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

Alright, Nahal thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Love over Fear Wellness is the name of my private practice where I provide mental health therapy as well as Trauma-Informed Personal Training. The name of my practice is so special to me that I even have it tattooed on my body! Love > Fear. The way I think about anything is basically the way I think about everything. I believe if we are able to really get in-tuned with ourselves and assess where we are making decisions from, we will end up in one of these two categories – from a place of love or from a place of fear.

Love is the mindset we have when we are in alignment with our true selves. Love guides us to make decisions that are compassionate, truthful and lead us towards a more authentic way of living. Martha Beck, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, says that the track of purpose is joy in the body, and following the feeling of freedom is how we will know we are on the right path. The feeling of being trapped is the opposite of that – that is how we know which path not to follow.

Fear is the mindset we have when we make decisions that are not in alignment with who we are and our purpose. When we make decisions out of fear, we are essentially self-abandoning. We do this for various reasons, sometimes as a way to get our needs met that sticks with us long after we have a need for it. Fear can lie to us and keeps us replaying negative patterns that halt our growth and keep us in survival mode.

Once I became clear on areas in my life that I was living in fear, I started to see the patterns that kept me playing small and limiting myself. Each decision we make, either big or small, is rooted in either love or fear. Love is always the way home.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Nahal Robinson, I am an individual and couples therapist as well as a trauma-informed personal trainer.

As most healers in any capacity, I got into my craft from my own healing journey. As a child, I grew up in a home with addiction and therefore codependency was a learned behavior I picked up on to get my needs of safety and love met. Essentially, I learned to get my self-worth from the approval of others rather than intrinsically from within myself, which is a very painful and out-of-control way to live. I always had an innate sense that this was not the way life was meant to be lived and at 19 I started going to therapy and began my journey of self-transformation.

As a therapist, I specialize in attachment patterns and somatic experiencing. Attachment patterns, like codependency and people-pleasing for example, can be a window into how we connect with ourselves and the outside world. Understanding and identifying the patterns we replay in our lives is the first step to getting out of the loop. Once we can identify them and understand the root causes for them, we can begin to implement new ways of relating to ourselves and others, increasing our self-worth and our capacity for life.

Somatic experiencing is basically our bodies way of speaking to us. When we experience situations that our nervous system is unable to process through, it gets stored in the body as trauma. Stored trauma in the body can impact us in various harmful ways and lead to injury and inflammation. Our minds and our bodies are connected and we can’t truly heal one without addressing the other. Getting connected with the body and understanding your own cues is just as important to healing as mental work.

I have been a personal trainer now for 11 years in the Austin area. Strength training was my very first passion and the first time I encountered the empowering feeling that came from accomplishing something entirely on my own. My self-love journey began with lifting weights and committing to myself to follow through with a goal. I am hugely passionate about movement as a form of healing and empowering, and that is what lead me to create my own modality of Trauma-Informed Strength Training.

Trauma-Informed Strength Training is a form of exercising that prioritizes a sense of safety, embodied connection and nervous system regulation. Many people who have been through trauma feel disconnected from themselves and sometimes unsafe in their own bodies. When we are disconnected from ourselves, our nervous system is dysregulated, which is not the optimal state to be when exercising (or doing anything for that matter!). When we can learn to connect with our bodies and understand our cues for dysregulation, we are in a much more empowered state that promotes strength and healing. I prioritize a safe space for my clients to feel comfortable moving their bodies and focus on mind to muscle activation during strength training.

With both therapy and personal training, I believe when we can come back into ourselves, unlearn self-abandoning, and discover the power that we hold, our entire lives shift.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Something that I think every business owner can attest to is how challenging it can be to stick to the plan you set out for yourself. Building a business is hardly ever linear or pans out the way you set out for it to.

In 2014, I became a personal trainer at Life Time Fitness. I worked there for 4 years and learned so much about movement, lifting, business and myself. At Life Time, the personal trainers were 100% commission, so no hourly or salary. It was also up to us to get our own clients as they were not handed to us. This was my first sales job ever and I went into it thinking it would be mostly me creating workout plans and did not anticipate the sales aspect at all. I adapted, I learned and I grew.

In 2017, I started graduate school to get my masters in professional counseling to become a therapist. Going to school, being a mom and having a full time job was a lot on my plate and I decided it was time to pivot so I set out to start my own personal training business, and in 2018, that is just what I did. It was going well and then life and covid happened. Pivot again.

In 2020 I graduated with my masters in professional counseling and was interviewing at practices to start my career as a therapist when my husband got laid off work. Back to the drawing board we went and we ended up deciding I would be a stay at home mom to our 2 young kids while he switched careers. Pivot.

In 2023, 3 kids deep at this point, I was ready to pursue my therapy career. I started interviewing at practices again when I discovered that Texas passed a law that LPC Associates (new therapists out from grad school) were able to start their own practices. Back into my business mode I went and started Love Over Fear Wellness with Nahal. Little did I know that not only would I be living out my dream as a therapist, but along the way I would be able to incorporate my love for personal training back into my practice.

Long story short, never be afraid to go back to the drawing board. You are not starting back at ground zero when one plan doesn’t work out. You are going back to the drawing board with more wisdom, more experience, more grit than ever before, each time. There is so much to gain when you try new things, even if it doesn’t work out the way you hoped. Sometimes where you end up is so much better.

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

I had to unlearn self-abandonment in many aspects of my life, business being a huge one, in order to get where I am now. This showed up massively when it came to trusting the process. Before I discovered strength training, I cannot recall a time where I committed fully to a goal and stayed all the way through. In 2016, I competed in my first (and only) NPC Bodybuilding show where I took home 5th place. If you have ever prepped for a bodybuilding show, you know how brutal the regiment is. It was 14 weeks of essentially having no life other than gym, protein and water intake (oh and working and being a mom too). The best thing that came out of that competition was not my 6 pack (lol), it was the pure natural high I felt from being so proud of myself for committing until the end. It truly didn’t matter if I got a medal or not.

Similar to this mindset in business, is that sometimes you just have to trust the process and commit to your goal and yourself without having instant validation on the way there. It really does take just putting one foot in front of the other, following the plan you set out for yourself even when it doesn’t seem to be providing results at the moment, and know that the results will come later. Trusting the process means believing you are worth attaining what is at the other end of the finish line, and getting there affirms that belief. One foot in front of the other. One step at at at a time. That is all it is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.therapywithnahal.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/love.over.fear.wellness/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61552395766401
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nahal-robinson-128a56104/
• Other: Email: [email protected]

Image Credits

Lady Bird Photo Co.