We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Heather Holloway McCash. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Heather below.

Hi Heather , thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Risk taking is a different experience after a major illness. When you’ve been so sick you weren’t sure if you’d wake up the next day, moving to another city and learning a whole new career doesn’t seem like such a big deal. After 15 years with undiagnosed neurological Lyme disease and one successful year of treatment, I moved back to Nashville from New York City. I decided to get certified to teach Pilates. I’d taken a lot of Pilates in the past but I didn’t fully understand how the certification process worked. I still wasn’t feeling 100% after being sick for so long but I knew I had to see if this career would work for me.

Learning to teach Pilates when your brain is healing is difficult. My brain was on overload trying to remember the order of the exercises, names of muscles and bones, along with movement cues. I wasn’t used to studying and had to teach myself how to learn new things again. I had to work hard to get strong enough to do the exercises myself, to pass my final tests. I hadn’t even been cleared to exercise for a year when I started my first certification in Beginner Mat.

Pilates is healing exercise and through the process of learning and doing, I healed my brain and body so they could work together again. I took a huge risk when I invested thousand of dollars and hours in training to start new career in fitness but it worked. By the end I was a different person. I had more control of my body. I developed strength where there’d been muscle atrophy. I could speak at my normal pace without having to think so hard about what to say. I don’t know that I would have taken such a big risk if I hadn’t been so sick before. Maybe it was a little wacky to do something so challenging when I was still healing. I had no idea how hard it would be but I also didn’t realize how the entire process would heal me and prepare me for a new life. Twelve years later, I’m still teaching and in my own business. The risk was worth it.

Heather , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Pilates Instructor and a writer. I love to help people find their strength and confidence through movement or words. I excel at teaching people how to get back into exercise after time away due to illness, injury or just lack of time. I create a safe space, for healthy movement so you can find a better relationship with your body and exercise. I started teaching Pilates in 2010 after working on Wall Street. I discovered I was sick with Lyme Disease and it had been undiagnosed for 15 years. After a year of intensive treatment, I was ready to do something new with life. I wanted to give back to others through movement so I moved back to Nashville to train with my former Pilates Instructor.

I’m also a writer. I decided to try teaching Pilates because I thought I’d also have time to write and I’ve been able to do that. I love to tell stories that need to be heard. I recently wrote a spoken word ballet, that’s going to be performed by the Nashville School of the Arts Dance Company, December 2nd at Hillwood High School. The ballet shares the stories of women’s bodies and what they go through. Teaching Pilates gives me a different view of how people feel about their bodies and the struggles they have. I interviewed women of different ages and experience about their bodies and wrote poems to share those thoughts and feelings. The students have taken the words and choreographed movement to fully share the picture of what it’s like to be in the experience of walking through the world as a woman.

As someone that loves to learn from others and their experiences I decided to share my own, in my book But First… A memoir of a backwards life. I talk about my experiences growing up in the theater, dealing with a major illness in a major city mostly by myself and narrowly escaping 9/11.

I also have a marketing company and help others share their own stories. My favorite aspect of marketing is writing newsletters. I love using story to help potential clients learn more about businesses and how they can work with them. I started this aspect of my business when I realized how many Pilates Teachers needed marketing support. Other teachers I worked with liked my marketing so much, they asked me to do theirs and my business grew to working with product companies and artist collectives. I help small business owners find more clarity in who they serve, create strategic marketing campaigns and write or adjust copy. Marketing yourself is hard but I make it easier so you can do more of what you love.

I’m the type of person that looks at someone or their business and can see potential. I feel so lucky to help people unlock their movement to become stronger and do things they never thought they could do with their body, or their business. I use my creative problem solving skills to find solutions even when it seems like there’s no other way. If you feel stuck, come talk to me and I bet I can help you find a way to get moving again whether it’s in your body or your business.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I’ve had to unlearn is perfection. As a dancer growing up in a professional dance school, I had hours of looking at myself and my friends dancing all day. I wanted to be a dancer so badly, that I tried to be perfect. I thought if I was perfect, they couldn’t deny me the opportunity to dance. That pursuit of perfection instead caused a lot of problems including a career ending injury my senior year of high school.

When I was in college for communications and journalism, I took a film and video editing class. I could no longer dance but I found a way to create dance by cutting clips of classic and modern cartoons to the Beastie Boys song Body Movin’ to make it look like choreography. I made tiny cuts and had a specific idea of what I wanted the end product to be. There were times I made a cut and it didn’t cut the clip exactly where I wanted. But I always played it back with the music to see how it looked anyway. The mistakes always turned out better than I could’ve planned myself. I decided to allow for mistakes, to let things happen without so much force. When I let go of my expectation for the outcome things are easier and flow better.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My entire life is a story of resilience. I’ve been faced with many challenges from illness to career changes and I rarely back down. I might pick a new path, but I always find my way back or a better way. When I moved back to Nashville in 2010 to start my Pilates training, I needed people to practice teaching. I hadn’t reconnected with many people in town yet, so I started teaching some of my friends back in New York over Skype. I called it SkyPilates. I always offered online sessions to clients.

When there was threat of business shut downs during the pandemic, I started telling my clients that hadn’t tried online sessions yet how to do them and what to expect. I had a lot of practice teaching online, which is it’s own skill. I was already set up to teach online and simply told clients when that happened. As a result I, I kept most of my clients and had zero transition time into online sessions. I was able to keep my business going when many fitness studios closed. When the studio where I worked closed later that year, I was able to start my own Pilates studio and make money my first year in my own business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heatherhollowaymccash.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healthyheatherpilates/
• Other: Podcast interview for the Nashville Creator Series with the SoBros Network: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nashville-creator-series/id1603284703?i=1000579690797

Image Credits
Jennifer Gouge