of putting myself, and I know exactly what you’re gonna say, having your own back.

Stephanie: I know

Nicola: That was it. That was the very first time I was starting to have my own back.

Stephanie: And it’s, you know, I wanna highlight that or explain to people, having your own back means being, as an adult, right, when you’re a child, your back is your parent. That’s who are designed to protect you and teach you. But when you become an adult, you have to become your own parent, your own protector. And for so many of us, the more identity your layer on yourself, as a woman, as a fat person, as a person with that is queer, whatever your identity, the more identity you layer on, the more you need to be strong for yourself, for your own self-protection. Otherwise, your safety goes down the toilet and then you start like being a people pleaser to offset your existence. [Mm-hmm.] That’s brilliant. Can we talk about doing business in fat body?

Nicola: Yes.

Stephanie: Okay. So we were doing an exercise recently and I can’t remember what it was, but we’re talking about the possibility thing, we were talking about in terms of how can we see in the future and the possibility, and you said for you, you almost had this thought or this belief that fat women could not be successful in business. [Mm-hmm.]

Stephanie: Can you talk about that? And meanwhile, you’re trying to build your business for eight, nine years at that point. [Yeah.] And you were holding the belief that fat people or fat women could not be successful in business.

Nicola: I held on really tight to that belief for all that time because I think for me, I saw a lot of people around me having, perceived to be having things that I wanted. So people would have traditional book deals, for example, or appear to have really thriving businesses, and I felt like I was just paddling so hard into that water, and I made that belief that because I was fat, because I wasn’t typically the thin ideal of, thin, blonde, beautiful, [beauty] exactly. That, that, that was why, because I was sold that, right, we’re all sold that from a really young age that you get to be successful when you are thin, you get to have success.

Nicola: And I internalize that so hard and so deeply and it was only since that call, since we talked about that, that I really realized that it wasn’t the fact that I was fat that was holding me back, but the fact that I believed that fat people can’t have successful businesses and that was what’s holding me back. So I have been doing a lot of work on that very belief since then.

Stephanie: Yeah. And again, that is your fat or your own, any identities that are oppressed in society. It is more difficult for people with various identity in certain sector but it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna be your reality. [Mm-hmm.] You can think about it differently and make it easier for you.

Nicola: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Like privilege is a very, very real thing. Like there’s no way to deny that. We know that fat people get paid less in their work. [Yeah.] We know that this happens, but what was happening for me is that that belief was leading me to make decisions that weren’t benefiting me. [Yes.] So rather than believing that reality, I choose to believe a different reality where fat people have really successful businesses and that helps me make different decisions in my day-to-day life.

Stephanie: Yeah. You were talking about paddling. [Mm-hmm]. A lot of us fall into that, that we have to offset where we’re not good enough because society tells us, because that’s what we believe about ourself. So we work, we we need the art, [Yeah] like really, really hard and we get exhausted. We go the high, the lows, because we’re trying to offset are not good enough for, wherever it comes from is irrelevant, but what it does is it prevents us from accessing success, whatever success looks like to you because we’re paddling too hard. [Yeah.] And I think that’s what you’re reestablishing in your business right now.

Nicola: Yeah. It so many times to me that yeah, that paddle, battle, battle, oh no, I feel like I’m gonna die now. I’m so tired. So yeah, I am making some big changes into how I show up now so that I have that energy sustainable because I wanna keep doing this work, and I can only do that if it’s sustainable, and I don’t want to go into these burnouts anymore, like that’s not enjoyable for me. And it doesn’t have to be like that because I can choose to show up and to do what I need to do and have a really successful business in my body that exists now, which is fat.

Stephanie: Exactly. I just wanna take a minute to talk to this, like at a global level and I’m becoming more and more aware of that. We’re talking about oppressive business culture, how we build businesses and there’s another way to do it, and we’re breaking the paradigm to do that. You’re talking about breaking the paradigm infertility, food or body image for me, like everywhere we’re talking about breaking paradigm and killing the sacred cow. I want people to think about what the circumstance you’re in, that you’re a lawyer, that you’re an accountant, that you’re a social worker, and I want you to think in term of, in the work you’re doing, which paradigm is present that causes you to have to paddle and work really, really hard.

Stephanie: It’s not just online business culture, I’m coaching a lawyer right now in one of my group, and it’s the lawyer culture, it’s the accountant culture. Like those paradigm are everywhere.

Nicola: Capitalism, just right. You can’t escape it.

Stephanie: But you can do it differently.

Nicola: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Stephanie: And it starts with you. [Mm-hmm.] Like yes, there’s a problem systemic, we need to address the systemic issue. [Mm-hmm.] But the way for you to have the strength, the capacity, the resilience to address the systemic issue in your environment is by first starting with you. [Mm-hmm.] And building that resilience and you to first like organize the way you’re doing your career, your work, so it’s safe for you to do it so you then you can go out and change the system or the culture of your industry. Why are you laughing?

Nicola: It’s just so exciting. Like in just imagining all these little people in their lawyer bubbles, [yes] fantasy bubbles, and we’re just all smashing it down on our own little bit. [Yes] We’re all doing it together and it’s just, yeah, it’s exciting.

Stephanie: To me, that’s what coaching is. Coaching is activism at the individual level. [Mm-hmm.] Right. If I can help people gain the resilience, the strength, the confidence, the mental capacity, then they’re gonna go in their own bubble and make changes. And all of us collectively, like you said, are going to blow up and make changes at the systemic level. But for the next five years, 10 years, it’s at the individual level. [Hmm.] A Beautiful conversation.

Nicola: Thank you so much for this. It’s just been, yeah, really nourishing and it really fills me up and makes me excited to do this work.

Stephanie: Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you would like to bring up to, any words of wisdom or anything we skipped over?

Nicola: I think we covered a lot. [Yeah.] I guess the biggest thing for me is to just obviously work with you because this has been transformative. You know, the work that we’ve done together has been huge for me. But yeah, believing that you are worthyto invest in has just been the biggest and best lesson for me in my business.

Stephanie: In every angle. [Mm-hmm.] That you’re a fat person wanting to be pregnant, investing in yourself to go get the resource [Yeah] that I’m not available anywhere through you and to the people working on their way of thinking, their mindset, all of that, you are worthy to invest in yourself and yeah, you shouldn’t have to, but it is what it is. [Mm-hmm.] Like we need to make ourselves stronger individually, It’s from every angle possible.

Nicola: Yeah. You deserve it.

Stephanie: And what is the name of your podcast in your book? Just so people can grab the first layer of you, remind everyone the name of your podcast in your book.

Nicola: They’re both called Fat and Fertile. So you can grab the book on Amazon, and then the podcast is just wherever you listen to your podcast.

Stephanie: And then you start your journey there. And for many women listening to this, it’s referral. [Mm-hmm.] When you hear someone talking about their difficulty or hinting that they’re having difficulty with fertility, send them to those free resources of the podcast to get them started to know that there’s another way.

Nicola: Yeah. And they’re not alone.

Stephanie: But for many women, they think there’s no other, stuck doing that, and it’s not true. So let them make their way through your podcast and then see if they need some help. Thank you very much Nicola for your time today.

Nicola: Thank you.