015: Camille Gallinger – Living Your Life With Vitality

Title: Camille Gallinger – Living Your Life With Vitality

Guest: Camille Gallinger

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well cast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. So today, my guest is Camille Gallinger.

She is the owner and founder of Vitality Enterprises. Camille and I are in a networking group for business owners and managers, a coaching group, and we’ve had a good time interacting with each other. And I’m really so happy to finally have an opportunity to have you on the podcast today and learn more, a lot more, about what you do and how you help people. So let’s get started by talking about what you do.

Camille: Oh, okay. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your show. It is a great honor. What I do, I am a nutritionist and I’m also a personal vitality coach. Everyone’s heard of a nutritionist.

I work mainly with people who are having gastrointestinal issues and who are very near burnout. In other words, they’ve been in fight or flight. They’ve had a lot of stress and so their bodies just aren’t working the way that they’re supposed to be. So those are the types of people I help in nutrition. But I put even more emphasis on being a personal vitality coach.

That’s something I created because what I saw was that people who did adhere to the nutrition lifestyle changes that I spoke about would often sabotage themselves because they didn’t know how to handle stressors or there were other obstacles in their lifestyle that they had to deal with. And those obstacles actually caused them to unravel everything that we had done. They actually suffered setbacks. And it was just so prevalent, especially with the amount of stress and distraction they have to deal with today that I knew I had to help them with their mindset. I had gone through something like that and I understood it, so I began to help other people that way.

Peter: Well, can’t wait to dive into that. So the first question I have, Vitality Enterprises, Personal Vitality Coach, you’ve got this word vitality front and center in your organization. So let’s talk about vitality. What does that mean to you? How do you define vitality?

Camille: Well, I chose the word vitality because I wanted to go beyond energy. So for me, vitality is defined as energy plus joy plus momentum. So of course, we all want energy. One of the most common complaints in the practice is fatigue. But we also want joy.

I mean life is short so we really do want to do those things that bring us a lot of joy. We want to experience that. And then momentum is very important to me because I find that a lot of people are stuck in life and if you can restore your energy and restore your joy, you can get going again. And momentum is really important to bring change, meet your goals, and so on. So for me, vitality is defined as energy plus joy plus momentum.

Peter: Wow. I like that. Kind of questioning my own day now.

Camille: Well, we can always work on it and it’s not something you do by yourself. That’s the beautiful thing about it. It’s really important that you surround yourself with real friends and friends who not only encourage you, but also friends who love you enough to tell you the truth so that you can keep your or maintain your momentum or restore your joy. So yes, while you’re taking care of yourself physically, you don’t want to ignore the other parts of you. And it’s really nice to have people to help you and to have professional people also to help you along that route.

Peter: The next question that just comes to mind here really is what motivated you to do this?

Camille: I actually did have a personal experience. First of all, I embraced nutrition because I really was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I had asthma and I had low energy and I really wanted my health back. So I did all of the study. I did all of the prayer.

I went to health food stores and then I went to school and I was able to beat asthma. And I was able to have enough energy to where I could participate in sports and I didn’t have to worry about allergies or anything. And so life was good for a really long time. But what happened, and this has happened with other health care practitioners I’ve since found out, I ended up essentially losing my health and energy again but not to the point of having asthma but it was just to the point of being very highly stressed and my body’s constitution was very weak because I had gone through a very, very stressful time. And it was a conglomeration of being with people who were not safe or healthy people to be with, even though I thought they were friends and they weren’t.

And just not knowing what I didn’t know, just about the dynamics of life and the stress was so incredibly hard to me, it really brought me down. As a matter of fact, I tell the story to another person I had talked to. I was in my house and I went upstairs and I was just walking in the bedroom and suddenly I just fell. I just fell down and I thought, woah, what was that? So I got up again, took one step and I fell again.

Unbeknownst to me, all of the stress was in my lower back and my lower back just gave way. And actually my husband had to just massage my back, massage my back until I was strong enough to get up. That’s how much stress I was under and it made me really look at what was going on in my life. It really made me look at what I had been tolerating and shouldn’t tolerate. It made me get another look at courage.

I had to have the courage to make some changes so that I could get my health back and beat this stress. And I did it. And I was so convicted by how intense stress could unravel all of those years of nutrition and health that I became committed to helping other people, telling them to treat in a gracious way if they would allow me. And to my joy, I did find a lot of people had a lot of the same things in common with me. And I was not only able to help them, they invited me to help them because I was a safe person.

I made a safe environment for them. And I helped them to build what I call courageous self care. And it’s courageous because you do have to have courage to do things like say no, to change your relationship, to change the amount of time you put into working and the amount of time you give recreation to yourself. So that’s what I’m committed to, and I do a lot of it.

Peter: So it sounds like your coaching covers all aspects of a person’s life.

Camille: I call it the fundamentals. It covers the fundamentals. So whereas maybe I couldn’t tell you how to be more successful in your business, but I can coach you on how to shift your mindset from an unhealthy one to a healthy one. I can coach you to look at who you’re surrounding yourself with. Are they healthy relationships or are they toxic relationships?

Let’s work on building up your courage to change those because if you keep tolerating that stress, it’s actually going to zap your strength and energy, and you won’t have any vitality.

Peter: So what if you have a relationship with somebody and it’s a family member and you really don’t have an opportunity to change who that person is, God gave us our family, we really can’t change Let’s say we live in close proximity. Do you have suggestions for how to manage that or deal with that?

Camille: Yeah. I’ve been asked that question before, and I’m certainly not talking about breaking up with your family member. But yeah, there are ways to deal with it. And one of the first ways, and I did happen to share this with a person the other day because again, I had gone through it as well, the courage to have honest communication, Even if you have to practice with someone or writing it out, you want to honestly communicate with that person instead of keeping it all on the inside and holding a grudge. You want to learn how to speak to that person instead of saying, you, you, you did all of this.

Start to have a mindset of personal responsibility so you can bring the problem up into the surface. For me personally, and a lot of people I know, we do decide to pray. Prayer is really good because I find that when we pray about a situation and we think and we listen, we inevitably find out things we can do differently. We don’t really get into this conversation about how bad the other person is, but we find out how we can see how the other person possibly feels, maybe how they may be walking their shoes a bit. And then we can do some things to change how we either communicate, how we respond, or so on.

It’s just a wonderful phenomenon just to learn deeper levels of yourself with this. And then, of course, if there are professional and safe counselors that you can go to and that person is willing to do that, then go with that because that relationship is such a priority. But it’s so important that you have that honest communication. And an example of that honest communication is and I had this with a person before actually, you really drain me. I adore you so much.

I love you, but you’re really draining me. And this is what it looks like. I find that I want to give more than what I have because of all of the situations and the stressors. How can you help me deal with this? Something like that.

Peter: So first of all, how long have you been doing this?

Camille: Well, the nutrition I’ve been doing for several years, nineteen years or so, but the personal vitality coaching I’ve been doing for about two and a half years. And I actually have quite a few friends who are doctors, MDs, and DOs, and they actually refer a lot of the patients to me when they can’t seem to break through that barrier. So it’s been going really, really well for over two and a half years.

Peter: And you have clients all over The United States?

Camille: Or I do. Because I do it virtually via FaceTime and Skype, and I do have clients all over The United States.

Peter: Could you give us example of who you’ve helped?

Camille: Yeah. And, of course, without sharing any names or anything, but I’m going to share this particular client because this particular client even wrote a testimonial on my website and I’ve actually shared her testimonial when I do my public speaking. But this was a client who really wanted to have a child but she could not have a child. She had gone through a few IVF treatments. It was really hard and I just began to talk to her and listen to her and I started to see the problem and I asked her if she would like to go through personal vitality coaching.

Explained to her what it was and then I made her feel comfortable so she could just talk to me and I found out one of the things that she did quite a bit was he had what I call the what if anxieties. He would say, well, what if this happened or what if that happened? I mean, look at worst case scenarios, things that hadn’t even happened, weren’t even close to happening. But she would say, well but what if it does? Well your body doesn’t know that it’s not truly happening.

All it knows is that you have a stressful thought, it senses a threat and it takes you right into fight or flight. And when you’re in fight or flight, you use a lot of energy and it’s very hard to heal. It’s hard to cleanse. It’s hard to have a baby. It’s hard to sleep.

So that what if anxiety goes on and on and it keeps you in this what is formerly known as the sympathetic nervous system response or fight or flight. So I encouraged her. Well first I let her know that she was doing it because she didn’t even know she was doing it. And then I encouraged her to think about ways. I helped her come up with ways to deal with that anxiety, to deal with that stress, to talk to the people who were probably the most problematic in her life in a gracious manner, to write things out.

I taught her how to do the brain dump that Mel Robbins made so famous, writing all the things that come to your mind in the first five minutes of the day and so on. But we did get her to a place where she was able to relax emotionally, be a lot more positive, be happy about praying, and then just have a lot more hope. And she did become pregnant. As a matter of fact, by our fifth month, she had gone to the clinic and they said, we can’t give you any treatment because you’re pregnant. And she called me right away to let me know.

Was so amazing, so amazing.

Peter: Wow, that’s a great story.

Camille: It was great. You know, a lot of men and women, I have both men and women, but you know, they’re all dealing with a lot of the same things. A lot of them feel less than because they’re comparing themselves to other people and that’s a lie and it’s not wise to compare yourself to other people. So we talk about gradually leaving that habit alone. They have the what if anxieties.

They are afraid that they may not be taken care of when they’re older. It’s just a lot of things that are going on in their minds that they don’t think about. And so I help them think about it and shift, oh, and there’s also the one I don’t like, which is they’re on Facebook a lot. And as a result of being on Facebook, they think about how miserable their life is because they think all of that stuff on Facebook is true. So we do talk about habits to change, like not spending so much time on Facebook.

Peter: We’ll be right back after this quick word from our sponsor.

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Peter: Now back to biz and life done well with Peter Wilson. One thing I did want to talk to you about a little bit was sort of a digital detox. Do you ever deal with that?

Camille: Oh, most definitely. And I’ve gotten good results when someone has the courage to let go of so many digital devices. The first way that I do is I start with what you’re doing at nighttime because a lot of people are on their cell phones or iPads late at night. So I do explain to them about the dangers of blue light and what it does to the pineal gland and decreases melatonin production and really hinders your sleep. So that pretty much convinces them of how important it is to at least protect their eyes from the blue light and either wear amber glasses or put away the device at a certain time.

Some people I will ask them, and I did ask someone to do this and he was a lawyer. I asked him to trade in his smartphone for a simple dumb phone for a while, take his wife on a weekend vacation to one of the cabins, no phones, no iPads because you need it. He did that. He said it changed his life. That was great.

And I find a lot of executives, they tell me they’re tied to their phone. They’re tied to it. It’s just time to let it go because if you’re going to have this much stress in your life and your job, then you need to meet it with an equal amount of recovery. And part of your recovery is please letting that phone go because if, God forbid, something happened to you, and we don’t want that to happen. Life is going to go on, not that you would be forgotten, but things will continue to progress.

So it’s not worth it that you give your best energy and time to this device all the time. Let’s do a detox. It just depends on how I communicate it to them.

Peter: One of the things that I’ve tried doing is just some of the light detox, which is there is a setting I have an iPhone and there’s a setting in there where you can make your phone not light up when you just pick it up, and a lot of people don’t know about that. So if I pick up my phone, nothing happens. It just it stays black. The screen is just dark. But most people I know have it, so if you pick it up, the screen lights up, and then, of course, you’re gonna see any notices that came in since the last time you touched your phone, which is probably five minutes ago.

So it’s almost it’s like little things like that I found can be helpful. I also always keep my ringer off, so I only have it on vibrate, and that’s it. If I happen to miss a phone call, oh, well.

Camille: One of the simple things that I do is I only have those little sound notifications for text messages. I don’t have it for emails or any type of group chats or anything like that that I might join. Only for text messages and that’s it because I don’t want to be notified every time I have this or that. And then the other thing I do is I’m not online on the weekends for my clients. They all know this.

A couple of them will always test me on it but I don’t take text messages or emails for Saturday or Sunday. That’s my time for recovery, and I’m very, very adamant about it.

Peter: That’s great. Well, and I think if you do that, you’re doing a couple things. Well, first, you’re helping yourself, but you’re also setting a great example for other people around you, and when you are with those other people in your life that you wanna spend time with, you’re actually spending time with them rather than distracted time versus, you know, intense time. It doesn’t mean you you know?

Camille: And it feels so freeing, and I know I have more energy as a result of it, and I honor them. And I think when I first initiated that, I think I made an exception one time because I thought, oh, well, you know, maybe I’ll just go ahead and answer it. And I thanked this person to this day because he really called me out on it. He said, no, no, I know I sent the email on Saturday. But you said, you don’t answer emails on Saturday.

You wait until Monday. And so that wasn’t what I call a real friend. So again, it’s so good to have people who will hold you accountable and help you along this because you’re not going to be superwoman or superman all the time. You’re not going to do it right all the time. So it’s really good to have those people to speak into your life and make sure you stay on the right path.

It’s wonderful.

Peter: I agree. So, if I’m going work with you, Camille, how am I going to work with you? What’s the deal, so to speak? Let’s say my doctor recommended me or whatever. Where do we go from there?

Camille: Yeah, after I give you all of the papers to read and talk to you, especially our first conversation on me, but we enter into a four session set, so we will talk every week at the same time for four weeks. I don’t automatically renew the next set of four without asking you first because I make it as safe and as comfortable for you as possible. It’s so safe and comfortable that if something comes up and you have to change your appointment on that day or close to that day, I’ll change it. No penalty. Everything always works out because I really want the person to feel and to know that I am for them and this is about them.

So again they have a four session set and let’s just say they meet every Tuesday at 01:00 each week for four sessions and after the fourth session I always ask them would you like to renew again and most of the time they renew until we get all of our results and at the end of each session by the way I always ask them how they feel because it’s important to me that they feel hope and one lady brought up a good point because I asked her how did she feel? She said, Oh, this was great. I was so afraid that you were going to have me rehearsing all of the past traumas and all the things I went through. And I told her, No, it’s not that way, even though I do have credentialing in psychology because that is what I took at the University of Missouri Columbia, but that’s not the way I do it. I really want to know what’s important to you, how you think, what’s in your way, and help you consider wiser ways of thinking.

Peter: I like that. So you are also a speaker. You do some public speaking. Are there any particular engagements that you do each year?

Camille: I speak to a very large medical institute in Montgomery, Alabama. That’s the one I do every year. I’m actually going to be going there twice a year now because there’s another institution I’ll be speaking for there. But there are other organizations around the state and in other states that I speak for, and I’m the very opposite of most people. I don’t really have any fear of speaking in front of a crowd.

The larger, the better, because I have so much fun. I think I would have more of the jitters talking one on one than I do speaking in front of a crowd. So it’s kind of different, but I love it. I absolutely love it.

Peter: Well, you sound very relaxed right now. So I want to talk just about you personally, not necessarily about what you’re doing, but just a little bit about you. So this is a question that I try to ask all our guests. It’s how do you define life done well?

Camille: Okay. So for me, done well is found in my definition of vitality, the energy plus joy plus momentum. And right now, what’s really important to me is what I have referred to as joy being the new status symbol. So if you’re doing life well, even if all of your circumstances are not the way you want them to, you still have a certain amount of joy. And you still have a lot of peace.

I used to think well, let’s say I watch TV. I see what they’re doing on TV. And I’d say, yes, that’s the life I want. And then you get into that life and it’s not anything like what you thought it would be. Nowadays, I’m just really happy to be able to be with the people that I love, to have the energy and the freedom to be with them, to do things, to travel, and to have real joy.

I don’t have to be the most famous person. I don’t have to have the highest success. But I do have to have joy and cause other people to have joy. And if I can impact them that way, then I’m doing life well.

Peter: That’s great. So what motivates you?

Camille: Well, I think what motivates me is the thought of having freedom And that’s health freedom, so I’m free from fatigue and disease, also financial freedom because I love to be generous. I like how it feels to be generous. And I like the joy in being generosity. And the freedom to be able to go as I please so I can make an impact, first in the lives of my family and then in my clients and even in people that I feel called to. So for instance, maybe a nonprofit group or helping some people at church or something like that.

I just don’t want to be stuck and I don’t want to be in a place where I don’t have enough. I want to have freedom to be able to make a difference and just bring a lot of joy and impact to another person’s life. And then that that falls back on me. It always comes back to me.

Peter: So let me ask you this. What comes first? Joy or generosity?

Camille: Joy comes first for me. Joy comes first. But joy is going to even make me want to be generous. Right. And then joy comes again after you’ve been generous.

Peter: Right. Exactly. But it starts with the joy first. That’s great.

Camille: Yeah. Because my attitude will be right and my mindset will be right and I won’t be self centered. I mean, I will think about other people and I’ll anticipate what’s going to happen when I’m able to make a difference for that person. I mean, yeah, you will get joy from generosity, but I think you have to have the right mindset, especially in today’s society when there’s so much love of money and so on and compelling people and all of that. I think the joy comes first for me.

Peter: So do you have any daily habits or rituals you’d like to share with us?

Camille: Well, I probably will feel comfortable saying daily habits. I don’t know about rituals, but I do like to do bible study, especially in the book of Proverbs. That’s that wisdom book. And it’s really true what someone once said to me, if you read just a proverb a day, you will get so much more wisdom. And I mean, there’s only 31 of them and read one a day.

That’s awesome. But I read more than just Proverbs but I make sure that I want to read something from the Bible first. And then I do want to pray. And this is before I even think about picking up the phone because if I pick up the phone I think that a lot of energy is going to just go right down the tube. If there’s a lot of requests and a lot of email, and if I really do something bad, like looking at the news, that will be tough.

So I definitely engage in the daily habit of reading the Bible and prayer. And then I also take some time each day to talk to at least one friend, especially one of my senior citizen friends. I have quite a few women that I know. They’re 75 and above. And they’re very wise people.

They don’t really do too many petty things so I don’t have to worry about that. And I just love sitting and listening to them, checking on them. They tend to get lonely sometimes so it’s kind of nice for them to get a phone call from me. And they can’t always come to my office so I will actually pick one day of the week and I’ll go to them. But it’s nice to keep up that conversation and to always talk to them.

Peter: I really like that.

Camille: It’s very abundant for me. Yeah. Just seeing how happy they are to get a call, and I think I I get more joy from it than they do.

Peter: So it sounds to me like you live a life of abundance and not scarcity.

Camille: Yeah. I would say that I would say after a lot of years and default errors learning it, yeah, I would say that my mindset is where it would be a life of abundance and I’m continuously learning but I’m actually having fun. I look forward to talking to people about how to not only acquire your health but how to hold on to it and how to get more than just energy and how to really think vitality. I mean so many people write me now and they say, oh I’m gaining my vitality. I want my vitality restored.

I mean they are agreeing with the mindset. I like seeing them free like that. And I like seeing them build up courage to let toxic relationships go and to let bad habits go and to enjoy just a healthier mindset and body. It’s I like it. It’s better than working for a big corporation for me.

Peter: Yeah. I wrote down the definition, this vitality equals energy plus joy plus momentum, and I could see how each component piece really plays into your message and to vitality because you could just focus on energy only, and energy without joy, it could be empty, right?

Camille: Definitely. You can have the energy, but what if you’re like, you have the energy but you’re on a treadmill every day, like a mutual friend that we know has that term and he’s so brilliant and wonderful and that’s a good point he brought up. Or what if you have energy but you have to just do back breaking work all the time and you just have no recovery time or recreation for yourself? Even if you take all the right vitamins, eat all the right seeds, just that lifestyle will eventually get you.

Peter: Right. Well, this has really been fascinating and it’s really been a joy to listen to you and I can just feel the vitality in your voice coming through. It’s really infectious.

Camille: Well, it’s been a joy to be on your show because actually I was just so happy the day I met you, and I loved the things that you had to say. They were very inspiring to me. And when I found out you had a podcast, I said to myself, I really wanna be on his podcast one day. And so months and months later, I’m finally on your podcast. So for me, I must be doing something right because I got on your podcast.

I just love your podcast.

Peter: Thank you. Thank you. Well, we try. We try. So Camille, if someone wants to learn more about you and what you do, learn more about your services, where should they go?

Camille: Yeah, a couple of things. They can go to my website at www.thinkvitality.com. So that’s thinkasinthink with the brain, think,vitality.com or they can email me Monday through Friday camillethinkvitality dot com. I’m really not on Facebook but I am on Instagram so if you’re a big social media person, you can find me, CamilleGallenger, Instagram.

Peter: Excellent. Well, Camille, thank you so much for joining us today, and I look forward to seeing you at our next mutual meeting at the Business Coaching, and you have a great day.

Camille: And you too, and continued success with your work.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.