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Today on the show is Maddie Black from the Slow Health Movement. She is on a mission to change the fitness and health industry and teach people body positivity and making small changes to reach your health goals.
You can find her website here: http://theslowhealthmovement.com/
and of course, check out our free facebook group www.TheArtofLivingBig.com to ask questions and learn more.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Art of Living big. My name is Betsy Pake entrepreneur, author and personal success coach. This is the show that brings you stories and small ideas to help you live a big life. I hope this once a week podcast will inspire you, motivate you and encourage you to think differently about what could be possible for your life. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let’s go live big. My guest on today’s podcast does something that a lot of us think about, but never actually dare to do. And one of the things I love that she does is that she does it now she talks a little bit about her plans for the future. And so she knew if she was going to live out some of those plans now was the time. So I love that message. Because now is always the time they’ll never be a good time or a great time. But now’s the time. So you need to listen to this story. I really love how she just jumped off the edge and did something that very very few of us would ever do. So
let’s go.
Alright, so I am here today with Maddie. Maddie, are you here? I sure I am. All right.
Well, I’m so excited. This is the most fun story. So I cannot wait to get started. But go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourself. And just so the listeners kind of know kind of what you do now and kind of what your what your deal is.
Absolutely. So I am well officially as of like two days ago and digital nomad living in Melbourne as of today, but as of tomorrow, I will be getting up to take up my new life in Mexico, where my fiance slash business partner and I are going to be finally able to work on our business, the slow health movement full time. So it’s been an exciting journey getting to finally getting on the plane tomorrow, it’s been in the works for about nine months. So I’m traditionally not been someone who puts that kind of deal with planning and kind of long term plans and moving out to the more spur of the moment. So this is definitely have a lot of little parts to it. And I just can’t wait to get on the plane tomorrow. Oh my gosh.
So right now you live in Australia, and you have an online business and explain to people what a digital nomad is that he may not know what that means.
Absolutely. So basically, I think that I mean, this is only a fairly new to me. And I’ve only just joined the realms of digital nomadism. So but basically, it’s building silos, a lot of people building online businesses that obviously do not require you to have a shop from you know, don’t need any kind of brick, brick and mortar to set it up. So you do kind of have the option of having a bit of location freedom, you’d pretty much just need an internet connection to make your business run, which is definitely the case for our business. And so we have the freedom of calm now that we’ve finally gotten to the stage of scurrying add jobs, we can kind of leave anywhere in the world that we want to provide. Got an internet connection. So we’re starting in Mexico for probably about four months. And then who knows after that.
So okay, so cool. So you’re gonna go to Mexico for a little bit and then just kind of take it from there. So you don’t even have really a next step plan. If you like it, maybe you’ll stay and if you want to explore somewhere else, that’s what you’ll do.
Is that I absolutely think that we might well, I think we’ll definitely be doing at least 12 months in Mexico. But after that said, we have started to maybe investigate doing think like half sitting maybe halfway through Europe or something we’re not sure. But yeah, it’s kind of the world is our oyster, we kind of depending on you know how much money we’re making, we’ll obviously have some parts apply in it, but we can kind of go where we like and really
love this. So tell me how you even started thinking about this was it like and I want to hear about your business too, because I’m curious about that. But tell me first about this whole movement thing? Because I’m I’m mesmerized as you can tell, so were you just out of the night you just got this idea or Was this something you always wanted to do? Or kind of what how did this start
a little bit of everything. So since I’ve This is my 10th year finished high school, pretty much to the month, which is pretty exciting. So when I finished high school, I really wanted to do like a gap year overseas, I kind of live in Italy or something and learn a language and and I just kept putting it off and putting off and I got jobs and you know, my career took off and so I just never pursued that. That you know, dream of mine. And so it wasn’t Till in January of this year, I’ve been working in a job that I was really miserable in, I had received some really bad bullying. So much so that I’ve taken the complaint, you know, to HR and it went through a process. And ultimately it ended up that they said, it’s easier for us to leave the trusted discipline this person. And so it actually was an absolute blessing in disguise. And I finally kind of had this freedom. My business was, you know, quite fledgling, and we definitely knew that we were on the right path with our business, we were pursuing something that we’d love. And so I said to to Rory, my fiance that I, I said, I think we should move overseas, I think this is the time we’re looking down the barrel of you know, maybe we’ll have kids in a few years, if we’re gonna do it. It’s got to happen now, and, and he jumped on board. And yeah, that’s kind of how that the planning started. I love
it. So it really is finding the gift. You know, I say that to my daughter all the time. When something goes wrong, you know, I say, well look for the gift. And really, you found the gift, you things didn’t work out at your job, and you were like, peace out. I’m gonna go take this adventure.
Absolutely, it was totally the case, I guess that I felt even at the time. I mean, I was pretty miserable. So I definitely felt like I mean, the financial insecurity of it frightened me, but my emotional health was not good. And so in pretty much immediately, as soon as I walked out of the building, I thought, No, this is a good thing. I’m, it’s, I’m gonna feel so much better. And, and obviously, you know, it was tenfold in terms of a gift because I finally had that light bulb moment to go, this is my opportunity. And, and I felt so much better. And I it meant that I also just wasn’t emotionally drained every day coming home to try and work on my build it with no motivation, and no kind of strength, I suppose. You know, I was just so drained every day. So it just was a total tenfold gift. Yeah,
yeah. So lots of times, you know, I talk about, well, all the time, I talk about starting small and small steps. But really, it was like a series of small steps of setting up your business and being in a position where this could even be something that you could go for. I mean, it sounds like there was a lot of little things, but tell me about your business. So that you got, you know, you set that up and in a way that when the opportunity came, you really could jump on it. So tell me about your business and what you do.
Sure, so our business is the slow health movement, and we are Uber passionate about shaping up this fast results, quick results culture that seems to be rampant in the health and fitness and nutrition industry. So you know, we’re sick and tired of hearing you can lose weight yesterday, and, you know, just stop eating food and all these terrible messages that seem to just be what everyone thinks the answer, we want to teach people. But, you know, well, personally, you’re beautiful the way you are. Now, we want to teach them that, you know, if you want to have any change in the way that you look, you need to start from a base of love. And you know, we focus on habits and and a couple of different things. So that sort of, you know, it took probably, probably, gosh, like five or six months to get really clear on just exactly what we stood for. We knew we wanted to do something in the health space. And this is about 12 months ago, when we first set up a business. Because Rory is a personal trainer, I’ve come from a coaching background and also worked in marketing for the majority of my career. So it was just a really nice fit for the two of us. And we always knew when we got together a couple years ago that we would have some kind of a business together. And so that started, you know, the audience started, we had a different name to begin with. So we rebranded halfway through and got really clear, just as you know, as an image kept getting clearer and clearer. And if it really was just a series of little steps. I mean, we started off trying to buy a website sorted, and we had a whole heap of dramas there. And I think we really feel that it’s only been in the last few months that we’ve gotten any real work done in terms of writing content or building any kind of a tribe. So it’s been like a series of hundreds of little steps.
Yeah, you know, so there’s a couple things that you said that I really love. First of all, I love that whole concept, because, you know, I used to own a CrossFit gym and I worked with nutrition and was a coach for a long, long time and people come in and they they they do want our culture has has set us up to want things immediately right. So five minute abs and yeah, you know, everything’s fast food like everything comes at us really fast. But really to be sustainable. I really love the message because I think that that is so important and the having the small steps within that really helps. To create something that you can really change your life instead of just like some quick fix.
Absolutely, and I think the biggest thing for us is that we want to teach people that change is life changing itself, kind of unsustainable, we believe in teaching people how to make shifts in their life, which is totally your message, you know, these little, you know, these little changes that happen, little shifts. Yeah, and we kind of use the metaphor of a compass, because if you move one degree on a compass, or you know, if you’re walking one degree off your path, you won’t even notice four kilometers, that all you know, mild, that, that you’ve gone off track, because it’s so small, you don’t even notice it changing in your life. So we really encourage people to make little shifts, especially for their habits with really big habit mastery. advocates, like we just think habits are a jam, they weren’t, you know, building blocks of our life. And so if you can make one small little adjustments, your habits, your whole life can change over the course of quite a long time. But you don’t have to feel so you know, when you’re throwing yourself into these workout every single day and you know, change your diet dramatically. The too big, your body just goes into shock wears these little. If you don’t even notice it, you making big changes over the long run.
I’m jumping up and down right now for joy. It’s so, so true. You know, I use the example a lot and I used it in my book that if an airplane takes off from LA headed to New York, and its nose is off by 1%. It won’t end up in New York, it’ll end up in Rhode Island. And so that last tiny bit of time, yeah, over time makes such a huge, huge difference. And I think that it’s really like our brains that, that reject like that super quick. It can’t handle that. So I think this is really smart. The other thing that you said that I love that I think is a great message for people is that you said you rebranded you rethought about things, you narrowed it down. And I think that people sometimes don’t want to move forward with an idea because they don’t have it all fleshed out. And they think well, I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I could do. I don’t have I don’t have it all worked out. So I’m not gonna do anything. But I always say just start because you can change and make, you know, change your mind and, and make adjustments. That’s progress, right?
Absolutely. I think that was a huge, that’s been a really big lesson that I’ve learned over this last 12 months, because I coming from a marketing career, I have definitely developed some perfectionism behavior. And I really had to learn with my business, it’s just not going to look corporately perfect. From the beginning, that’s not going to happen, I need to have an opportunity to develop what the business actually stands for. And I did develop time to develop how it’s going to look them and you know how people are going to view the brand and, and in the brand, really, last week, we had a name change, like six months in and that meant a new logo and a new color scheme and a new everything. But it was the right thing for us to do. And it kind of was like starting from scratch. But we had we put so much like I think we leave it to as entrepreneurs, that there’s a lot of time that goes into just thinking about stuff like, you know, I completely agree with you, you have to get you have to action it. But so much of it was just us, giving ourselves the space and time to go, Okay, well, let’s really think about what we want. Let’s do research. Like we listen to podcasts every day we were, we were reading every blog, we can get a hands on where I was doing heaps of scientific research to find out what we really, truly believed in. So we took a lot of time to really get clear on what we stood for. And now we can speak to everything that we believe in really clearly because we’ve got that really clear in our minds, but we didn’t stop that stop. didn’t stop doing anything in the business in terms of actually, you know, getting websites underway and all that kind of thing.
I think that’s a really good point. If someone wants to start really getting clear on what you believe, man, I did that this summer and it made a world of difference in the decisions I made. It’s almost like having a business plan for your life. Right? No, yeah, I really think
absolutely. Yeah, exactly. I think and that’s been something that’s kind of come across into my everyday life. Because as I said to before I i’ve been someone traditionally who I make spur of the moment decisions I moved, but like I moved cities in Australia, in the space of two days life I I made some pretty massive change in my life in the last 10 years. That wasn’t well thought out and I don’t regret any of it because I think it taught me something every time. But having to go through this journey with my business has really taught me to sit and think and not be afraid to take the time to think because you know we all suffer from FOMO now and And I think that’s dangerous, because it doesn’t give us the opportunity to kind of connect in and understand whether it really feels right for us like that gut instinct that we’ve all kind of forgotten how to listen to. And so that’s been a huge learning for me as well.
And really taking your own advice of slowing down to sense all of that stuff. And I love that the FOMO the fear of missing out, I think sometimes we see someone doing all these different things. And we think, Oh, I have to be doing that, and this and that. But really, if you could stay the course and build one thing and focus on that one thing and make the right decisions for that one thing. You have a lot more progress.
Absolutely.
So inside, you know, we’ve talked before and before this call when we had email that you know, I talked about how we have this Facebook group, the community and it’s SS lb, that stands for start small live big community.com. So SS lB community.com. And Maddie, you’re going to be in there the week that this airs so that people could ask questions, they can get links to your website, if they want to learn more. And I bet everybody will kind of want to hear how the move went
to.
Lately, we’ll be happy to share.
And so you leave tomorrow. I’m so excited and grateful that you took some time to talk to me with that pending tomorrow. But so you leave tomorrow and then are you expecting downtime? Or what’s going to happen? You’re going to get there and give yourself some time to acclimate? Do you know, right where you’re going.
So we are moving to a city called Playa Del Carmen, which is just nicking Kuhn. And the plan at this stage is we’ve moved we’ve kind of we’re getting over taking us about 48 hours to get from destination to destination. So that’s gonna be a really big and it is going to be some serious jetlag. So I, we found a house that we were going to live in over there, which is really, it just calms me down. Like I’ve been doing a little research on that for months looking at, you know, with what areas we want to live in. So I think in the first couple of days, it’s going to be busy just getting bank accounts and SIM cards and finding this house and kind of moving in. And I think once we’re there, it’s just gonna be like, flopping on the bed and watching Netflix for day, getting acclimated
and feeling better. You’re gonna have some great weather, you’ll be able to get out in the sunshine. That’ll be nice.
Absolutely. And it’s freezing cold in Melbourne here. So it’s gonna be a bit of a shock to the system. But I’m so look forward to it.
Yeah, I’m so jealous. Well, that sounds awesome. I can’t wait to follow along on your journey. And I can’t wait to have you share with people inside the community, the Facebook group, I think you’ve got an awesome business and I think it can really help people. So thank you so much for coming on, and sharing not just about your business, but about your little adventure, too.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been absolute pleasure.
Thanks for spending some time with me today. I’d like to hear what you think. So be sure to get in on the conversation at SS lB community.com. And of course, here’s a little message from my husband.
That’s it.
Transcribed by https://otter.a
