The following are excerpts from Tamara’s interview with ProudMary.

Tamara is  personal coach offering individual and group coaching and support services.  She brings a unique background of health and wellness into her new profession. Her busy schedule balancing family and work requires that she finds the right motivators and tools to make it through her day. I was lucky enough to spend some time getting to know Tamara — mom, busy professional and entrepreneur, and to learn from her firsthand how she got to where she is today and how she stays there. 

What four words would you use to describe yourself?

I prefer to see myself as aligning with certain values. This helps me to schedule my time so that I am really doing what’s important. I can see how day-to-day, week-to-week, I am fulfilling my values and what’s important to me. These values are growth, balance, service and community.

With your busy life, what do you do to take care of yourself? How do you balance intense work, stress and the rest of your life? 

I exercise and meditate and make time for sleep, every day. My work schedule varies from day to day, but I make sure that I get 7.5 – 8 hours of sleep. If things get too busy, the exercise would be shortened but I will never sacrifice the sleep. Unless I have to catch an early flight. Sleep is really key. That’s a foundation for me.  Getting the sleep I need is going to give me the energy to start my next day.

The meditation helps me to balance and get grounded. I can be a very high energy person, so my meditation usually happens at the end of the day, when I’m preparing for sleep. It’s also really important for me to make time to connect with family, my daughter and my partner, here at home, and my mom and siblings in town as well. It’s important to have time for everything and some people think it’s very odd, but I literally schedule everything. So I don’t have a to-do list. If it’s on my schedule, I make sure it happens.

I have 30 to 60 minute blocks throughout my day. They might be things like client calls, interviews, or networking meetings, but I also have things like yoga a least once a week on my calendar, or going to the gym or to swim. Family activities are also on the schedule. It’s also a good way to communicate with my partner. I schedule more than the average person. It keeps my life running!

Can you tell me about your background and experience in naturopathic medicine? Let’s start from the beginning, what is naturopathic medicine?  

Naturopathic training includes all conventional medicine, with an emphasis on treating the root cause of the ailment. We treat the whole person. We have guiding principles that we call therapeutic order to begin treatment with the least harmful measures such as changes in diet, lifestyle, and then we progressively use more aggressive strategies, such as pharmaceuticals and minor surgery, as necessary.

I graduated from naturopathic medical school in 2007 while living in Phoenix, Arizona. I completed a residency in family medicine at a primary care clinic, where we provided conventional treatments like medication management. We had a full scope of practice, including prescribing medications and doing minor surgery. I was doing what people would do in a regular primary care setting, like a doctor or physician assistant.

One of the most important things I learned was that we really have to understand all of the conventional treatments and diagnostics in order to treat our patients, because people live in a conventional world with conventional therapies. The environment that I was in served a population who knew what they wanted; they were paying cash, they wanted their medicines, they wanted their injections and they wanted to be able to get back to work the next day. This really informed my training and guided me toward a very holistic view of healthcare and wellness.

Shortly after completing my degree, I returned to Minneapolis and joined a corporate wellness company. I began coaching clients with chronic medical conditions through the wellness programs provided by their employers. This is all very conventional in terms of “What medications are you taking? How are you managing your asthma or diabetes?” but at the same time, I learned an entirely new skillset that I hadn’t learned in medical school — and it was coaching.

Previously with my new patients in Minneapolis, they would leave my office with a laundry list of things that they needed to do, anything from changing to an anti-inflammatory diet, drinking a certain amount of water, getting a certain amount of exercise, to following a supplement regimen. What I didn’t realize at the time was while it was very easy for me to do these things, for a new patient, struggling with a medical condition, it wasn’t. He or she didn’t necessarily had the same amount of time, energy, or motivation that I had.

Coaching the employees helped me better understand different personality types and different behavior change tendencies. By learning that, I was better able to meet people at where they were, and to provide more “small step” approaches, which is very much a coaching approach concept.

I really enjoy coaching people within the corporate wellness context, but what was missing for me was the opportunity to do things how I wanted to do them. Working for a corporation, there are certain products and services that we can’t endorse. I use lots of things that help me, such as technology like Fitbit or apps to track diet. These are valuable tools for people to better manage their health and habits. When I work with people privately, or with people who contract with me directly, they have the opportunity to get my full scope of experience.

My focus has moved on from medical conditions. My demographic is people like myself who are entrepreneurs, who may still be working, and who probably are balancing competing priorities with work, and family, and self care. I work mostly with people around my age, in their 40s, and what is different in my practice now is that I am able to bring more of myself. I have a lot of experience trying different businesses and learning more about what helps people become successful, whether it be managing their time, managing their energy, or developing certain habits.

My coaching approach focuses on Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies. She’s the author of “Better than Before,” and she has podcasts with her sister called “Happier.” There are so many different personality frameworks, like Myers Briggs. I like the Four Tendencies because it specifically addresses how we respond to inner and outer expectations.

To read the full interview, visit: ProudMaryOwnIt