We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nilüfer Ece Bozkan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Nilüfer Ece thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

I think that success can look a lot of different ways and the image of success is always shifting and changing. I think that what I thought would make me successful five years ago, is definitely different than what I think success would look like for me now. I think that the goal posts are always moving up as you grow and learn more about yourself, the industry, the clients, everything.

To be successful, and to keep up with whatever your changing image of success is, I think that you need to have an open mind and to be able to change and adapt with the circumstances. You also need to be able to dive deep into something that you have no idea about and work through whatever gets thrown at you without giving up. Failure is pretty inevitable when your’e trying to make your own path, but I think that it is also super rewarding, and you have to learn how to use them as ways to help your success grow.

Ever since I was young, I wanted to be a doctor. All the way until college, I even studied pre-med and biology. However, in school, I realized that these classes were just not for me. Everyone seemed to be enjoying their time way more than I seemed to be, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do anymore and felt really lost. I even decided to do an internship at a local hospital following around surgeons and watching them operate on children, when I realized that this was absolutely not for me. The healthcare system was and still is largely a sick care system. Simply treating illness and disease that we already have without showing people how to care for their bodies before they even become patients. I suddenly realized that I could not do this. But how could that be?

My idea of success for so long would be achievement of getting into medical school, but since I couldn’t see myself doing that anymore, how would I ever become successful? After what felt like the longest and hardest time trying to figure out what I could do with my life, I came across a health coaching school. It was everything that I enjoyed about health, nutrition and wellness in general and even more. I had the ability to learn how to actually work with people and how I could help people before sickness developed. I could show them how to live a really good life, and they didn’t even need to necessarily be sick to come to me.

This changed my whole view on success. I suddenly took a whole new direction with my life, however unintentional it was and suddenly my idea of success was to have a thriving health consulting practice. I wanted people to come to me not because they necessarily felt awful, but because they wanted to learn how to feel even better in their body.

This was my idea of success until about a year ago when I finished my 200 hour yoga teacher training. I felt so amazing in my body and everything that I learned in such a short period of time that I felt the need to incorporate yoga in my business plan. I needed other people to know that yoga isn’t just doing crazy poses, but that its about how you feel in your mind and body. Now my idea of success has changed, yet again.

I don’t think that this means that I will never be successful but I think that it means that success looks different to everyone and that in order to feel successful you just have to keep doing something everyday that brings meaning to your life and that genuinely makes you say at the end of the day, “I did that today.”

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

For people who may not know about me, I am Nilüfer. I am a health consultant and have my own practice, meaning that I help clients one on one or in a group setting, learn about themselves, their health and figure out how they can live their best lives. What that means in more detail is that I help clients look at their nutrition, their lifestyle, work-life balance and I help them with meal planning and recipe ideas. I also help clients with specific issues such as weigh management, detoxing, migraines, allergies, period symptoms, digestion, fitness and skin health.

I also make sure that we are not just looking at what symptom that they have, but I help them dive deeper as generally a symptom that we have that is visible normally stems from conditions in the body that are not visible. So we go into the root cause of things.

I am also a yoga teacher so that allows me to help clients on an additional layer meaning I can help with meditation, goal setting and mindfulness. I also do private one on one or small group yoga with clients as well.

I am most proud of the connection that I get with clients and how comfortable my clients are able to get with me. I appreciate that as I also get to hear about so many wonderful stories and learn something new each time myself.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In my experience, I think that when people hear that you’re starting your own business, they don’t really take you seriously. I think that most people don’t know all of the work and struggle that goes into the backbone of a business before you can even put it out there. A lot of the time, before you even announce to the world what you are doing, you have already put so many hours of hard work and research and dedication to the project, but to the rest of the world it just seems like you have put out an instagram post stating that you’re accepting clients now. A lot of the time the real hard work goes unnoticed and I think until you can get yourself to a position where you can prove to people everything that you have done and everything that you can do all on your own, you need to show real inner strength and faith in yourself. That shows resilience. Not giving up when it seems like you’re doing everything and working so hard with very little to show for it yet. Everyone goes at their own pace building up their own success.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I read a lot of books and am constantly trying to expand my mind. The latest book I actually just read is called Inner Engineering by Sadhguru. It is a relatively quick read, and a bit abstract, however I quite enjoyed it as it taught me to appreciate everything, even the tiny things in life and to live in awe of the world around you. This made me realize, even when it felt like everything was falling apart, that everything is still okay. The world is not actually falling apart, and it taught me to be grateful for everything that I do have.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wellnesswithnilufer.com
• Instagram: @wellness_with_nilufer
• Facebook: Nilufer Ece Bozkan
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilufer-ece-bozkan4/
• Youtube: @wellness_with_nilufer

Image Credits
All photos taken by myself or family