Making It – Episode 158
Transforming Pain into Purpose — An Inspiring Path (Ali Shapiro)
Ali Shapiro: I’m Ali Shapiro and you’re listening to Making It. I run a health coaching and education company. My signature program is called Truce with Food, where I help midlife women to stop falling off track with their food and feel great in their bodies. I also certify coaches in my Truce Coaching Certification that addresses the roots of stubborn change.
One of the earliest memories I have that would track with my current life is I started a babysitting camp. I tried to scale babysitting and I succeeded. I was about twelve years old and I lived in Pennsylvania and you couldn’t work legally until you were 16. I wanted my own money because money meant freedom. I went down to the YMCA and got a certification in CPR and did all the credentialing that you need to become a babysitter. And I would babysit people’s kids here and there.
I loved it, but I was like, this is really inefficient. Obviously, I didn’t have that language, but now I understand that it was inefficiency. And so I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of a win if in the summer we started, we called it kid camp. And I enlisted some of my neighborhood friends who were also babysitters. The parents could just drop their kids off and know that they were having a blast. And we went door to door and kind of pitched this kid camp. And my friends who babysat with me weren’t as outgoing as I was.
So I think I was the lead on marketing and we had kids come for a week for like 3 hours and we planned all these super fun activities. We had snacks and it was a really wonderful experience. And then, of course, I didn’t have a language for this, but I thought, what about brand extension? And we did at kid camp at Christmas time and made it all day. I found a willing to rent out their basement. To us it was like, go get all your Christmas shopping done. We had kids for 8 hours. My mom and some people supervised.
My parents were city school teachers. I didn’t have entrepreneurs in my family. And I was coming up in the age of when online entrepreneurship was very new. And if you don’t have a model of what success is, you default to the cultural conditioning. And so much of the cultural conditioning at the time was six figures. Even though intellectually I knew that wanting to make six figures was what people do with their weight, right? Like once I get this weight, I’m going to feel relief. I knew intellectually but emotionally I still wanted to make that. And I’ve done that comfortably on my own terms and ethically.
On the surface, my business is about helping people heal their relationship to food, their body and their health. Most deeply, it’s about people learning that they have to be the authority on their health and their body and what they eat. So, to use a business metaphor, you have to be the CEO, you have to be the leader, and you have to be the one who knows what works for your body, what sort of options you have, and how you want to proceed. Much like a healthy business has an ecosystem, your body is an ecosystem.
This was born out of two important experiences in my own life. When I was around five or six years old, I had pesticide poisoning. And at the time, people weren’t aware of environmental toxins. Looking back now, it’s when I started to gain weight. And so when you’re growing up in the eighties and nineties, health is about thinness. And the doctors couldn’t answer why I was gaining weight. And so I went to weight watchers when I was eleven, because you think it’s about calories. And I thought, okay, thinness is health.
And then at the age of 13, I was diagnosed with cancer. Even though I got to my thinnest weight on death’s door, I still had equated thinness with health. And I ended up having a lot of problems with my health as a result of the chemotherapy. I was the first generation of childhood cancer survivors. There was no long-term understanding of what you needed to do with your health. The physical effects of chemo had created a lot of gut problems, but nobody was talking about gut health.
And so by the time I was 24, I had these increasing diagnoses of IB’s, acne, depression. And then what I would later understand is the trauma of all of that. Not tending to that would cause a further disordered relationship with food. And so I really had to untangle the difference between thinness and health, where weight and health overlap, and also learning how we’ve learned about health as thinness as just being free of disease. So sorting through all of that and having to be a pioneer in how to restore my health is really what makes me passionate to help other people.
I think so many of us, especially women, think that if we work hard enough, that is going to lead to success. And a lot of the coaches and business owners I work with, I train people in my methodology, they are really heart centered entrepreneurs first, and their soul’s expression is their work. And so I think we don’t talk enough in entrepreneurship about listening to what your business wants from you, what does the soul of your business want? And that doesn’t mean that you can’t make great money, that you can’t love your business. It just means it’s not about charging through with something that’s in the dominant paradigm already.
It’s going to be something that life is asking you to bring forth that probably hasn’t been created before. I think our current model of business doesn’t consider, are we giving back as much as we take? In other words, is it regenerative, is it generative? And I think a lot of, at least in my field and in some marketing tactics, it can be rooted in fear and scarcity. I mean, you end up getting clients who are in fear and scarcity. It doesn’t make for a fun business. We need to think of a model that is actually regenerative rather than just taking and taking.
But I think in the health space, we’re often preying on people’s worst fears. For example, like, heal your gut in 30 days. Right? That is not possible. You’re telling people what they want to hear, and then people end up feeling like they’re at fault rather than what they bought into was the problem. In the health space, we still think people have our best interests at heart. I don’t think people consciously are trying to exploit people, but I do think people are selling people unrealistic expectations around health.
People come to me and they’ve spent thousands of dollars on functional medicine because they thought this was the answer. It didn’t work for them because they weren’t doing foundational things, and they blamed themselves rather than say, maybe this wasn’t actually the first right step for me.
A lot of people take what is, I think, the universal entrepreneurship experience and make it personal. And what I mean about that is it’s messy, it’s hard, it’s inefficient. And when people’s doubts come up, they make it about them. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. I don’t know if I have anything to offer. You’re at the beginning of a learning curve. How could you have any answers right now? And this is the work, right?
The work of entrepreneurship is a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and figuring out what sticks, what we continuously do in the entrepreneurship journey, what ultimately takes us out of the game, is taking things personally that tend to be universal. The other thing entrepreneurs do is they’re unconscious of how they’re trying to get their needs met through their business. I don’t know if this is as prevalent. But there was this whole era of I’m multi passionate, I’m pivoting my business. Of course, businesses evolve and change.
A lot of people aren’t clear that when it gets hard, you’re telling yourself you’re going to pivot rather than work through it. And so I think figuring out how we’re trying to get our needs met through our business is really important because it creates blind spots. It can send us down the wrong road. And ultimately, we feel like we’re never enough and we make things personal that are really just not. We need to learn the structure of business that isn’t emotional.
I think for me personally, I have this trouble with wanting to get somewhere fast, not slow down. One of my business mentors, she just introduced me to sacred pacing. And I love that concept because it makes me think about nature as a guide. You know, the oak tree takes the time it’s going to take to grow. You can honor the cycle and the growth and the seasons of your own business and really appreciate them, rather than think that there’s something wrong with your business.
When you actually understand the concept, you can look back in your life and see, huh, so many of the things that are the best things that happened in my life, I didn’t work for. They happened in their own timing, and they came to me. So the more you can understand, or at least hold the idea of sacred pacing, the more proof you get that this works.
Making it is how does my business serve my life instead of my life revolving around my business? I have always been a hard worker. I like challenging myself. I like challenging myself physically with risks. So much of the first half of life was about building and building and making it and impacting people and making as much money as I ethically could. Now, here at midlife, making it is am I enjoying the process? Is there ease in what I’m doing? Am I tuning into what life wants from me rather than always being in the driver’s seat?
Can my son and husband and I have a leisurely morning and take him to daycare whenever we get there because we want to spend time with him? If I want to take him out of school for an afternoon, can I do that? Do I have weekends to not stress about my business, but really be present? And it is also making more by working less. I kind of drank the meritocracy Kool aid growing up. The harder you work, that is going to be the proportion of reward. I just no longer believe that.
It doesn’t mean I never work hard, but I am learning to appreciate, having space to again hear what life is asking of me, to have joy, not just at the finish line. And so making it for me is really making sure those values are present in my life. And then how does my business fit into that instead of trying to fit everything around, just working hard? The definition of making it now really has to be me getting clear on what needs I’m expecting my business to give to me.
For a long time, having been bullied, I was thinking, oh, if you have a big platform, if you’re popular, that’s success. This was all unconscious. And so it’s like I was trying to get those belonging needs met through some sort of metric. Would I love for my work to catch on? In a way, of course. Is that going to be the main goal that defines how I spend my day anymore, when I don’t need that to reach my other goals? So now, making it becomes about, do I like me? Do I like my clients? Right. It’s what I teach my clients.
It’s a more mature sense of belonging. I’ve got my own back. What are my values if my work catches on great and it’s quote unquote popular enough. Another thing is, with the financial goals, so much of what I was trying to get met was if I’m exceptional enough, I’ll finally feel like I can rest, that I’m worthy enough. What I’ve had to learn, especially these past years, which is why my definition of making it has changed, is you’re allowed to rest now. You’re allowed to play now. You’re allowed to slow down now. Your worth is not tied to your accomplishments.
And I get emotional even thinking of that, because we may all know that logically, right? But we all have some core wounds. I think many of us, as business owners have wounds that we’re reenacting out and our business. So the more wholeness, self-actualization you reach, I think the definition of making it shifts and changes. I think you have to get to certain milestones to realize it’s not what I thought it would be. Oon my journey to making it, what I learned is entrepreneurship with the right lens can be the greatest catalyst for our soul’s expression, but you have to have the right lens on it to do that. I’ve learned that I overestimated hard work and underestimated the game of business. You need to know the structure of the game.
And so with that, it’s also defining what is enough for you. I think my soul would define making it that I’ve taken the pain in my life and transformed it into something that can help other people. And I think I’ve done that.
I’m Ali Shapiro, and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me alishapiro.com. That’s A-L-I-S-H-A-P-I-R-O. You’ll find the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
Danny Iny: Making it is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and Once Upon a Business. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making It, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.