Regaining Trust in Yourself with Emotional Eating Expert Renae Saager

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This is a podcast episode titled, Regaining Trust in Yourself with Emotional Eating Expert Renae Saager. The summary for this episode is: We need to trust ourselves and ask for help when we need it. Sometimes we feel miserable in careers that fit society’s mold for what we should be doing. When that happens, we are striving. However, sometimes we feel at home in a job and we feel like we belong, and that is when we begin to thrive. Our jobs should play to our unique talents, gifts, and abilities. As humans, we are personal, emotional, and social beings, and we need all of those needs to be met at work. In this week’s episode, we will listen to Renae Saager — a life coach who focuses on emotional eating — as she tells us her story of the past decade. She reflects on the past ten years and the careers she has had and the ways she has grown. In her conversation with Rebecca, Renae talks about her personal journey with food and why she became a life coach that focuses on emotional eating. She also talks about the different career paths she has taken, and how some have resulted in her striving while others have helped her thrive. Listen in to learn more about how Renae Saager regained trust in herself, found a career that made her feel alive and began thriving.
A summary of Renae's life journey
01:08 MIN
How Renae became a life coach that specializes in emotional eating
02:37 MIN
The catalyst and epiphany that changed Renae's relationship with food
02:12 MIN
How Renae helps other women make a choice and move forward
02:10 MIN
Identifying what it means to be successful on a personal level
02:04 MIN
Finding a job that meets your personal, emotional, and social wants and needs
02:17 MIN
The difference between striving and thriving in a job that is not right for you
02:21 MIN

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Hello, this is Rebecca Fleetwood Hession, host of the Baddest Women's Council podcast. We're here for reflection and connection for the bad- ass high- achieving woman like you. So thanks for being here. And since you're here, you might as well just hit the subscribe button. Don't be silly. You don't want to miss a minute of any of the episodes coming up.

Speaker 2: (singing).

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Today's guest is Renae Saager. Renae helps her clients as a life coach deal with emotional eating. Her website states," Where women break up with binge eating and create the life they're truly hungry for." I love this episode. We actually just connected a couple of hours ago and I said," Hey, do you want to record a podcast today?" Because she posted something on Instagram, because it's her birthday, and it was a reflection over the last 10 years. And there were some things that really stood out to me that I wanted to talk about today. And so this conversation encapsulates everything that I care about working with my clients and the difference between striving and thriving, both in our mindset, in our willingness to explore careers until we find the one that really fits for us. It's just rich with... It's just just good. Here we go.

Speaker 2: (singing).

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Hey Renae, how's it going?

Renae Saager: Good. I'm excited to be here and to chat with you.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I'm excited too. Happy birthday. I know this won't come out today, but we're recording on your birthday.

Renae Saager: Yes.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And we're birthday people, we have discovered, so yay us.

Renae Saager: Yeah. I'm accepting gifts and happy birthdays all month long to anyone out there listening. So just know that if you're listening later, which you will be, but send me the love still, I'll still take it.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Absolutely. If they want to put this on their calendar for next year, it's December the 1st.

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm(affirmative). Yep. I often have an Amazon wishlist started so I can send you that link too.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Amen sister. We are sisters in birthday celebration. Same, same, same. Well, here's why I reached out and said can we talk today is not only because you're fabulous and it's your birthday, but your birthday post on, I found it on Instagram, I'm sure it was on all the places really stuck out because it's profound, but there's a place in this that I want to hone in on for our listeners, but I'm going to summarize it quickly and then people can go and read it for themselves. It goes from, well, it's not in chronological order. You're making it hard on me.

Renae Saager: It should be in chronological order.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Oh, I just don't count very well. I'm more of a words girl than a numbers girl, whole place. You're calling back on like all that's happened in a decade and you start with 2008 blackout drunk, late stage alcoholic. 2009, got sober. 2012 residential treatment for eating disorder, again, not first- time apparently. 2013, started working at Trader Joe's, this is the one I'm going to come back to. 2015, went into surgery for cervical cancer. 2016, your mom died. 2017, traveled through Europe with a friend from work who I'd never really hung out with outside of work, this totally sounds like something I would do. Also in 2017, moved back to Milton- Freewater, made a major career change, opened a gym. 2018, officially started your own business, which you're running today. And 2019, was certified as a life coach making the biggest investment in yourself you'd ever made and 2020 sold your childhood home, road tripped across the country with several stops and ended up here in our beautiful city of Indianapolis. That's quite a journey.

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Another thing that I love about you, even though we've just met, it's just so apparent is big, bold moves. Sometimes those are destructive, sometimes those are constructive and it's played out in this evolution. And so I want people to follow you because you specialize in emotional eating.

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm(affirmative). Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: As a practitioner, as well as someone who's been through it to help others through it, fair?

Renae Saager: Yep. Exactly.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Before I launch into the stuff I want to talk about why the Trader Joe's thing stuck out to me, tell us just a little bit about that work you do now as a practitioner.

Renae Saager: Yeah. I, as you were reading through that, struggled with food stuff, like you name it, I did it with food and body and just that chronic anxiety around it for over a decade, 15 years close to, and finally I reached a place where I was able to see why I had struggled for so long. And once I started connecting those dots within myself, everything just became more and more apparent. And that's when I started really educating myself on intuitive eating, health at every size, getting more into the brain and the psyche. And I just always said," If I ever figure this out, I'm going to tell everyone. I'm going to help as many people as I can," and here I am getting to do just that. And I love doing it because I find that it is women similar to you. It is women similar to me. It is the go getter, very high- achieving productive, outgoing person. And it's this food thing that is the skeleton in the closet that she cannot get rid of. And I love getting to work with these kinds of women. I love getting to talk about all that deep dark stuff. I've never been someone that's into small talk. I couldn't like cut the, let's get to the good stuff. And so that's something else that I really love about coaching and that I just do effortlessly, which is I really lay it all out there, but I lay it all out there in hopes that someone else is going to connect to it. And they get a flicker of hope that," Oh my gosh, maybe I can do this," because I know I didn't get here by myself. I had tons of help, tons of mentors, tons of everything. And so I put it out there in hopes of offering someone else, some inspiration or some hope because I lived in that hell with food and it really felt like a hell for again, 15 years. And so for me to be able to help women leave that in a relatively quick amount of time is amazing. And I really love it. And my clients right now are amazing and it just keeps getting better every year. So that is what I do.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I love the way you talk about it, you light up. I can tell when someone is in what I call a thriving career versus striving when they talk about it and they have that look of thriving on their face. It's joy, it's happiness. It's, I love what I do. It makes a difference. I see how it makes a difference. It's always fun for me to see that in someone, but, well, it's, what's funny is I think back about 10, maybe even 12 years ago, I wrote a blog post and it was titled, I miss the days when I was hungry and I just ate because that's when things start... I was traveling all the time. I had little kids. It was constantly what's for dinner. And then when was I going to eat and what was I going to eat? Was I going to eat chicken nuggets off of the kids plate again and then feel like or was I going to actually make a healthy dinner?

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And it was like, food became this thing when my kids were little. I totally resonate with that. You mentioned something about your journey. You said," I finally figured it out for myself and then I really started to dive in and study it more from the neuroscience and from all the different angles." Can you share with us, what was that catalyst of figuring it out for yourself? The epiphany maybe.

Yeah. Sometimes I'm hesitant to say the epiphany, because I think when I put this out there, people are like," Oh my gosh, I have to have a traumatic event happen in my life." But where things really clicked for me when my mom died. I was still managing things were okay but it was after her death that I was really shaken and it was put into perspective for me just how short life could be. And I was a very functioning person with binge eating like most of us are. We've managed it, we're really good at hiding it and protecting it. And I had gotten to the point after her death that I was like," I don't want this anymore." The difference for me was I wanted the life without it more than I wanted the life with it. And it's a challenging place to be because for so many of us that have emotional eating or binge eating things, it is a comfort. It is our number one coping skill. And it's like ripping your child's stuffed animal out from them. It's terrifying. And I hear that fear and I had it too. What do I even do with my life? If I'm not thinking about food or exercising or bingeing or burning it off, what do I do? And I didn't know. And this is something that I always try and tell my clients too, is like, please don't get stuck on the how, it will happen. It will unfold. It will also click for you, but you have to start. Because for me, I didn't know. I just knew like," Hey, listen, I want to be a business owner. I want to be a coach. I want to do all of these things. And I don't want to carry this heavy bag of emotional eating, binge eating with me into every single thing that I do in my life." Because up until that point, it had been there. And so I metaphorically put the bag down and started working through some of that stuff. And a lot of it is regaining that trust in myself. And that's something that I work with clients on a lot too, is that: Diet culture or dieting robs us from all of our personal power. It makes us doubt ourselves until we die. We don't think we know what to eat. We don't think we know how to eat. We don't think we should be the weight that we are. We do everything against ourselves. And so what I do is I come in and I help you, we clear all that stuff out of your brain, all those years and years of diet culture, and messaging that, we've believed about ourselves, which is, "I'm not enough. I'm not good enough," and we can the food rules for maybe the first time in your entire life. And by doing that, by stripping away all of those old beliefs, we're able to really get clear on what exactly you want, because the fear is, "If I don't control my food, I'll never stop eating." That's not ever happened. That's literally never happened to anyone that I've worked with myself included, but it's actually that fear," I'm so terrified if I don't control it, I'll never stop eating," that is actually keeping us eating. And so we remove all of those fears and I help my clients tap back into what they really want because as motivated and as confident as these women seem, they are often not as confident as they put out into the world. And they crave the kudos from people. They crave the admiration. They are people pleasers, even though they are quite confident. If you looked at them, you'd be like," Oh, she is super confident and super driven." But internally, like when I get to see behind the curtain, there's a lot of," I don't think I'm good enough. I don't think I am worth it. I don't think I'm worthy of this," which surprise... Hello, that's welcome to the human condition. There's nothing about that that's surprising to me, but it's amazing to get to show women why they're thinking that and that they can actually, for once possibly in their entire life, have a choice and shift how they move forward.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: We do very similar work because I help career women and men, but mostly women, learn how to trust themselves to get through times of uncertainty because all of our career is full of it.

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm(affirmative).

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: How to trust that they have unique gifts and talents that are their super power and how to trust themselves to reach out and ask for help and connect, to get to have the kind of life they want. And one of the things that is a common theme in the women I'm working with as well is they haven't really identified the life they want. They're just trying to control all the pieces as they move through it. And you said, you said," I don't really want to say my epiphany because I don't want people to think that there needs to be a traumatic experience." But I think that the biggest thing that we can do in the work that we do is remind people that identifying the life you want is that. We only make changes really for pain or gain, to move away from the pain or move towards the gain. If we don't spend some time looking at what the gain opportunities are and identifying what's the life that I want, it's going to be really difficult to achieve it. We're just constantly taking it as it comes and trying to control all the things. And I think that's where we get into some struggle. I put out a survey and asked people to describe what a thriving life was. And people said," This is really hard. I don't know. I've never really thought about it. I should spend some time thinking about it." And it's fascinating to me, more and more of my clients I'm asking that question and I'm helping guide them through identifying what do they even want?

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm(affirmative). Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It's fascinating to me.

Renae Saager: It is. And it's because we're just, like we talked about before we started recording too, it's like so much of that comes from societal expectations. Like," Oh, this is what you do to be successful." And it's not the truth for everyone. This isn't true.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And what you want shouldn't be... I hate the word shouldn't. Pause please. Backing up. Rewind. What we can do for ourselves is not identify the life we want in terms of a title, an achievement or something that sounds like a business term, but instead identify the life we want and how it feels to live in it.

Renae Saager: Mm-hmm(affirmative). Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And I shared with you the framework I use, because I think this is really interesting, the way it ties together is I talk about a business as human framework. And if you had two columns side by side and under the business column, you wrote control, measure, optimize. And under the human column, you wrote personal, emotional and social. We have very different needs. The business needs to control the money- making model of the business, that's good business practice, but we, as humans can get more comfortable with our unique, personal needs, our emotional needs, our social needs and when we can combine those two that's thriving. But I think that with food, with our time, with a lot of things, especially high- achieving women, control has become our go- to because we feel like without it, things will spin completely out of control. And we won't know what's coming next.

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm( affirmative). Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: One of the things that you noted in there, as I said, was that a stint at Trader Joe's, God bless Trader Joe's. I love them so much. You said in 2013," I started at Trader Joe's and I think that's worth mentioning because I met some of my closest friends there," pause, social, right?

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm(affirmative).

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: "I met David there," I'm assuming that's a very special person in your life.

Renae Saager: Yeah. My boyfriend.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Hello David. And it was the most quote unquote at home in a job you'd ever felt. And that is so significant in the work that I do for people to feel themselves and connected at work. And it was significant enough that it made a place in your summary of the decade, emit some other really big things. And I wanted to talk about that. What was it about Trader Joe's that got the bullet point on the birthday list and a significant place in the last decade?

Renae Saager: Oh, I just think it's hilarious that you picked that out because, so I had originally written this in my note, in my phone this morning when I was going through pictures and thinking about what I wanted to write and I had done the whole thing. And then as I was going through my photos, I was looking at all of them. And I had tons in there from Trader Joe's. I had tons in there from my girlfriends from Trader Joe's and I went back through and added that in there. And I felt that it was worth noting because I just remember going in there for the interview and it was... I'm a kind of weird, I love fiery-

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I wouldn't even put the kind of disclaimer on there. My favorite thing about you is how weird you are.

Renae Saager: Yeah. I'm kind of a weirdo.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I feel like you are owning your uniqueness in big, bold ways. And it makes me trust you because I feel like... And that's what I say to my clients, the more you own your uniqueness, the more you evoke a sense of trust, because I know you're not hiding anything for God's sakes. I've seen you do whatever, I've seen you just be you.

Yeah. Even just going into Trader Joe's on the first day and people were not in corporate uniforms, they were wearing converse and they were wearing whatever and jeans and crazy hairstyles and plugs and tattoos and beards and weird glasses and everything. And just a shirt that was like Trader Joe's with a Hawaiian flower on it. I was like," Oh my God," it just felt fun to me. And I obviously attend to be a little bit higher energy and I get off on that, that's another reason why I did like working at Starbucks and restaurants too, is the adrenaline that the peak from it, but there was just something different about being in there. And I remember when Dean, he was one of our captains that wasn't really that popular at my store, but I really liked him. I really liked Dean and he hired me and that's probably why I have one reason why I liked him, but we just have a lot of similarities in our intensity, which can be off- putting to a lot of people, but he hired me. And I remember right when I got hired, I ran up to him and bear-hugged him. And he's like this pretty beefy baldheaded," Oh, I do CrossFit and yeah, bro I'm going to eat steak." And so he's like that. And so I bear-hugged him when I got hired. And one of the mates, Jessica was like," I don't think anyone has ever hugged Dean before." And I was just like, but, I just felt so at home. And I just remember the first day I started and I took a picture for my Instagram back then, and it was all of my shirts that I had gotten and my knife cutter and the belt thing. And I was just like, I can tell this is where I belong. And it was just the ringing of the bells and the music and the mates, the upper management, while they're upper management, they're still just fun people. And that's what I like is, and let's just like be keep it real, there are definitely some negatives that I could go into, but we're going to stay on the positives right now. A big part of being successful at Trader Joe's is having a good work ethic. And that is that I do and that is something that a lot, not all, a lot of the people there also have, which is like, get up, let's get to work, but also let's have some fun doing it. Let's have the witty banter going back and forth, and then music cranked up and the jokes and the laughter, like belly laughter on the floor. And I feel like that's so much about what I want in my life is I used to think I wanted a job where I wore a pencil skirt and heels and had a briefcase, honest to God for the longest-

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Oh, I had that job.

Renae Saager: Yeah. I was like, I just want to be a secretary. And I still have some difficulty being me not being the buttoned up, all of that stuff. I feel like, Oh, I should be doing that. And I have like a panic attack about it twice a year where I was like, I need to be more serious and more professional but I just can't. And so, that was a part of that job that I just was like," Oh my God, these are my people." The mates were crazy. The captains were crazy. The co- workers were crazy, but all in such a good relatable way, just good people just some good-

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And to me, that's the epitome of a personal, emotional and social humanity based culture, right?

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And when you can combine that with a good moneymaking model of business practices and systems and processes, that's a winning combination, but what's really interesting about your story is this wasn't your first job.

Renae Saager: Oh God, no.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Before that where were you?

Renae Saager: I was at a hospital, a main hospital in Portland, Oregon. And I'd been there for five or so years. I had floated through a couple different units, renal dialysis, oncology, al of that.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: You were training to be a nurse, right?

Renae Saager: Yeah. I was in school. I was applying for nursing school. I was doing the 312. I had the scrubs. I was like," This is the job that's going to be respectable and people are going to like look up to me," and I hated my life. Every single day on the way to work, I honestly thought I wish someone would just crash into me. I dreaded going so bad. And I don't even know really what it was. I just know, I felt extremely claustrophobic there. I felt like I could not breathe. And it had nothing to do with the people that I worked with because honestly the people that worked on some of my unit, almost every floor that I worked at at the hospital, amazing, like still friends with them on social media, just wonderful. Nurses have very similar raunchy humor that I appreciate. I lived with a nurse for many years and I loved her too. But for me, the work was just so claustrophobic feeling. It just felt awful.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That's what I describe as striving. When you're in a job that doesn't play to your unique gifts, talents, I'm very much about God kind of guiding some of these experiences that we have. And I think that's the way that he's like pounding on the door going," This one's not for you. This one's not for you," make you uncomfortable enough even when it doesn't make sense, because society says," Get a job that study and has a good paycheck." Well, nursing is the epitome of that, right? It's, there's always going to be sick people so you'll always going to have a job and they pay pretty well, but when you're miserable, that's no life.

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And so: This is literally the perfect example of the difference between striving and thriving is when you can find a place where you know that your unique gifts and talents and personality and style and all of those things you can belong, that's what we want is to get up every day and think, "I can't wait to go be with those people." The work is still going to be work, don't be ridiculous, but doing it in a way that you can show up fully as yourself, that's the snizzle.

Renae Saager: I get it. Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But one of the other things that you said about the difference between the two was in the break room.

Renae Saager: Yeah. At the hospital, I was not in a good place with my food when I was working in hospital. I was very aware of all the food and body talk, but I still am, but it just like doesn't affect me in the way that it did back then. But at the hospital, you know what? A hospital's, I swear to you for as much health as they promote, it is like the most fat phobic place I ever been because all you see, and doctors bless their hearts, most aren't educated on health at every size, which I'm a huge believer in and just the scale and I've got lots of thoughts on all of those things, but everywhere in the hospital is like," We're going to do a 10 pound weight loss challenge," or tape measures on photos and all about weight loss and just all of this stuff. And ironically, you go in the break room and there's boxes of donuts, things of bagels, and everyone's eating it. And the whole time they're eating it, they're like," Oh my gosh." I remember one person specifically was eating a bagel. And she was someone that I really liked. I looked up to her and she's like," Oh, I'm going to eat a bagel here in a minute, get a bagel here," around her midsection. And I was like," God, what a horrible way to think." And it's not their fault, it is our society, again, slapping on these," This is a good food. This is a bad food. Always eat green vegetables, never eat a donut," all of these things that just make us more screwed up around food, but I stopped eating in the lunch room because I was like," I can't handle this." All I hear are people talking about how fast they are, how much they hate their stomach, how they're starting a new cleanse, how this, that, and the other. And it just like, I could not handle it. And then I went to Trader Joe's and because your schedule so wacky, I started with the closing shift and then I kind of went to some mid shifts and then I went to the opener shifts and I preferred the openers because I'm much more a morning person. Sometimes you'd have to get there at 4: 00 AM, sometimes 3: 00 AM, sometimes 5: 00 AM. You're up early and if you get up at three in the morning, you are hungry at 5: 00 or 6: 00 or 7: 00 AM. And so I just remember going into the break room and having it be odd hours like 7: 00 AM or 10:00 AM and someone's eating this huge bowl of leftover spaghetti or a big thing of meatloaf and French bread or a box of bacon in a baguette and just all these crazy things. And nobody was back there. I shouldn't like," Oh, what is this going to do?" We're all like," I am hungry. I've been up for four and a half hours. Give me some calories. Give me a burrito. Give me the meatloaf, give me a whole thing of chicken. I don't care." And so that was just for me, so refreshing to be like," Oh, you can just eat." I was in this place where I was recovering my relationship with food and so it was so helpful. And none of those people knew. I was brand new at that time, so none of them knew anything about me and my food, but just me being able to go into that break room and have people randomly eating cookies at 6: 00 in the morning. I'm like, what? No eating cookies followed up with the," I know I really shouldn't, but, I've been so bad but," they just ate the cookies and moved on with their life. And it was just so freeing to me.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: You think there's a connection between those things that goes both ways, right? When you're in a career or a job that you are well suited for, you feel more emotionally stable, so it doesn't trigger some of those things. And then when you are more stable with your food, you can open yourself up to greater relationships.

Renae Saager: Oh, for sure.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Because you can be yourself.

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I feel like because it made a place in your post that it had to have somehow been significant in relationship to those other things.

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And then to hear you say that it was from scrolling through the pictures that you added it. I think that's also a practice that we can all benefit from. I've made significant life changes from that act of reflection. Everything about this podcast is reflection and connection for high achieving women. And when we can reflect back when we're not in the frenetic pace of living it and reflect back into either decades or even last week, we learn a lot about ourselves that we don't necessarily pay attention to in the moment.

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm( affirmative). Yeah, absolutely. Just with the stress of being in the... And there's a lot of nurses out there that also I've worked with, I've worked with them and that makes sense to me. That industry, that field, that line of work attracts that same high achieving," I just want to do right. I just want to get it right. I just want the gold star." It attracts that type of person often. It's the high achiever that goes into that industry. And it's just kind of like, push, push, push, go, go, go. And at a certain point, like you were saying, your body tells you," This is not right. I cannot keep going at this." And especially right now for nurses, my heart breaks for them because quadruple the amount of stress with COVID and stuff, I'm sure that the food things are just completely out of whack. But for me, in that field, I was so uncomfortable with where my life was heading. When I thought about the next 10 years of my life, I was like," Oh no." I was not filled with excitement. I was like," I can not do this for 10 years, there's no way. And so of course it was all a chain reaction. It was all just building on each other. And so going to Trader Joe's and feeling that safety, feeling at ease, feeling seen, feeling appreciated, making genuine connections, not having to kill myself on the floor or be so crazy and stressed out, I could simmer down that nervous system. A lot of that binge eating is your central nervous system is just in overdrive and so you eat and it makes everything quiet. And so I was able to just quiet my brain, even though I was still in a super chaotic environment. When I would come home from Trader Joe's, I told my roommate, I was like," I can't see you or talk to you for at least two hours," because I was so stimulated from Trader Joe's because my store was at the time, the busiest constantly breaking records for how many people we saw.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Wow.

Renae Saager: I'm actually much more of an introvert than an extrovert and so by the time that I left, I was like," Oh, I'm done. I don't want to see anyone. I'm going to take a nap. Maybe I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to watch some TV," and that's it like I'm tapped out for the day, but it still fed me in a way that made me just feel so alive. I just loved it.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: The deepest human need is to be seen, heard, known for who we are uniquely and so you have illustrated the power of that, both in your social relationships, as well as the eating challenges that you'd had. All of your body just goes, ah, this is thriving. Because day when you wake up, your brain has one job, it wants to make sure you survive and thrive. Striving was never supposed to be part of the program, that entered in with the whole industrial age productivity, education, high achievement stuff that we don't have enough hours to cover today.

Renae Saager: Right.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But when your brain feels that you can be yourself and that you're doing work that matters and that you're doing it in a way that you're connecting with people, you've checked all the boxes and then your brain goes," Yey, she's thriving."

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Then you can go home and rest.

Renae Saager: Mm- hmm( affirmative). Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Yeah. That's good stuff.

Renae Saager: It is.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That's good stuff. You had no idea when you woke up this morning on this beautiful day of your birthday, that you were going to be a poster child for thriving on the Badass Women's Council.

Renae Saager: Yeah. You guys out there listening, she literally messaged me like three hours ago and was like,"Do you want to be on the podcast?" I was like," Wait, for real, or to just chat?" She said," No, for real. The podcast is actually today." So this was very short notice.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I just think when you see an opportunity, you should jump on it.

Renae Saager: Yeah. I agree.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That's what we did. Thank you for being here. This has been absolutely super fun.

Renae Saager: Yes.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Tell our listeners how they can continue to be a part of your life. Where can they find you if they wanted to hire you? Tell us all the things.

Renae Saager: Yeah. The best ways are through Instagram or my website, Instagram and my website are both exactly the same. It's just Renae Saager, R- E- N- A- E, S- A- A- G- E- R. You can find me on there. You can send me a message. I'm on both. I'm on there quite frequently, especially Instagram so you can always just shoot me a message. And even if you don't want to hire me, but you just related to some things I love connecting with new people, especially since I did just move to Indie about four months ago. I'm still doing all the networking and meeting all the people. So yeah, please, if you have a listener, that's interested send me a message.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Yeah. You share really helpful tips on your Instagram. It's definitely worthy of a follow and you're super fun. And so do you mostly do, from a business standpoint, one- on- one-

Renae Saager: Yep.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: ...Coaching? Okay.

Renae Saager: At this point I just do one- on- one. Yep.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And are you taking new clients? If somebody was listening to this and said," I need to just do something about this today."

Renae Saager: Yes. I have a couple of spots left. I'm getting pretty filled up, but I have a couple of spots and then I'll be taking some in for the new year as well.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Awesome.

Renae Saager: Yeah.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: You're great. Go enjoy the rest of your birthday and everybody mark your calendars, Renae's birthday is December 1st.

Renae Saager: That right.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: She'll be expecting gifts and all the things next year or anytime this month.

Renae Saager: Any time, yes.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Open this month for receiving of the gifts.

Renae Saager: Yes. Open enrollment of gifts.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Okay. Awesome. Thank you.

Renae Saager: Thank you.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: This

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: is Rebecca Fleetwood Hession. Thanks so much for being here. We'd love to stay connected. We can do that if you jump into the online community at badasswomenscouncil. community. We've got lots of cool people in there already and if you come in, you'll just be cooler.

Speaker 2: (singing).

DESCRIPTION

We need to trust ourselves and ask for help when we need it. Sometimes we feel miserable in careers that fit society’s mold for what we should be doing. When that happens, we are striving. However, sometimes we feel at home in a job and we feel like we belong, and that is when we begin to thrive. Our jobs should play to our unique talents, gifts, and abilities. As humans, we are personal, emotional, and social beings, and we need all of those needs to be met at work. In this week’s episode, we will listen to Renae Saager — a life coach who focuses on emotional eating — as she tells us her story of the past decade. She reflects on the past ten years and the careers she has had and the ways she has grown. In her conversation with Rebecca, Renae talks about her personal journey with food and why she became a life coach that focuses on emotional eating. She also talks about the different career paths she has taken, and how some have resulted in her striving while others have helped her thrive. Listen in to learn more about how Renae Saager regained trust in herself, found a career that made her feel alive and began thriving.