We were lucky to catch up with Lynn Lessell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lynn, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?

You may ask, “Why do you want to tell us about starting your practice? What’s so important about that?”

The important reason for starting my practice is something that I believe will tell you a lot about me and why I do what I do. That said, I’d like to start with what led up to going out on my own.

First, let me say that I never intended to establish a career as a coach even though oddly enough people would always ask me if I was a therapist. So, why did I become a coach? Great question. It all happened unexpectedly several years ago when I was managing two wellness centers. As a manager, I was already helping patients with their care plans, their treatments, and understanding the importance of taking care of themselves but I didn’t feel like I was providing them with every tool they needed. Let’s face it, why should they listen to me, I was just a manager.

I began thinking about my journey along with the beliefs I had to change. That led me to start researching how I could bring additional tools into the centers while also adding value to who I could be for the patients. I established an expansion plan for the practices and invested in a program to become a health coach. When I brought this business plan to the owner, he was impressed and encouraged me to follow through until it was time to launch. It was then that the plug was pulled, and I heard ‘Get them in, get them out, get paid- forget the rest’. I was crushed. I had invested thousands of dollars to become certified and endless hours working on this plan and it ended in a moment. All I could do at that moment was to continue to do my best on the job as I had been doing all along. I needed the job. My heart was heavy. After all the medical offices I’d worked in over the years and all the patients that seemed to need more than they received, I thought I was finally going to be able to make a difference. I felt defeated and then I was angry. I stayed on the job despite my disappointment, continued to complete my health coach certification, and went on to certify as a mastery life coach. Then one day it happened. I was called into the office and told to do even less than what I’d been doing all along and was cut off from dealing with the patients altogether. At that moment I simply said, “If I understand what you’re saying, you’re telling me I no longer have a job so I’m going home!” For the first time in a long while, I felt relief. I had no idea what to do next. I had invested thousands of dollars and now had no paycheck. OUCH! As I headed home, I realized what had to come next. For years I was limited in the ways I could help patients and now as a certified health and life coach, I could help others without anyone telling me I can’t! That was the day I established Itz Why® LLC in the community and began letting the world know I was on a mission to help others the way I wish someone would have helped me. It wasn’t easy going out on my own and I faced many unexpected challenges but it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. More important than that, I’m helping others transform their lives to prioritize their mental and physical health while gaining personal growth and business achievement as a whole person without sacrifice or guilt. Establishing my practice was never my career goal yet now it’s the foundation of my purpose to help people have the tools and understanding about how whole health and wellness doesn’t have to feel impossible to achieve!

If you thinking about spreading a message, one that transformed your life in a way no one has ever shared with you before, don’t be afraid to stand out from the masses. Making a plan, taking a risk, and creating what you know allows you to become who you were meant to be is worth it. Always remember that it takes more courage to ask for help if you need it than to fumble blindly on your own.

Lynn, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

How did you get into your industry/business/discipline/craft, etc.?

I’m incredibly proud to be named the Identity Coach by my clients because of the life transformations they’ve experienced. Through my life’s journey, I’ve learned how daily chronic stress, regardless of its origin, becomes so invisible and toxic that you can get very lost inside yourself. I felt alone and thought my destiny was “for worse” not for better, that I had no choices, and my only option was to simply exist through each day as best as possible. So, why do I do what I do today? I hit rock bottom and discovered that what I should have been doing all along was taking back control of my life and treating stress like an annoying bug buzzing in my ear. I won’t say it was easy, but it changed my life and now I love both my life and myself. I’m passionate about spreading the word that if you feel alone…you’re not. If you think there are no other options…there are. If you don’t think it’s possible for you…let’s have a conversation so you can take back control instead of hitting rock bottom like I did. “Itz Why” I became a coach.

What type of products/services/creative works do you provide and what problems do you solve for your clients?

As the founder of Itz Why® LLC, “ME” Monday®, and IPP Inner Power Partners™ (IPP™), I’m passionate about having as many tools as possible to help my clients and colleagues. I’m a certified health coach, certified mastery life coach, certified facilitator of Compassionate Integrity Training (CIT), certified in Functional Body Systems, trained under the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches (NBHWC), recently certified in Hypnotherapy, and have a degree in business management and marketing.

I work with individual clients who feel like they’re doing everything they can, yet it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. As we work together, they discover what a quality lifestyle can look like in every area of their life whether they want to lose weight, eat better, feel better, figure out who they want to be, or find the success path that fits them best, for example. For each individual, it looks and feels different and it’s a one-step-at-a-time process.

Depending on what each client wants to achieve, the services I provide are customized to their needs. I provide health coaching, mastery life coaching, Hypnotherapy, and consulting for stress management. I’m a writer, and motivational speaker. In the future, I hope to bring the transformation that occurs among individuals in IPP™ to teams within companies. This would enable employees to have less stress and work more cohesively together so productivity levels for the entire company increase and everyone wins.

Individual clients who work with me as a personal coach focus on a variety of topics and most often aren’t trying to look for a new identity. That’s just a consequence of the self-discovery they uncover and the choices they never realized they could make so the doors of opportunity open for them.

I launched “ME” Monday® four years ago to declare a special day on your calendar each week to schedule some time to celebrate yourself. It’s also a free email subscription that brings weekly motivation and tips around average daily occurrences direct to your inbox. Readers look forward to the once dreaded Monday each week and some have expanded their “ME” time routine to more days of the week. You can also subscribe to the “ME” Monday® and IPP™ Thursday Podcasts on Speakeasy Studios. “ME” time is a necessity, yet it’s often misconceived as a luxury.

What do you think sets you apart from others?

As the Identity Coach, one thing that sets me apart from other coaches, I believe, is what I like to refer to as my “Spidey sense”. I’ve always had this innate ability to hear multiple layers below the surface of what someone says to help them. I’m not clairvoyant just a fine-tuned listener. I hear the things that are deeply buried within, the things they don’t hear themselves say out loud, and ask the right questions that provide the door that opens to a file that’s been stored long ago and possibly forgotten.

I use a customized technique within my coaching that creates a trusted bond with anyone I work with. That comfort level becomes a priceless tool that invites the client to explore inward and reveal what they didn’t know they didn’t know about themselves.

Clients thank me for changing their lives in remarkable ways. Our work together helps them simply experience the self-awareness that may have been ignored for a while.

As a coach, I’m known for transforming lives. As the founder of IPP™, I’ve been told I’m revolutionizing the networking industry so professionals can get back to basic relationship-building. Many of the IPP™ members openly share the great amount of personal growth and business advancement they’ve experienced from being part of this community.
All I know is I believe becoming who you want to be and connecting your most authentic self to the way you build relationships and conduct business can lead to infinite opportunities for less stress and more success.

You can’t do anything about what you don’t know you don’t know, and I ask the right questions to help you figure it out and achieve your goals!

What are you most proud of?

What I’m most proud of is my story from beginning to end both personally and professionally- it’s all connected. One couldn’t exist without the other. It’s about connecting to who you are deep down with less stress despite anything you’ve experienced good, bad, or ugly.

It’s about not letting anything or anyone cause you to ignore any part of yourself because when you allow that you can get very lost.

Always be who you want to be in all areas of your life, that one person you love being and you’re setting yourself up for SUCCESS and less stress!

I couldn’t be prouder about being able to set an example for others who feel like I used to so they know they can choose themselves, unconditionally and guilt-free!

What are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/ your brand/your work/ etc.?

I’m often asked about the Itz Why® logo. “Is that a helix or DNA?” YES! If you’re asking why- the answer is this. DNA is the foundation of our physical makeup, right? How you take care of that foundation determines how healthy you are as you get older.

We all get a fresh start when we’re born and as we grow up that foundation changes based on the choices we make.
I believe your personal why is the emotional DNA of who you are and the foundation of your potential success.
How you care for your heart and mind formulates your mental well-being as you get older; therefore, I believe that until you feel connected to your “WHY”, your emotional “DNA”, you may not feel clear about the foundation on which to build your best choices.

My journey was one of acceptance of the worst rather than believing it was possible to choose differently.
Being a mom and having a career while building a business made me realize how much the threat of daily stress was affecting me and holding me back from achieving goals.

Since I knew I couldn’t be the only one feeling this way, I set out on a mission to find others like me and build a trusted support system.

Itz Why® LLC introduced IPP™ as a small membership group at the end of 2021 by asking professionals of various industries one question… “What’s stress costing your business?”

IPP™ stands alone from other relationship-building groups because we unconventionally approach the process.
Building trust, learning about others as people, and liking others you do business with don’t just happen. It takes time and consistency. We share our expertise and experiences in different ways to support each other which results in lower stress levels and better business.

Our small group quickly expanded at the start of 2022 into two additional cities. Halfway into 2022, a fourth location was launched and now as we’re coming to the end of summer in 2023, we’re growing locations five and six.

It’s hard to believe we recently hit a one-year milestone and we continue to grow at a consistent pace.

We introduced a few new incredible member benefits this year, with a projected plan for training additional facilitators as we grow. Membership locations are expected to expand outside the local area both in person and virtually as soon as next year.

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

Thank you for asking. The main character of my story is stress. It’s invisible and it’s toxic.

The most important thing I’ve learned from my journey is how to neutralize the threat of daily stress to live a quality lifestyle.

Stress was continuously playing “whack-a-mole” with my life ( remember that carnival game?). I felt it at almost every age and every stage of my life. You may ask, “How do you neutralize THAT?”

Well, you have to stop wanting to control everything that happens.

You have to want to start looking for the person that got deeply buried under all the stress and bring that person back to the surface.

It can be different for everyone and I’ll define what it means for me. Simply said… I regularly ignored myself because of the belief that I was responsible to fulfill the expectations others had of me. I believed it was my job to ensure that everything was the best it could be for everyone else. The traumatic circumstances that continuously swirled around me didn’t have to define who I am and I had no idea! When you’re in the center of it, “you can’t see the forest through the trees”. I almost hit rock bottom more than once. The chronic stress I experienced from believing I had to ensure everyone else’s happiness was poisonous and it was unknowingly impairing my health. The very last time I hit the lowest I’ve ever been, the only way back up was to ask myself some really hard questions and do something I had never done in my life…put myself first!

The hardest questions I had to ask myself were who do I want to be and what do I want?

I had no idea. I never knew I had the option to ask myself those questions let alone consider that I had my own choices to make.

It doesn’t matter how anyone else sees the situation. What matters is it’s traumatic to you and you get to decide how you want to deal with it. So, when I realized I was the only one that had a right to have expectations of myself things began to change.

Because of my life journey, and it was a long journey, I had to dig deep to discover who I wanted to be and figure out how to love that person 100%. It may sound crazy but now I’m loving the “me” that’s a kooky, animated character who dares to be different; I’m living every day with laughter while presenting someone trustworthy, loyal, and reliable. Everything has gotten better with less stress.

You can’t change anything or anyone around you. You have to make the change from within and find your true identity. That change eventually can restore you to who you are deep down to allow you to learn how to defuse the anxiety.
It’s not about the awful things you deal with; it’s about who you want to be despite it.

What I didn’t realize then, was that I wasn’t alone. There are many people like me out there and I’m proof it can be different!

What I’ve learned along this journey is that it’s far from selfish to prioritize your wants and needs. You don’t need someone else’s permission to be happy. You must permit yourself to make the choices you think are best for you.
It felt like I was on a rollercoaster for a long time and when the ride finally stopped I was right where I was supposed to be because I made the choices necessary to get me there.

It wasn’t easy but it was worth it!

Both my physical and mental health has significantly improved and so did my rate of success.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

Becoming a coach was never something I considered doing yet it’s where I am today. If I could go back, I would not change a thing.

Because I became a coach, I became a person I love. Because I became a coach, the people I work with become people who love themselves. Why would anyone want to go back and change that?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://itzwhy.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itzwhycoach/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063619868875
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-lessell-chwc-clc-cht-bba-speaker-writer-05656b37/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8ZMCGnq0pnpFvFZC9PHJP0GVKvW0Yu0G
• Other: https://itzwhy.transistor.fm/subscribe