We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicci Howard a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nicci, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you recount a time when the advice you provided to a client was really spot on? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

One of the most impactful pieces of advice I have more my clients is to be patient and to give themselves grace in their perfectionism.  You cannot be 100% perfect and on-point 100% of the time and if that is the expectation then you will be disappointed when something comes up and you will force yourself to feel like a failure if you don’t hit a particular goal in a particular time frame. Most of my clients are high-achieving, driven and fast-paced busy women who thrive in feeling an seeing change immediately, but something I have to remind them is that whatever you do to achieve the results, you will have to do to maintain the results. So if someone cuts out all of their favorite foods just to lose 10 lbs then what happens when they add those back in? They’ll go back to how they were before they cut it out. The goal should be to learn how to eat the foods you like, within the bounds of what your body needs so that you can make it a lifestyle and can do it forever.  When you have patience then things go easier, you feel better and have a lot more energy for life. When you feel better and have more energy, making decisions in life, in the kitchen and for the long haul is so much easier.

Nicci, 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?

I began learning about nutrition and fitness during my undergraduate degree and became a personal trainer while also having a successful career in PR, sales and marketing. My side-passion turned in to a career when I moved with my husband to the midwest and I said “if we move out of San Diego I get to open a gym”…so I did. It was a way to keep me busy a drive my entrepreneurial spirit while being a mom to my brand new baby girl. I did nutrition education for the local grocery store, for the local city government as well as nutrition seminars for some other trainers and their gyms, nutrition became my specialty in business and educating others while fitness was what I did for “fun” with my clients also. I had that very successful gym for many years and loved every minute of it but I did not love every minute of not being near the coast. So we moved back to San Diego and I closed my brick and mortar business but migrated my clients to an online business format. I was able to keep my personal training clients until they found in-person trainers, if that’s what they wanted, and I was able to keep most of the nutrition clients with me for many years to come. I am a fast-paced and driven person and that paired with my love of all things nutrition, science and fitness helped me carve out a great niche for myself and my company.

How I got to where I am today and how I turned my HeartStrong Fitness studio into The StressLess Lifestyle that is now the success that it is is driven by my own experience with women and myself. My own experience with stress, overwhelm, burnout, having kids, hormone imbalance, weight gain, and working like a crazy woman with no boundaries certainly took it’s toll. And, I had to rethink my relationship to food and fitness.

Flashback to me as a work-from-home career woman who traveled constantly, I became a work-a-holic with absolutely no boundaries (picture me in labor with my daughter while on my blackberry…sad, but true). Then came #momLife and hormone imbalance….and the StressLess Life. I actually love working out. In college I used my time at the gym as stress relief, but during the times in life where I was overwhelmed, under-slept and too busy to truly take care of myself deeply, I realized I needed to step back from the “hard core” mindset to heal my hormones and take care of my self, and is see the very same thing in many of my high-achieving women clients. After a time of learning about imbalance, how stress affects the deep health and how deep health affects fat loss and aging, I realized this was where women need the most help. Nutrition, most importantly, stress management and fitness secondarily.

Over the years I have also acquired certifications and specialty classes in diabetes fitness, pre/postpartum fitness and metabolic conditioning and am PN1-SSR certified (Sleep, Stress Management & Recovery). I have been teaching fitness and helping people with their energy and health for over 22 years! It is something I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. My business is still online, it has thrived this way, and I still love to do speaking engagements and teaching others the basics of nutrition while learning to balance out a busy life.

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

I have made a few pivots over the years. I had originally planned on “ruling the world” and being a major player in the industry I was working in previously within Corporate America. I thought I could do that and have my kids and be “all the things”. Turns out I wanted something different once I actually had my kids, I wanted to be around and I was traveling for my career, so I quit. I got lucky though, that I had already become a personal trainer but wasn’t doing anything with it. I had just started studying something I had a huge interest in because I like to do lots of things. That interest because the open door to my first big pivot. I was able to open my gym and I already had the education, the certification and the knowledge because I had picked mentors and began learning many years prior, it made my big “pivot” much less scary. So, al that said, I think that the biggest pivot I made was when I closed my brick and mortar and went online in 2016. Online business was not the same back then as it is now. And frankly, it was easier for me back then then it is now. Now you’re contending with any and every influencer who has a major reach, back then it was clients I had build a solid face-to-face repertoire with who know your expertise, who understand your knowledge and who have seen you inaction in “real life” and their family, friends and referrals, it was a real face-to-face, traditional way of running a business. Pivoting from being a brick and mortar business owner where traditional marketing worked and newspaper ads got you somewhere to an online business that has been thrust into the world of social media and contending with all that comes along with that is a major pivot mentally and in how you run your business.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

When working with other people, as I do as a Nutrition, Fitness and Stress/recovery management coach, it is very important to remember that not everyone is the same and that not everyone has the same goals. Each person you work with may have the same goal in mind but what it will take to help them reach that goal may be wildly different from the last person you helped. We are individuals and the way we help people should be individual. You have to have compassion for the struggle that one person may have when others may find it simple. You have to have empathy for where someone is coming from or where they’re at in the moment and help them though that in addition to helping them stay on path to their nutrition or fitness goals. Understanding how people work is just as important, if not way more important, than understanding how to start a business and keep it running.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.stressless-lifestyle.com
• Instagram: @nicci_stressless and @thestresslesslifestyle
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thestresslesslifestyle
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/niccole-damico-howard

Image Credits
Britteny Veir