How a Wellness Coach Finds the Time and Motivation You Swear You Don’t Have
Most people who walk into a wellness conversation start the same way. I want to feel better. I want to lose the weight. I want to have energy again. Then almost immediately the second sentence: but I do not have time.
Laura Burdick has heard that second sentence in every coaching meeting she has ever run. And she has a simple, almost unfair move that ends the conversation in one sitting. It is not a mindset shift. It is not a productivity hack. It is a piece of paper, a clock, and one honest question.
This post is inspired by a 5 minute segment of our latest episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast with Laura. The full episode is worth your time, but the methodology she walks through here is portable, repeatable, and uncomfortably specific. You can run it on yourself this afternoon.
The Two Step Coaching Move She Runs On Every New Client
When someone tells Laura they are ready to change their nutrition or get back into physical activity, she does not start with a meal plan. She does not start with a workout. She runs two moves first.
Step One: The Memory Pull
The first thing she asks is when in your life you felt the absolute best. Not your healthiest, not your most disciplined, but your most alive. Then she asks what you were doing at that time. What was your sleep like. What were you eating. What were you saying yes to. What were you saying no to.
This is not nostalgia. It is a reverse engineering exercise. The point is to surface the conditions that produced the version of you you actually want to be again, and then ask which of those conditions are missing right now.
Step Two: Awareness Before Changes
Most coaches go straight to the to-do list. Laura does the opposite. Before she changes anything in your life, she gets you to be aware of what is already there. What are you actually consuming. Are you reading your ingredient labels. Do you have any idea what is in the box you are eating from.
Her one non-negotiable baseline rule, the one she jokes makes her the no added sugar queen, is to remove added sugars from the diet. Not natural sugars in fruit. Added sugars. The kind that get engineered into products to make them more addictive.
The Move That Ends Every I Do Not Have Time Excuse
When the resistance shows up, and Laura says it always shows up, the line is almost always the same. I do not have time. I am too busy. There is no room in my day.
Her response is not a pep talk. She gets out a notebook and starts cataloging every minute of the client’s day. Not the highlights. Every minute.
And what she has found is universal. Within 15 or 20 minutes of honest auditing, the same admission surfaces. “Then I just kind of scroll on my phone for a while.” Sometimes it is 45 minutes. Sometimes it is two hours.
In her words, no one has ever left a coaching meeting thinking they were still right that they did not have time. Everyone leaves with the same realization: there is time. The math is on the page. You cannot negate 24 hours.
The Question That Separates Real Goals From Surface Goals
Once the time excuse is off the table, Laura runs one more diagnostic. If a client says they want to lose weight, she stops them and asks why. Not in a soft way. Get real about why you want to lose weight.
Because the why is the engine. When the scale does not move on the days you want it to, the why is what gets you to the next workout. When the scale does move and the dopamine runs out, the why is what keeps you from coasting. If you do not really know what you are after, the behavior change does not stick. It cannot.
Why This Is Really About Behavioral Health
In the framework of The Vitality Journey, this segment maps cleanly to one of the six health dimensions: Behavioral Health. How you manage your time. How you manage your space. How you manage your impulses.
Laura’s point in the segment is sharp: nutrition and physical activity are modifiable risk factors. They are things you can actually change. The math is on the page, the ingredient list is on the box, and the time is in your day. The reason most people stay stuck is not because the levers are missing. It is because the awareness is missing.
How To Run Laura’s Two Step Move On Yourself This Week
You do not need a coach to start. Try this in the next 7 days.
- Pick a day this week and write down every 15 minute block from when you wake up to when you sleep. Phone scrolling counts. Be honest.
- Circle the blocks that are not actually serving anything. Look for the scrolling pockets first.
- Identify one 30 minute window you can reclaim three times a week.
- Open your pantry. Pick up three boxes you eat from regularly. Read the ingredient list. If you cannot pronounce more than three things, that is your starting place.
- Write down the answer to one question: when did you feel the absolute best in your life, and what were you doing then? That answer is your direction.
The Bottom Line
Laura’s two step move is not new. The reason it works is that most people skip it. They go straight to the workout app and the meal plan and the supplement stack, and they wonder six weeks later why nothing stuck.
Awareness is the unlock. Honest time audit, honest ingredient audit, honest why. Once those three are on the page, the behavior change is no longer a willpower problem. It is a math problem.
Watch the full conversation with Laura Burdick on The Vitality Journey Podcast: HERE
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Full Transcript
DAVE: So Laura, let’s say somebody comes to you and says, look, I’m out of shape. I really haven’t paid attention to my nutrition. Look, I need a coach. Do you have a process or a prescription, a prescriptive way that you work with a client who would come to you and say, help me out, Laura?
LAURA: Oh, absolutely. So right away, I try to get people to reflect on the time in their life that they felt the best, and try to get them to remember, what were you doing at that time? What was happening at that time? Just so we can start to, okay, let’s pull those things forward. But then more so than making changes right away, I just try to get people to be aware of, what are you consuming? Are you reading your ingredient labels? Do you have any idea what you’re putting in your body? And just getting people to start to focus on, okay, what is that chemical that’s listed on this food? And I’m consuming it all the time. Before I’m like, okay, now let’s remove that chemical. And my baseline for everyone is I get people to remove added sugars from their diet. It’s like, that’s like a joke about me, that I’m the no added sugar queen. But that’s the first thing that I’m like, no one needs any of that. So let’s get rid of that. And then I just get people to be aware of what are you consuming?
DAVE: It’s like, we’ve talked about this before. It’s a heightened paying attention. You just need to pay attention. You need to dial in. And in our parlance, the way we talk about the vitality journey is, you have to start with an honest assessment. But then I also like how you said, talking about when did you feel the best. And that would be like us saying, we need to dream a little bit. Let’s go back and look, when was your best day? So I love that juxtaposition: honest assessment, but also dream a little bit about what you want to be, right?
LAURA: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Then I ask people questions, like if they’re coming to me and they say, I want to lose weight. Okay, why? Let’s get real about why you want to lose weight, because when it’s not happening or it’s happening, how motivated are you going to be to do the behaviors you need to do, if we don’t really even know what we’re after.
DIMITRI: Yep. And Dave, I was actually going to ask, so again, person comes to you and they have the woes me, oh, everything is so hard, or I just can’t, how do you overcome the mindset first to even get to some of those removal or behavioral changes? How do you coach in that way?
LAURA: Well, a lot of people don’t even come to a health coach, or don’t even come to talk to someone, because they’ve kind of already beaten themselves up about it not being possible. So one thing I do a lot with people though that have a million reasons why something can’t work for them, is I start to catalog every minute of their day. And really clearly and quickly, we find the gaps where they are available to do some different things, to make some changes. I can’t tell you how many times someone’s like, well, then I just kind of scroll on my phone for a while. Okay, well, what could we actually do during that time? Just get really scheduled.
DAVE: So you’re chronicling your life, and then you help them, and you look at it and ask questions, what does this mean? What does, and all of a sudden their eyes are opened. How much…
LAURA: Oh, the response that I get every single time is always like, oh my gosh, wow. No one has ever left a meeting thinking, oh, I was still ready, I don’t have time. Everyone always leaves a meeting with, okay, there is. That’s why I joke with people who always say, I’m so busy. I’m so busy. I’m like, how is he?
DIMITRI: Right. It’s prioritization.
DAVE: Yeah. So what she’s done here is she’s brought in that health factor that will be in our next episode, we’re talking about behavioral health: how I manage my time, how I manage my space, how I manage my impulses. You’re doing the vitality journey already. You’re covering all the health factors. But what I’m hearing you say is behavioral, if you don’t manage your behavioral health, your overall wellness, you’re not going to be able to increase in that, right?
LAURA: Oh, absolutely. And that’s why nutrition and physical activity are such modifiable risk factors for creating bad things that happen in people’s life or really good things that can happen in someone’s life. They’re so modifiable, and people can do something about it. So I kind of think I address the easy stuff.
DIMITRI: I love too that you wrap tangible metrics around it like time. So I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. Well, when you put it, when you journal that and put 24 hours on a clock and right now what you’re doing, you can’t negate the number, right? The math is there. Same thing with the removal of ingredients. So as you remove added sugars and now we remove the strange chemicals, it’s like these are tangible things you can see and do.
LAURA: Yeah. It makes it easier to grasp. Yeah, for sure.