28: How is Your Health Connected to Your Wealth?

Today, we are talking about how your health is your wealth in entrepreneurship and life with healing practitioner, Sandie Gascon. Sandie is an Integrative Healing Practitioner, Author of Heal Yourself, and Founder of The Integrative Healing Academy.

After suffering severe side effects from medications during her twenty-year battle with chronic migraines, when she was diagnosed with Lupus she committed herself to healing naturally. Through her experiences, she developed a whole body, mind, and spirit approach that addresses the person in a truly holistic manner. She takes the guesswork out of the equation by running functional lab work to see what the body needs. She healed herself of migraines, depression, lupus, interstitial cystitis, and cystic acne.

Her purpose is to help educate others on the importance of shifting focus to rebuilding and rebalancing the body and removing internal and external stress so the body can heal itself. With her healing practice overflowing she created The Integrative Healing Academy where she teaches people how to heal themselves, become a practitioner, and start and scale their online business.

In this episode, we cover: 

• How to start taking steps to a healthier life and how it can even save your life 
• How to be authentic in your business and bring REAL value to your customers and clients 
• Why it's ALWAYS worth investing in yourself 

Connect with Sandie:
Book: Heal Yourself
Website

Instagram
Facebook
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Website

Chapters

• 1:04 Sandie’s story // The importance of your health and your wealth
• 8:16 Sandie's top skill: authenticity
• 11:39 Sandie's best decision // Why it's always worth it to invest in yourself
• 14:20 Sandie's worst mistake in her business
• 17:02 Why Sandie wouldn't change anything
• 17:42 Sandie's beat advice on keeping a healthy life

Transcript

Sandie: [00:00:00] see what's going on with your health. It's really great to build your business, but it's not fun if you build this whole business and then you're not able to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

 Welcome to Behind Their Success. This podcast is for people who are feeling stuck on their entrepreneur journey or in their careers. It's for people who want to scale and grow their businesses, learn about the power of mindset, or they just know there's more out there and they want to start making changes.

I'm Paden Squires, the host of the podcast. I was never cut out to be an employee. And when I was an employee, I was bored out of my mind. So I made a plan. I studied and passed the CPA exam in eight months while working all with the end goal in mind of quitting my job and starting my own business. I did that in 2014 and has been on an amazing wild ride since.

So now let's hear from other entrepreneurs and what mindsets and probably more important, what actions they have taken that have created and led to their success.

Paden: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Behind Their Success Podcast. [00:01:00] I'm Paden Squires, the host, and today we have Sandy Gascon. She is an integrative healing practitioner. She is an author of Heal Yourself and founder of the Integrative Healing Academy. Sandy, welcome to the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Paden: Yeah, Sandy. 

Sandie: tell us a little bit about what you do. In a nutshell, I help people heal naturally and then I guide them to become practitioners if they wish to accept that mission. And then from there go on and help them learn to build and scale their online business. 

Paden: Very cool. give us a little bit about your background, where you are from and how you started to get to where you are now.

Sandie: Yeah, so I'm actually from Canada. I grew up in Northern Ontario in the bitter, freezing cold, and have since left that for greener sunnier pastures in Florida. makes sense. , but yeah, , growing up I had a lot of health issues and migraines, insomnia. Was diagnosed with bipolar depression at [00:02:00] 19. Wow.

Sandie: I ended up developing lupus in 2009 and I had a lot of experience with the pharmaceutical companies growing up. I was put on a lot of different medications and the one that I was put on for bipolar depression just gave me a lot of side effects. I wasn't given any help on how to get off of it.

Sandie: And, it really started to turn me away from the pharmaceutical industry. So when I was diagnosed with lupus and they wanted to put me on more medication, a lot more medication, I decided to go natural. route, even though I didn't know anything about it. 

Paden: Sure. 

Sandie: So that started my journey to work to heal my body, and it was a very long journey.

Sandie: I had no help back then. It was very different in the natural healing world. In the internet world, we didn't have access to people like we do now. And we didn't have access to the knowledge that we did, we do now. So I was on my own and tried a lot and had a lot of success [00:03:00] and I had a lot of failures.

Sandie: And, eventually with trial and error, I developed something called interstitial cystitis, which is a very painful bladder condition. It feels like you have a bladder infection, there's no infection, but it doesn't go away. And, it was then, and I had already healed from lupus, healed from migraines, got my brain balanced, I was off the medication, so I was doing really well, and then I, I took like a thousand steps backwards, and that was when I realized I had to really face a lot of fears, get certified to be able to run some labs myself to stop guessing.

Sandie: And so that's what I did, I stopped, I got certified. I figured out what was going on with my bladder and was able to heal from that. And I went on to start my online business, which very quickly flourished. I actually made the six figure mark in my first year. I was able to pay off over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans.

Sandie: And from there have just been building and building. I wrote my book, Heal Yourself, and went on to launch the Integrative Healing Academy. We just celebrated our two year anniversary. We're up [00:04:00] to a hundred students and 20 practitioners as of yesterday. Very cool. 

Paden: Very cool. 

Sandie: Yeah. 

Paden: We talk here about being healthy, wealthy, and wise, to be able to be successful in business and in other areas of your life, like what health is like.

Paden: you hear,people say, it's like a healthy person wants all kinds of things and a sick person only wants one thing, to be healthy.so like this whole part and learning about your body and learning, it's been a journey I've been on the last, I would say three or four years getting really into exercise and working out and things like that.

Paden: And the effects that's had on my career and the ability to do more and have the energy,has been tremendous for me. 

Sandie: It's huge because, sometimes people think they're healthy and I was a really sick person who thought that was normal and thought that's what I was going to have in life.

Sandie: And so, as I started to heal my body and started to reach higher and higher levels of health, I was like, Whoa, it doesn't have to be that way, but we're so conditioned as a society [00:05:00] to think that, Oh, you have a symptom, take a pharmaceutical, just keep on going with your life. And then when the next symptom comes or the side effect comes, take another pharmaceutical and you don't ever feel good.

Sandie: You can still function for some people. Some people can't, but it's so different when you start to really look inside. And I run a lot of functional medicine labs. So we look inside, we see what the body needs to heal, what the body needs to reach optimal health. And when you start to incorporate that along with the You have to do some lifestyle changes.

Sandie: You so the nutrition and the mindset work and, reshaping your thoughts and creating boundaries and habits and all these things, it's amazing what you can achieve with your health. 

Paden: I think people kind of get in that position because it happens so slowly or ever, ever so slightly.

Paden: Like, you know, you start getting the symptom and it almost comes on slow. And then when it's there, it's kind of chronic and always there. And you just feel like you said, it's like, you almost just feel like that's, well, that's what life is. Right. Not knowing that [00:06:00] you necessarily can, maybe do some different things and fix that and heal that.

Paden: Um, you know, it's kind of interesting. And my wife's a nurse practitioner, so big background in, in, in medical and it's such a struggle in the medical industry, because you're right. it takes a whole lot of lifestyle changes, habit changes, all these kinds of things that the medical system isn't necessarily even set up to even help you with, it's, 

Sandie: no, it's a sick care system. You go there when you're sick. 

Paden: Yeah. 

Sandie: And, It's really important. if I got in a car crash, I wouldn't be going to like my supplement. I feel like I live in a health food store. I wouldn't be going there. I'd be going to the hospital.

Sandie: I'd be getting surgery. And if you have a life-threatening infection, I'd be getting antibiotics, not going and taking,my natural ones because there's a time and a place for it. But I think there's such a divide in the two worlds and we've kind of bridged that a little bit with functional medicine.

Sandie: and getting into the more integrative wellness where we're adding the science to the healing versus just,[00:07:00] they both have a very big allopathic model. So you'll see,the pharmaceutical doctors based on that, you go in, they ask you what your symptoms are and they're like, Oh, you need an antidepressant or you need a cholesterol med.

Sandie: And it's very compartmentalized. And a lot of practitioners in the holistic world do the same. You go and you tell them your symptoms and they're like, Oh,that must be your hormones. Let's give you some progesterone. And there's a lot of guessing. And so the functional medicine world with the functional medicine labs is like bridging the gap and saying, Hey, you know, we can use science, we can look inside and then we can use supplements to, and herbs to really start addressing those because most pharmaceuticals are based on herbs.

Sandie: Interesting. Extracted a component and stuck an expensive name on it and charged you a little bit more, right? 

Paden: Yeah, and I really like, I really like how you explain that because I think I think it is the right path where it's, you got the natural healing, you got the medicine and it's like, well, let's take the best things from [00:08:00] both worlds and really meld them all together because that's probably really the closer to the truth of the way we need to, the way we need to go.

Sandie: Yeah. 

Paden: So, you know, Sandy, you've, you've had some success growing your business and helping people do a lot of different things. What would you say is your top skill that helps you be successful in what you do? 

Sandie: For me, it's really going to be authentic. I think it's lacking a lot right now.

Sandie: There's a lot of people who are out there. They're faking it until they make it. They're out there, just regurgitating different programs. There's so many, join this funnel and sign up for my course that nobody's ever been in. And we see that a lot. Like people are just trying to use ads to make a lot of money really fast.

Sandie: And people are tired of that. They want people who have experience, they want people who are able to,really show up and tell you what you're gonna get, and what you're doing with them, and it's, right now, I, [00:09:00] Driving is my pet peeve. It's like you see an ad and they're like, I can get you this, and this results.

Sandie: Come on, book a call And then you book a call and they're selling you this high ticket package. That's like totally,forcing it down your throat with these high pressure sales tactics. And it's like, people don't want that. Like tell people what you're doing, tell people what it costs so that they can go in informed and don't force them to make a decision on the spot.

Sandie: So that's a big thing for me in the business world. That's driving me nuts. But even with my practitioners, when they graduate,they're just getting started. And I encourage them to tell people, they're just getting started and say, you have your mentor. Working with you and able to help you through versus, them getting started and having to pretend that they have all this experience.

Sandie: So at the Academy, we're all about being really authentic. We want to be ourselves and create connections with people and attract the right people to work with us. 

Paden: Yeah, there's, I agree with you as, there's so many, like you [00:10:00] said, there's so many like online marketers out there just selling junk and here's the thing. You can't really even build a business that way because you better get really good at sales and marketing because you're going to constantly have to keep finding new and new customers because everybody else is leaving out the back door, right? because they're going to get in there and realize, wow, I was sold the bill of goods.

Paden: This is whatever. So yeah, it's tough. and here's another point I'm saying when you talk about authenticity is that I think that's huge. It's huge in my business and huge that we, me and my employees talk about is like, You don't have to know everything.

Paden: And if anybody, and I tell my clients all the time when they ask me something and I'm like, if somebody tells you they know everything, you better run away. Or 

Sandie: if they tell you they can fix it, guarantee, run away. 

Paden: So it's authenticity. And I think the only way you can start to be authentic really is to get better with yourself and get your own self confidence because when you're not being authentic, it's, you're trying to hide some part of you that you don't want people to [00:11:00] see.

Sandie: Yeah. And you just have to go from a place of service when you're in that state and you're, it doesn't mean we can't focus on making great money and making great income and transforming our own lives, but it needs to still come from a place of service. 

Paden: Yeah. Yeah. and that's one thing.

Paden: It's like, if you, if you're always doing what's in the best interest of the client. it is being honest and it's like, Hey, you're better served by this person over here than us. could we figure that out and maybe do it for it? Sure. We may, but like it's a better option for you to go do that.

Paden: A 

Sandie: hundred percent. 

Paden: Yep. And then anything that builds, once we talk about this law, not authenticity, it's trust. Yes. It's trust. And then trust is so valuable and allows you to grow the rest of your business. Without much issue. So Sandy, what would you credit as the best decision you have made on your journey?

Paden: I've made a lot of those. 

Sandie: I've made a lot of really terrible ones. 

Paden: We'll get to that next. 

Sandie: If we're talking about business, my business journey, it was way back. I've been doing this now for eight years. [00:12:00] And it was hiring my business coach at the start because I took a program, didn't have any business training, and didn't have any real support.

Sandie: It was basically like, here's some knowledge and go fly or fall or drown, whatever. And then it was just,you're done. And so I tried for about three months to work on my online business. I was getting people locally, but it's not what I wanted to do. And, I hired a business coach.

Sandie: I invested 10, 000 back then. It was a lot and it was scary. Because I was a hundred thousand in student loans. I had just invested in a program that I was still paying off. And then I'm like, okay, can I get a loan? And I had to ask my uncle, I'm like, can you help me do this? And he's sure, I'll help you with that.

Sandie: And, uh, yeah, I invested in it. and I'm a business coach who within three months got me to my first 10K month. Now, eight years ago, it was a lot easier because it wasn't so saturated. We didn't have the sea of, I call it the sea of crap. picture yourself in the ocean surrounded by like [00:13:00] plastic and you can't get out.

Sandie: Trying to get one of 

Paden: those six pack holders stuck on your face. 

Sandie: Yeah, exactly. And quickly made my first 10K month. And, that, that was definitely one of my best business decisions. 

Paden: And I, I would echo with that. I have similar experience and it's not, I would say coach, I wouldn't say I've necessarily had a coach, but it's been in communities,online communities where I'm, I'm part of a mastermind group and, really for the last, last couple of years.

Paden: And it's all business owners. with the same kind of values and still wanting to grow and have already had a significant amount of success. that cuts years off my time here to where I want to be. Yeah. and it's not, it's an investment. Like I, I, and I don't say this to brag at all, but I'd say I spend more money on self development than almost.

Paden: Anybody I know. and it's worth it. You 

Sandie: gotta, you gotta, I, I'm in the same boat, self development and growth and business growth. And if you're gonna, if you want to make it to that next ceiling and, go where you want to [00:14:00] be that you're not, and you feel like, oh, there's, there is a, an invisible roof over me and I just need help getting through it.

Sandie: Then you seek help. Whether it's from hiring team members, whether it's from doing masterminds or investing in different programs for yourself,you've got to, I'm constantly reinvesting in the business. Yeah. 

Paden: Yeah. That's great stuff. So the best decision was getting a code. What's one of those nice, one of those nice bad decisions that you got a lesson.

Sandie: I can think of one that I just made recently, but I don't have enough. I don't have enough hindsight yet. So we'll wait a year. I think it's still going to turn out to be a really amazing decision. but in the moment I was just like, eh, that was, not the greatest investment, but, The one thing that I should have done, and I wrote my book Kill Yourself, it's a very big book, and it's, it has a lot in it, I basically took all of my knowledge and put it in a book, at the time, and as much as I could fit in there, and I spent a year writing it, I spent six months editing it, and I had the opportunity to get in front of [00:15:00] Hay House, because somebody read my book and said, I'm best friends with the owner of Hay House and I think your book should be published with Hay House.

Sandie: And so I got on the phone with him and he's like, yeah, we'll send you to the person who intakes and everything. And she's like, We'd love to take you on, but you need to take your book and rewrite it into five books. You have too much in this book. And I was so like, I had a young baby. I was just like, I put so much into this book and I'm like, no, I can't.

Sandie: And so I then put out this book and I, since then have, like, I should have done what they said and just taken it and just wrote more on less. So I wrote more on one subject instead of it being like, it's like a healing Bible, but it's so big that it's very hard for people to take it all in. Right. And for me, that's how my brain learns.

Sandie: So it's like, give me a textbook and I will, I will take in that textbook and it's basically like a little healing textbook. And so that would probably be one of the biggest mistakes that I [00:16:00] have made because this book is 200 pages. Even if I would have done a smaller book, it's so much easier to do, like,a free book funnel based on a smaller book.

Sandie: With printing costs and that sort of thing. So I thought it would, that would be my biggest, uh, my biggest change if I was to go back business wise. 

Paden: Well, and you know, you can still do that. 

Sandie: Right, exactly. But I hit that same resistance of, Oh my God. God. 

Paden: yeah. Sure, sure. Heck, you know, I bet.

Paden: I bet you could still do that if you take the time or if it makes sense to you. Oh 

Sandie: yeah, I have that Hay House's President's number on my cell phone. 

Paden: There you go. Heck yeah. 

Sandie: No, I'm not sharing it with anybody. . I think I'd get in a little bit of trouble. 

Paden: Yeah, it's probably not a good idea.

Paden: That's cool. 

Sandie: no. 

Paden: So looking back, looking back, you've started your, you know, eight, 10 years in or whatever exactly it is, eight years, eight years. 

Sandie: What? Oh my gosh. Yeah. 

Paden: I've hit, I hit 10 years in business myself this year, which is pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah. So [00:17:00] going back to the beginning. What would you tell yourself from your perspective today?

Paden: What piece of advice would you give yourself? 

Sandie: Hmm,

Sandie: I would probably not change anything. I would just, I'm very much, if I was to go back there and change anything, then all my experiences would be different. So I probably wouldn't even go back and give her any advice because she's got that. She's got 

Paden: it. It turned out okay, right? It 

Sandie: turned out very well. I like how it turned out.

Sandie: I live on. Five acres in Florida. I've got my son who's healthy and he's just a baby in those pictures, but, we have so much fun. We go to water parks every week. We do, we have a beautiful pool. I get to see my horses, right there. So 

Paden: That's awesome. 

Sandie: Yeah. 

Paden: So what would you have to share?

Paden: you're really in health, in the health industry and what are some common things like, or basic things you think? Or any piece of advice I guess you'd give to just our listeners in general. the audience here is a lot of entrepreneurs [00:18:00] or just people that are into self development.

Paden: And, I think you certainly have a lot of value that you could add to them. 

Sandie: Yeah, I would definitely. for thinking of nutrition, start working on removing processed foods, not following any of the crazy fad diets that are out there because they might make you feel a little better in the beginning.

Sandie: You might lose some weight, but when I look at the long term test results of people on these extreme diets, whether it's keto or going vegan, it's not good. So find balance and eat real food. eat real food. Buy it from the farm as much as you can and really work to cut out your toxins and your chemicals.

Sandie: So you want to get as real food as possible. And it's a very different shift than cutting out carbs or, cutting out fat or, these, whatever macro people are focusing on removing or, trying to swing one side or the other, really just focus on cutting out the toxins. And then when it comes to [00:19:00] taking supplements, You need labs, because so many people come to me, they'll have a list of supplements and I'm crossing them off based on their labs, like this is wrong for your body, this is wrong for your body, like you are doing more harm than good with the supplements that you are taking.

Sandie: we need to see what your body needs, not guess based on your symptoms. We're all so unique, and I have my core six labs in my program. The three of the foundations that we start off with are organic acids from Mosaic Labs, Great Plains. They used to be Great Plains, so a lot of people are like, what's that?

Sandie: a full blood panel and a genetic test, and I just use the Ancestry raw data. And in the back of my book, I go over these labs and the blood work shows optimal ranges, what each level means. You can see the different labs. on the organic acids test show and what we're looking for on genetics.

Sandie: And it's all explained. but really if you just got those three labs, that would give you such an amazing foundation going forward. 

Paden: Yeah. And it's, yeah, with, Integrating [00:20:00] science into it, right? Like it,you're right where it's we're all so unique. It's like, Oh, we'll do a supplement.

Paden: Like what if I don't even need it? It's all based on you individually and taking the guesswork out of it, certainly is going to make it so much more effective. and you're right. Everything else is, most everything else is just lifestyle. and making healthy choices and not, it's not necessarily complicated and, and at its basics, Where it's. Eat clean food and move your body a little bit more. 

Sandie: Eat good food, move your body. And for people like when they are developing symptoms, then yeah, they're definitely going to need some supplements. And I encourage everybody to run those labs because if I look at somebody like my husband who was convinced he was healthy and he watched me go on this journey and heal myself.

Sandie: still dead against supplements, would not take anything. And he was overworking like crazy, but he felt really good. It was really strong and fit. [00:21:00] And, he was very lucky that in the smoothie I was giving him, because that was the only meal that I could get something healthy into and I gave him a smoothie every morning.

Sandie: I was spiking it with supplements and he didn't know and he ended up having a stroke. And had he not been on those supplements, he would have died. And the stroke he had was like 1 percent survival rate and he survived and is fine. The doctor was blown away by how much progress he made at a six week checkup because after his stroke he came home and he said, okay, give me the supplements because the doctor even told him, had you not taken that you would have been dead.

Sandie: And so we, a lot of people, they, especially if they're really driven and they're, they're really focused on their business, they might not be feeling what's going on in their body. they might be, you know, taking some caffeine to get up in the morning or. some wine at night to go down in the morning in the evening, or different energy drinks.

Sandie: So they feel really good until they don't. Yeah. So there's two types of people. There's the people [00:22:00] like myself whose body is like, whoa, red flag, everything is gonna kill us, and gave me all these symptoms so that I had no choice but to do something about it. Or the people who their body doesn't tell them until it's like.

Paden: Yeah. 

Sandie: Heart attack, cancer, stroke, and it's just boom, really heavy one that it's, they're hard to come back from. And some people they don't, right. So run the labs, see what's going on with your health. It's really great to build your business, but it's not fun if you build this whole business and then you're not able to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Paden: Yeah, that's what comes back to the sick person only wants one thing, right? Very cool, Sandy. Hey, it's, it's been great to have a conversation with you. What's the best way people can connect with you? You've certainly given me some stuff to think about, but what's the best way people can connect with you?

Paden: I scare 

Sandie: everybody with my husband's 

Paden: story. and the cool thing is like in the last, especially I'd say the last five years of my life, I've been around a lot more people that take all this kind of stuff seriously, right? My wife and a [00:23:00] lot of our friend groups are very much into functional medicine and The great stuff that can happen there.

Paden: So it's awesome. It's certainly awesome to have you on. yeah, what's the best way people can connect with you or get ahold of you or, just interested in what you've got going on. 

Sandie: Yeah, they can go to my website. It's www.integrativehealingacademy.com. they can find my book on Amazon and audible.

Sandie: It's called heal yourself, body, mind, spirit. 

Paden: Awesome, Sandy. I appreciate you. Anything else you want to leave for the listeners? 

Sandie: Just do small changes, even getting the labs and making these diet changes. If you want things to stick, just do a little bit at a time. And that's when I go through my program.

Sandie: We do small things so that those small things can become lifestyle and habit and bring big change in the long term. 

Paden: That's awesome. That's awesome advice. Yes. Small things, small habits, let those things compound over time and you'll be amazed how far they'll take you. 

Sandie: Exactly. 

Paden: All right, listeners. Thank you.

Paden: We will check you out next time. 

[00:24:00] Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as we're trying to accomplish our goal of helping create more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs. You can follow us on social media by searching for me, @padensquires  or going to www.padensquires.com  On the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth, and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.