172 - On Building a Business and Overcoming Binge Eating: A Client Conversation with Devorah Schulman
In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by one of my clients, Devorah Schulman. Devorah specializes in coaching women over 50 who have battled binge eating and body image issues throughout their lives.
She shares her inspiring journey from childhood battles with binge eating to becoming a registered nurse, a plant-based expert, and a coach who helps her clients overcome binge eating and achieve lasting results.
In her first 90 days in the Business Building Boutique Program, she built her website, nailed down marketing copy, became a Canva pro, did a presentation in Israel, and signed paying clients! And I’m super proud to be a part of her journey.
Tune in and be inspired by her story of resilience, her remarkable growth in the Business Building Boutique, and the incredible impact she's making.
👉 Head over to devorahshulman.com to book a consultation with a Devorah and to grab a copy of her FREE cookbook
👉 Create a profitable business that looks good and sets you up to be respected through the Fast Track Business Building Boutique Program
👉 Check out my FREE Canva Workshop and learn how to create stunning graphics for your coaching business!
👉 Watch the episode on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts!
👉 Book a free Coaching Business Assessment with me
Don’t forget to connect with me on social media:Instagram | Facebook| Pinterest
Transcript
Preview: It takes more time than you think to build a business and. Even though Devorah now has the website and she's now doing weekly emailing and she's working with her first paid clients. There still is this ongoing, where we have to keep finding people, talking to people, reinventing, assessing, it just takes time to get all those pieces. And as you mentioned so wisely in the beginning, when you came to work with me, it was like, I wasn't actually prepared to have 10 clients. And you didn't know that. Like you don't know what you don't know. And, you are prepared now to have that many clients, but it's much more work than what you expect.
Intro: Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.
Debbie: Welcome to today's podcast. I am super excited to introduce you to the first of many clients that I am going to be featuring on our podcast. I'm doing a podcast series to be able to introduce you not only to the types of coaches that I work with and the really incredible coaching that they're doing, but also to highlight some of what they have done as we've worked together.
So we're going to kick this off with Devorah Shulman. She is a coach for women. I'm going to let you introduce yourself and tell us who you coach. And get us started. So welcome.
Devorah: Okay. So I coach women over 50 who have struggled for a lifetime with binge eating and body image to help them beat their binge eating and just get a whole new life.
Debbie: Oh my gosh, that is so needed. If you don't mind, if I get real personal here, can you give me the backstory? Tell me what brought you to be coaching on this.
Devorah: Well, there's a few factors that came together. Number one, personally, I have struggled with binge eating since I was a little girl. In fact, one of my first memories as a little girl was fighting with my mother over food. It happened to have been watermelon. I wanted watermelon, and she offered me cantaloupe, and I was throwing a tantrum, but it was food related. And I was a fat kid in a time when, unlike today, which is sad, every other kid today is overweight or even obese, which I would love to cure also, but when I was a kid, there was maybe one token fat kid in the class and I was that kid. And I was bullied and made fun of. I used to come home from school crying. They would pull up my dress and make fun of me and it was painful. And my parents were also in pain because I was so overweight.
And how did they deal with it? The way a lot of parents would deal with it. They tried to put me on a diet. They would have the stuff in the house, but I wasn't allowed to have it. And what did I learn to do? I wanted it. So I became a sneak eater. I mean, today there's other terms. I, as a kid, who knew the term binge eating? So I would sneak whatever it was when nobody was looking and I would learn to eat as fast as I could because you never know when somebody's coming. And I got fatter and fatter. and we would go to let's say my grandparents house and my aunt and uncle would be there and we would be in the car afterwards and my mother would talk to me, you know, they all talked about how you gained more weight.
I used to wish, I don't know, on dandelions and on wishbones and those like wishing seed things. My biggest wish was that I wanted to be skinny and I went on my first serious diet in the summer between 5th and 6th grade. So I was 10 years old and I looked really good. I got down to a size 10 preteen which was amazing at that time and my mother was very sickly so she was in the hospital and my aunt took me shopping and got me these beautiful clothes and I came home. I never got to show them to my mother. She passed away the two days before I started 6th grade the day before orientation. And that was the end of my diet.
That was the start of my yo-yo dieting career and up and down, up and down, up and down. And I would decide if I'm a good girl or a not good girl, bad girl. And I would live my life either on a diet, just breaking a diet, trying to be on a diet, feeling guilty for not being on a diet, being on a diet in public, but in secret binging my brains out planning it. And I have to confess that I managed to get married on one of my thinner times and even through marriage, up and down, restricting, binging, restricting, binging, and I wasn't always there for my kids because my whole focus was on this eating and what I look like and what I feel like and the isolating and the not wanting to be seen the wanting to shrink and being invisible, but being bigger and bigger.
And this was the whole focus of my life. I feel bad for my kids because I don't think I was the greatest mother. So after diet after diet, weight watchers, grapefruit diet, Stillman diet, my own eat-yogurt diet. At one point I tried starving myself and my father made me eat and I was so mad at him because after he made me eat I couldn't stop but this whole dieting thing over readers anonymous. I was a 90 day wonder until I wasn't anymore and the punishment for breaking it, I just couldn't do it. I prayed for an answer. That's how I was broken over this and. I heard about plant based eating way back when, but then I went to nursing school and I am a registered nurse and which I'll talk about a little more later.
But in nursing school, it's very high pressure and that was the end of anything. I managed to get through nursing school mad as could be because I didn't have household help, so this is the kind of person I am. I was mad that I only graduated second place in my class, that I wasn't number one. And you know what? It really doesn't matter. But to me, it mattered. So anyways, so again, I struggle back and forth diet after diet, up and down, up and down, up and down. And then I got into a group coaching program that featured whole food, plant based eating. And between the support and learning how my mind thinks and the freedom of the boundaries of the plant based food, that was the answer.
Now I'm also a registered nurse and I worked first with cardiac patients. And then I worked with labor and delivery, which you think of young, healthy women giving birth. Well, they're not all healthy young. Well, they could be in their forties also, which to me, that's young, but they're not all healthy and they're getting bigger and bigger.
I see the connections and I see people, they have no choice when it comes to their eating. They are so entrapped by their minds, by the processed food industry and the way it's taken over their brains. They've taken their strategies from the tobacco industry. And they actually will test people, drip things onto their tongues and put them in MRI machines and see how they react to get to the bliss point that everything lights up and there was an old commercial for potato chips and it said, Bet you can't eat just one. Yeah. And you know what? You can't.
So, I learned all about that, and I saw the people suffering and struggling, and As I studied, I took courses in learning how to be a coach. There's actually a nursing certification for nurses who are coaches. It doesn't mean we only coach nurses, even though people get confused. It's just a nurse who is a coach. And I learned about I took a few nutrition courses about whole food, plant based eating, and I put it all together. And I don't want anybody to have to suffer the way I've suffered. If I could help somebody to overcome this, to overcome the shame, the embarrassment, the isolation, the self hate and condemnation, that is really, really What my goal is.
Debbie: Wow. Boy, I bet you guys are hearing this and thinking it's so brave of you to share all of those details. Thank you for that. I know that there's people that just heard what you said and we're shaking their heads as they're listening to this. So thank you for being so honest and so transparent. So obviously you've conquered this. I don't know if conquer is the word that you use, but you figured out a way to shift what was happening for you and you are nice and thin and trim now as well.
Devorah: Thank God.
Debbie: Yeah. So let's fast forward to you've gone to coaching. You've done the education on plantbase. You've conquered your binge eating and you've got yourself in a really great place. You decide you're going to build a business. And so now tell me kind of what's happening and how did we get connected?
Devorah: Okay. So here I finished my coaching program and I'm ready to change the world. I'm going to fix the world. Hello, anybody out there, anybody interested? Please, anybody? And, I just had no idea how to go about reaching people. And I would see, oh, yes, I coach this one and I'm making all this money and I'm doing this and I'm having an effect and yada, yada, yada. And it sounds great.
And crickets. And I listened to some kind of business summit, and I was asking people, what do I do? What should I do? I didn't even, you know, talk about technophobe. Not only was I a technophobe, I didn't even know what technology I needed. I was totally, totally clueless. I work with one person who told me, Oh yes, you need one-on-one coaching.
That's the only thing. And I would get off the phone with her because she wanted to do it on the phone, which was fine. I love doing it on the phone and however it works. And I would speak to her and I said, this is nice. But what do I do? do YouTube videos. Okay, do YouTube videos. How do I do them? Oh, Google it, find out. I have a virtual assistant who does it for me. So, do some Canva things. How? My virtual assistant does it for me. And I found she was all over the place and I felt good about myself. Oh, yes, you're on fire. You're on fire. You're on fire. You're busy there. Yeah, I am on fire. But I felt I needed direction and Debbie, I never did Facebook.
I'm not a Facebook person, but I would look through groups for people with my niche and you came up with your Canva workshop and said, I am struggling with Canva. If someone could teach me how to do it for free and. It was really helpful. It got me to spring for the $99 a month professional subscription, which is worth every single penny.
Debbie: Yeah. If you're not using Canva Pro ladies, you should upgrade to Canva Pro. That's what Devorah is talking about.
Devorah: I didn't want to do it, but I am so glad I did. So anyways, and then you had the offer for a conversation to assess your business and I got on the phone with you and you did not want to work with me.
Debbie: Ladies that are listening to this, let's set the record straight here. I want to work with people that I feel like are in the right place at the right time so that everybody can have success. So, at the time that we talked. I didn't think it was the right time for you.
Devorah: Right, I was working with another coach.
Debbie: Yes.
Devorah: Even though I was not 100% satisfied with her, you said, as long as I'm working with somebody else, I'm going to get confused because different people have different approaches. When you hear all sorts of signals coming into your brain from all different directions, it's totally confusing. so I ended up firing her.
Debbie: I did not know this part of the story.
Devorah: Yeah, I ended up firing her. I just couldn't, you know, I had to finish out. I had two more sessions and she was, listen, she loved working with me because I'm an action taker and she felt, but you still need one on one coaching and said, listen, we can still be friends And I finished out with her and then I started with you, Debbie, and what can I say, you gave me an organized step by step of what to do. you know something, if 10 people would have signed up with me back then. I wouldn't have known what to do with them. I wouldn't have been able to handle it. My head wasn't ready for it, and I just didn't have a way of knowing how to do it, what to do. You got me branding myself.
And I use the phoenix. It's this very stylized phoenix and it represents rising up out of the ashes. However, many times a person falls, they just get up and they keep going anew. And that's what I did. And that's something that I want for my clients
Debbie: Let me just clarify you guys. This is part of her logo that she designed herself. That's 1 of the things that I teach is about branding and the board designed a logo with the Phoenix in the logo. It's beautiful. So, go ahead.
Devorah: Yeah, thank you. But the whole thing, the colors, copy for a website, making a website. You know, people spend thousands and thousands of dollars on this. I was nervous about spending money on more coaching because I had fallen in. I had wasted money on another coaching program that promised to be the end all and be all. And I was feeling guilty. I still feel a little guilty, but I keep telling myself it was a learning experience. Everybody makes mistakes.
And if that's the worst mistake I make in life, I'm pretty good. So, just the value from building my own website, my copies, I started doing a newsletter and the email subscription, doing a presentation. I actually spoke internationally in Israel. It fell into my lap. But thanks to Debbie and her guidance, I was able to put together a beautiful slideshow presentation in Canva.
I would have never ever been able to do that. And I've put together a recipe book. It was about switching recipes for familiar dishes, like, let's say pizza or mac and cheese with healthy plant based versions of it. And I made a companion cookbook which I offer for free. It's 46 pages long. And again, I would have never begun to know what to do with this without Debbie's help.
And I actually signed a paying client. So, I'm doing social media posts. Where I'll go with that, I don't know. I'm going to evaluate how, but I would have not had the tools to do Any of this without Debbie, and when you get on those calls, she'll actually say, let's say, if I sent out an email, how do I know if somebody got the email?
Oh, you can do an email tracker. How do you know, you do this X, Y, Z, every little technical glitch. She guided me through. I could have never done this. I'm telling you the value here was amazing. My husband was skeptical when I started. I'm actually ready to sign up to work with you again.
Debbie: Oh, good.
Devorah: And my husband said, yes, yes, do it, do it, do it.
Debbie: Oh, that is such a compliment. I just want to, again, set the stage for you guys. Today is around the four month mark of you working with me. I think it's about four months and one week. So at the three month mark, she actually had gone through having no website, no tech knowledge, no understanding of how to write marketing copy, did not know how to use Canva, did not know what an offer would be, had not had any paid clients.
In the first 90 days exactly to the date, you had done all of that, done that presentation in Israel, created your first freebie, done your first email. I mean, so much stuff in 90 days. It's unbelievable. Super proud of you. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about how people Would work with you, what it is you can do to support them. Give me a little bit of information about that because I'm sure at this moment, people are like, I need some help.
Devorah: Okay. Well, right now I'm doing 1 on 1 coaching. Yes. And have a great offer now. It's six coaching sessions for $299. I mean, if you would go to a private nutritionist, one on one to just get a diet and be weighed in, it costs more than that. And the way they reached me is, well, they can reach me through my website, devorahshulman.com.
Debbie: Yeah. And we'll leave all the links in the show notes. You guys can have a consultation with her, go to our website, devorahshulman.com, and your link is on there for a consultation.
Devorah: Yes. My consultation and my freebie cookbook.
Debbie: Yes. And you want to get that cookbook. All right. So let's move on. Tell me what your superpower is with coaching.
Devorah: My superpower with coaching is number one. I'm a nurse. I'm a registered nurse. I know about disease and I know about health and When you go to your doctor and your doctor speaks gobbledygook medicalese to you, I can translate that into simple, plain language that you can understand and even guide you with how to have conversations with your doctor.
So that is one of my superpowers. I understand the science of processed food addiction and the various traps that our brain falls into and real complicated things like brain chemistry and how our biology works against us and how the industry has capitalized on that. And I have. a superpower of taking complicated things and making them simple and easy to understand to a dummies level.
That's what I needed for myself. And that's what I can do. I have a very simple process. It's called the freedom roadmap. Free stands for find your wise. R is realistic expectations. E is for education. The second E is for enlist support. D is determine your commitment. O is open mindedness to new ways of thinking that you never thought even possible. And then M, let's move forward. Let's move forward. Action and mastery and we keep moving. There's no such thing as having arrived, always moving forward.
Debbie: Oh, my gosh. Okay. So this is one of the other parts that we work on in the business building boutique. Exactly what she's talking about. Most of you guys have an offer and you say to me, like, well, how many weeks should I coach and how much should it be?
And I say, well, that depends, right? We have to map out what it is you're going to do with your clients to get them to the result that you are selling and that for you is the freedom method. So exciting. So it sounds like somebody should definitely hire you if they have an interest in solving binge eating, if they're interested in working with a nurse who really, wow, like you said, can even take the information from a doctor and help you understand it better, right? Who's interested in plantbased. I love this. The science of processed food. Wow. To understand what that's all about. I haven't heard you talk about this this way. All right, so what is your plan for your business? Tell me, let's talk about your business growth from this point on. What do you hope to accomplish and where are you going next?
Devorah: Right now, I'm coaching one on one. I do want to, eventually, I want to build groups. And the reason why I want to build groups is because it's part of my enlist support. One of the problems with binge eaters, Is that we hide, we isolate sometimes we think we're the only one there for so many years. I thought I was the only one. I thought I was a freak. There's something wrong with me. And then when we see that there are others like us. And others that are working towards it and others in a positive mood in a positive way and not unrealistic because we're not perfect and so that when somebody falls instead of condemning them, let's turn it into a teaching moment.
Let's support you. That's when you need even more support and people could have partners. So this is my vision is to actually build a community because community is really the way to go.
Debbie: Well, as part of the Business Building Boutique, you are in the Fast Track. I have two versions of the business building boutique and Devorah's in the fast track and we have office hours and we also have a Facebook group. It's a small group of women, an intimate group where they're supporting each other. Do you want to talk a little bit about our office hours experience?
Devorah: Office hours are absolutely amazing. This is where my other coach told me, no, no, no, you need private coaching. You need one on one. Well, office hours and the Facebook group, I have to say, yes. I come with all my questions and every week I always manage to have questions. and I'm not shy, but we're all up to different places and we all have different things. But we learn from each other. Like, so somebody's doing something. Maybe I'm not there now, but I have my notebook. I have my notebook here and I write everything down.
I have to really like put tabs on things, but when I'm doing this, Oh, I'm not ready for that yet, but at some point that's going to work. And sometimes these things work faster than I thought they would. Then I need these things. So we're learning from each other. I find we're supporting each other. Also, when I first started.
There's one person in the group who is way ahead of the rest of us. And I was like, oh, my goodness. And I'll confess I was. Jealous of her. And I could still be a little jealous of her, but I said, no, no, she worked to get there. You're fine. You're just where you need to be. Everything will come. Just follow it.
Do the process. It will happen. And she worked very hard to get to where she's going. It was not overnight. You know, there's that saying, it was an overnight success. It only took 15 years and everybody on social media only shows the good side. They never show hard work. It is hard work. It's not all fun and games.
And sometimes it's sitting there putting together something when, and not necessarily in the mood of it. And sometimes it's getting a little, um, nudge or a kick in the behind to get going and honest critique. I have to say, you know, if somebody's barking up the wrong tree, you are not shy about saying it.
Debbie: Well, I do feel a responsibility that if you pay me money, and if it's on my conscience that I think, wait a minute, stop, you're doing like, that's going the wrong direction, or I don't think that's the right thing. I really feel an obligation as part of my commitment to you as a coach to stop you from what you're doing.
I don't guarantee to be a hundred percent right all the time, but I sure do want to make sure like I've got 25 years experience. So I'm ahead of you. Let me just tell you, wait, pause. We're a little out of order on this. Let's do this first before that. So yeah, I'm a pretty straight shooter, but anyway, well, we're going to wrap this up.
I want to tell you how grateful I am That I guess you finished with that other coach and that you came back around. It is such an honor and I'm so delighted that you're going to renew and stay with me. You know, it takes more time than you think to build a business and. Even though Devorah now has the website and she's now doing weekly emailing and she's working with her first paid clients.
There still is this ongoing, where we have to keep finding people, talking to people, reinventing, assessing, it just takes time to get all those pieces. And as you mentioned so wisely in the beginning, when you came to work with me, it was like, I wasn't actually prepared to have 10 clients. And you didn't know that. Like you don't know what you don't know. And, you are prepared now to have that many clients, but it's much more work than what you expect.
Devorah: Definitely.
Debbie: Yeah. So in the show notes. We're going to leave the link for her freebie. So you can go to her website, devorahshulman.com and be able to get on her email list. I would definitely do that. She provides tons and tons of really great. knowledge, education, great tools that she gives you like this cookbook. you also can find her on any of the social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram. She has a YouTube channel. and my goodness, I would definitely schedule a phone call with her. You already heard, you want to tell us again at six weeks. And did you say $297?
Devorah: $299.
Debbie: $299 for six weeks of private coaching from a woman like this who has been there and been through it all. And now it's come out the other side, as an RN, a coach and a plant based food expert. So thank you so much for being a blessing to me and for sharing so honestly with everybody here today.
Devorah: Thank you.
Debbie: All right. Have an amazing day. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks. Bye. Bye.
Outro: Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.