Finding Balance with Susie

Susie Linquist - Health & Wellness Coach at Linquist Wellness Coaching

Susie Linquist founded Linquist Wellness Coaching in 2020 to help women feel strong and confident.

Taking care of ourselves, mind and body, is something so many of us, especially as women, push to the back burner of our to-do lists. We rarely find moments to highlight our own needs and often begin prioritizing the needs of others more than our own. Whether it’s a love language or simply the way we have been conditioned to be, women so frequently lose themselves in the chaos of life. Luckily, there are some of us on a mission to change that for themselves and others and Susie Linquist is leading the charge.

Linquist Wellness Coaching is a brand and business built by Susie Linquist in 2020. Her goal has always been to push others beyond settling for “good enough” and inspire them to strive for what greatness can be for them. Particularly for women in their 40s and 50s, Susie provides detailed resources to help women overcome their mental and physical obstacles to feel strong and confident in their own skin.

Born and raised in Ohio, Susie was always seeking an outlet to help others find themselves. She now lives in North Carolina along with her husband, and two children and has built a platform that not only benefits her and her family, but truly changes the lives of her many clients. 

Susie went to college for photography and began a 20 year photography career that helped her to master the client facing aspects of business and find connection with others through her work during important parts of their lives. Although her career was very successful and fulfilling, she always felt a pull toward wellness and now looks back on her time as a photographer as another part of the journey that led her to her current path.

Her love for fitness started when she was in the sixth grade and found a passion for step aerobics at home with a friend. Coupled with being raised in a home that valued being as natural as you can, Susie always understood the importance of taking care of yourself and how easy it can truly be. Later in life, Susie, like most people in their 20s, could do whatever she wanted and not yet feel the consequences on her body and mind. It wasn’t until having kids in her early 30s that she realized she was neglecting her wellness and found herself in survival mode trying to support her growing family while forgetting to support herself in the meantime.

After going through some personal health struggles in her 30s, Susie researched every diet, workout, and biohack she could find to try and self diagnose. With her husband being an acupuncturist, she assumed they could use their combined knowledge and figure things out on their own. Finally, a coach reached out to her through a mutual friend and she decided to stop worrying about figuring out what was wrong, and start working toward a permanent solution.

“I was like, I have gotten so much from this and she was encouraging me and I was like, I think I want to do this, I want to be a coach. And I got certified just before COVID hit so it was the perfect time to start because I was working in a gym at the time and already had all these clients and all of a sudden no one could go to the gym anymore,” Susie said about the beginning of her journey. The difficult nature of seeking wellness during the COVID era is something that led to a perfect storm for people like Susie, who were seeking ways to form deeper connections and take the next step toward something new.

Things for Susie and her clients started out as helping athletes figure out how to train and eat right to create well rounded programs. But she always felt like there was more connection that could come from her work. Over the last five years, Linquist Wellness Coaching has expanded to focus more on women in their late 30s through their 50s and their journeys to reclaiming their health.

Unsurprisingly, Susie's desire to serve this specific demographic of women comes from her own wellness experiences and a call to help others navigate what is often a difficult time. She told us, “When women hit their late 30s and that perimenopause phase, it’s like your body just becomes this foreign thing that you’re living in and you don’t understand it. Nothing is working the way it used to and I just felt like I have been through so much of this and overcome it. They always say you are the most equipped to help the person you used to be, and it was time to step into that.”

Entering back into a group setting once her kids had grown up a bit, Susie found herself teaching and attending classes at a local gym. She remembers feeling very seen by the instructor and drawn to the idea of helping other women feel the same way by becoming a teacher herself. She said, “I wasn't there for a workout or to transform my body. I was there to have a minute to myself and it just felt so good and I got so into how that felt.” All of this eventually led to where she is now, providing full coaching services and creating change for her clients.

Obviously Susie’s work is very client focused and one-on-one and that, like all workplace dynamics, is not without its challenges. She told us that at the end of it all, the difficulties of her work come down to imposter syndrome and confidence, the way that it so often does for female entrepreneurs. The idea of her work being solely aimed at helping others makes it challenging to know if she is qualified to be doing so. It can be so hard to lead others to find personal growth when we are constantly trying to find it ourselves.

Susie said, “Having the trust in myself as a coach to be able to help my clients. For me to feel so confident in myself and what I am doing that they feel confident enough to trust me. Once you have a bunch of clients and you’ve transformed them and brought them to this amazing place, you have that. But when you’re just starting out with knowledge and you don’t have that history, you’re often second guessing yourself.”

When your work is so centered around the confidence, success, and wellness of others, it can be so important to overcome feelings of self doubt to reassure not only yourself, but your clients. Their investment in you and your business is deeply personal with an industry like coaching and it can be so important to create connections and trust for all clients to ensure their success.

Susie may have grown in confidence over time but she has never had any shortage of concrete qualifications to do her work. She is group fitness certified, Barre certified, nutrition and wellness certified, and has taught Bootcamp, HIIT, and stretch classes. Her range of knowledge has certainly always been impressive and with the growth of her business over the last several years, her experience and success stories speak for themselves as well.

Working with clients when it comes to health and wellness can have its own unique difficulties and challenges to overcome as well. For example, when working on workout and diet plans, each client has different needs, different starting points, and different goals, making each person's plan look different. Susie told us as well that sometimes, when nothing seems to be working, her connection with the client leads her to dig deeper and find that they may be struggling with mental or health related roadblocks preventing them from finding success.

We asked if this can feel deterring to her, the idea that she alone can’t always be one to help a client reach their goals and she told us that it is quite the opposite. “It is so freeing,” she said, “Not feeling like all the pressure is on me because I have been through so many practitioners on my own that I really feel equipped to take someone and say “I am going to get you this far and then we are going to go see this person”. It’s freeing to not feel like I have to be able to fix the whole human all by myself because I am not a doctor.”

Continuing on, we talked more about the specifics of Susie’s work and what goes into creating a plan for a client. She told us that it really comes down to a lot of the mental load of creating change in your own life and she cites her motivation, faith, and acceptance of change as things that help her really see a client's needs and understand where they are coming from. 

“It’s one thing for someone to want to get somewhere. It’s another thing for them to actually believe they can get there. I think that is a huge roadblock for people stepping into space. And I do have this ability to really see them. So I’m not going to stand by and let them sabotage themselves, I see their potential and it’s just reflecting it back to them,” Susie said.

She really focuses on the ability to make clients believe in themselves and the potential they have to become who they want to be. She wants them to feel that they are worthy, capable, and see that she has been through this herself and the limitations that she imagined were placed on her, were overcome. It is such a passionate and personal process that makes Susie's work not only unique, but deeply meaningful.

Connection is a main force behind all Susie does and she is very mindful of its importance when it comes to being upfront with clients. “I hear people tell their stories and it's like I have said that exact same thing and I was walking in those shoes. I am very honest about all the things I have been through because I do feel like it helps to give people strength when they know that,” she told us.

She also went on to say that her honesty not only helps her relate to clients individually but also helps them to relate to each other. “So many women are ashamed of what they're going through and they don't want anyone to know. and it's like, I bet that 9 of the other people out of these 10 are going through the same thing,” Susie said.

Women especially are no strangers to the struggles of comparison, self doubt, and shame. We are so often expected to do and be everything by society and sometimes by the people in our own lives that it can be debilitating to finally face our shortcomings. Especially when it comes to taking care of themselves, women regularly out themselves last and then feel guilty when they have to admit to it.

Susie understands this feeling all too well and it is a driving force behind her desire to connect and build community throughout her work with women. She says that connecting with women later in life is no accident either, telling us, “I feel like women are finally ready because the focus is finally starting to circle back to being okay to be on them. Typically, many women get married in their 20s, start to have babies in their 30s and then everything is for their kids and their family. And if you're working throughout all of that then you  have even less time for yourself. It's when you're in your 40s and 50s you're typically locked into your career enough that there's space and time and if you have kids they're typically grown to the point where you can circle back to yourself.” 

She went on to explain that this cycle often matches up with the cycles of our bodies as well and at that same time, major changes start to happen that make us feel disconnected from ourselves. Susie told us that she gets such excitement from meeting with clients, hearing their struggles, and knowing she can help them navigate this time and that is what truly motivates her each day.

We continued on to touch on women who may not be mothers as well who are seeking the same kind of self recognition and support. Susie cited that it can be more hormonal for women who have had babies but for those who haven’t there are still the challenges of perimenopause to overcome and navigate as well as women’s inherent way of putting themselves last, whether it be to family, careers, or any other obligations in their lives.

“Every single woman on the planet deserves to be seen. It takes a lot of hard work and discipline not to put yourself last. You have to be super conscious about it and know that it's not selfish,” says Susie.

She went on to tell us that her deep conversations with women lead her to remind herself that she is not a therapist and that it is more about helping her clients get to where they need to be themselves then telling them where to go. “That somebody else's job, I network with people who can do that. I have people that call me a life coach and I'm not a life coach. It's a fine line. because I've definitely thought about that in the past but what I think is really cool about it is that you can, without having to say it, just by helping a person, introduce new ways of taking care of themselves and then they can come to these Revelations on their own,” she said.

Susie finds so much gratitude and fulfillment in hearing women reach their full potential on their own accord and it serves as a driving force and unending motivation behind her work. She told us, “It's even more joyful to sit back while they're telling me what they've discovered instead of me telling them and it goes in one ear and out the other. It's much more powerful.”

We talked more about how it often happens that clients who seek out Susie do not initially understand that their struggles and challenges are deeper than surface level. She says that many people have to reach their breaking point before they are ready to rebuild themselves better. Remaking their lives is a huge step and Susie appropriately sees herself and her services as a guide for that, not the entire solution.

Admitting that we need help can always be a struggle but knowing that women like Susie are creating safe spaces for self discovery and growth makes the journey a little smoother for so many. Being a woman can be demanding, exhausting, and draining, but it can also be fulfilling, self nurturing, and empowering when we have the right knowledge and resources to make our own way.

We asked Susie a bit about the future and what she sees on the horizon for herself and Linquist Wellness Coaching. She told us that the recent development of her newsletter has been a passion project for her and she wants to continue to grow her reach and become available to more people through this medium. Networking and growing her community is such a huge part of what drives her work forward. 

Collaborating with other professionals is a goal of Susie’s as well. She already works in community with others to help her clients get what they need from her services but continuing to grow her network and offer more places for connection is more and more important to her as time goes on. There is so much opportunity for collaboration and Susie plans to take advantage of it all to ensure her clients are getting the best possible experience to help them the most she can.

Personally, she sees herself being there for her kids as they begin to enter new phases of their lives and continuing to do her work while going wherever she feels meant to go. Susie tells us she is excited to be in the phase of life she is and seeks to continue this joy throughout her work and life while bringing it to others as well.

In a world so often overwhelmed by what is “good” and “bad” for us, our brains, and our bodies, it is more important now than ever to seek community and support from those who have been where we are. By cultivating meaningful relationships with her clients, digging deep into their needs and goals, and keeping her own journey with wellness at the forefront of her teaching, Susie Linquist and her work changes lives for the better. Powered by human connection, Linquist Wellness Coaching motivates clients to never settle, and seek out the dream lives they wish to live. Susie herself is conscious of her feelings and those of her clients. She is deliberate in her work and inspiring in her passion for helping others look and feel their best. It was such a pleasure to connect and hear about her journey first hand and we look forward to seeing where life leads her next.