Today I am living my personal and professional dream, training others to run successful health coaching businesses through my company, Health Coach Institute.  Students tell me their time with us is transformational, or even revolutionary.  it is a business that I created with my co-founder Stacey Morgenstern through grit, determination, and a lot of hard work. It’s a true labor of love and I could not be more proud.

But it wasn’t always this way…

Flash back several years.

I was a professional actress struggling to earn more than $50k a year and hating my life.  Even though acting was my passion, I just wasn’t happy or fulfilled living the starving artist life, and some part of me knew that I wanted something more. At the same time I was struggling with a very complicated relationship with food. I was completely addicted to Diet Coke of all things!  I drank two liters a day and my diet practically consisted of junk food during the day followed by a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream every single night before bed. I also had a binge-eating disorder that haunted me for years. I knew something radical had to change and I knew that, to take back my life, I’d have to start changing what I ate and how I ate. That was the first step to a full-blown love affair with health.

When I discovered Health Coaching, I knew I had found my path. Suddenly everything made sense.

After several years of study and hard work, I built a six-figure coaching practice in under ten months. I had always been passionate about becoming an entrepreneur and when I discovered coaching as a career, it truly felt like it was made for me. I was like “I get paid to become my healthiest self and help others do the same? Hell yeah!”  It was as if the heavens opened above and said, “Carey, this is your new life!” I was scared though, because it seemed too good to be true—that I could turn my passion for health and personal growth into a career that helps people?! It took a little while for that to sink in, but when I saw other people doing it successfully for a living, I thought “Why not me?” After that, I was all in and have never looked back.

It was during this time that I met my Health Coach Institute co-founder, Stacey Morgenstern, and together we built a multi-million dollar company called Holistic MBA— a world-class business training for health and personal development coaches. Holistic MBA was the forerunner to HCI.

Over the years we trained thousands of coaches who complained to us time and again that they weren’t able to coach for a living and were overloaded with nutrition information from their previous training.

They told us they wished we offered a certificate program that would train coaches from the start so they wouldn’t have to waste time and money in other programs that they felt didn’t work.

That’s why we created Health Coach Institute (HCI) – to fill the gap in the marketplace – to build a Health Coaching school that focuses less on theory and more on the practical skills that help coaches truly succeed.

The first few months with Health Coach Institute were hectic! Just as with running any new business it meant months and months of overtime and eating, sleeping and breathing it. Luckily, we had practice from building Holistic MBA so we weren’t total newbies but, still, every business is different and HCI was our baby. We poured time, love and energy into making it the best it could be. We started off with only three other people and Stacey and me. We had one sales person, Stacey wrote all the marketing copy, one systems operator and I was the businesswoman behind the business.

There was a steep learning curve, but it’s also the ultimate in self-empowerment and personal growth, because you are forced to develop a level of creativity, resilience and personal power that you didn’t know you had. In fact, that is part of what we teach in our curriculum. We teach students how to gain confidence and step into the most empowered version of themselves—and we were doing it right along with them!

Tapping into this purpose gave me drive that I had only imagined possible. I look at my life now and think about all of the time I wasted not chasing my passion. For me, a purpose driven career is the ONLY thing that matters. If I’m spending 40-80 hours a week giving my heart and soul to an endeavor that is NOT aligned with who I am or why I’m here, then what am I doing?

Too many of us are burnt out from dead end jobs that we wake up every day dreading. That’s such a huge waste of creative energy. Health Coaches are the ultimate advocates for purpose-driven lifestyles and careers because we are all about creating your life from your most empowered self, on your own terms, and owning it wholeheartedly.

If you’re someone who is thinking about starting a business or turning your passion into a career, then there’s a whisper inside you that’s getting louder and louder, saying “Do it. Go. Now. Don’t wait!”

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to listen to that whisper and TAKE ACTION. Enroll in that training, take that new job, move to that new city.

You may not know all the steps to take to get to where you want to go, but if you just keep taking the step right in front of you, then you’ll be shown the way.