Redefining Health and Wholeness from the Inside Out, with Penney Megginson
Are you healthy? How do you know?
In this episode, my guest Penney Megginson helps us redefine health and wholeness--from the inside out.
Introducing Penney Megginson
I met Penney when she invited me to be on her podcast, Penney for Your Thoughts, a show about how your thoughts and mindset affect your health, happiness, and performance. Preliminary conversations and my own cyber-sleuthing quickly piqued my curiosity about Penney's story. It was clear that an unwelcome and unexpected encounter with Mortality had profoundly altered her relationship to health, happiness, and performance. That in fact it had profoundly altered her relationship to Life itself. And I wanted to know more.
So, I was thrilled when Penney accepted my invitation to be a guest on this show. Her story gives us insight into how we can be more aware, proactive, and meaningfully involved in the lives of those we love today--before it's too late.
Penney's story also shows just how powerfully our Stories influence the way we live out our purpose in the world.
In fact, as I've said many times before, I believe that our Stories and our unique purpose in the world are inseparable.
Penney is an American living in Switzerland with her husband and two kids. Early in career, she focused on exercise physiology, but then began adding other specialties to her toolbag to help others achieve their peak mind and body performance--including physiotherapy, pilates, yoga, integrative nutrition health coaching, EFT, and NLP. Her encounter with Mortality further focused and accelerated her development. And this intense evolutionary energy has made her an impressively well-rounded practitioner supporting whole-person health and wellness for her clients. Today, her Story, her innate gifting, and her accumulated expertise have converged to produce the Megginson Method, a mind-training system designed to help you overcome the core reasons behind your bad habits, cravings, and self-sabotaging behavior.
Two Chapters, One Story
We built our conversation on the scaffolding of two statements I found in Penney’s bio online, each of which served as entry points into pivotal moments in her Story. The first statement was this:
“That was the moment that I realised that it isn’t enough to just be content. It’s really about a balance of your inner state and physical well-being.”
I asked Penney to share what was going on in her life that led to that moment. And Penney shared the story of her dad’s untimely death from a heart attack--doubly sad because he died just before the birth of Penney’s first child. Key bits of this part of the conversation include:
Penney’s awareness that she “should” (her word) have done more to help her dad pursue better health. For a time it was a genuine regret.
We chewed on what she might have done differently and what the rest of us can do today who realize that either we or someone we love could benefit from improving our health.
This experience greatly expanded Penney’s definition of “health” and led her to begin working from the inside-out with clients.
Penney riffed on the nature of “stuckness” and how the key is first to take full responsibility for it and for ourselves. (I didn’t plan for all of these recent episodes to hit on the stuckness idea this much, I swear! But I’m trusting that there’s a good purpose behind it.)
We compared the American and European mindsets about “exercise”--acknowledging that Europeans embrace more of a “culture of movement” while Americans “work out.” Americans get in the car to sit in traffic on the way to the gym, where we’ll run on a treadmill. Europeans find that ironic and would rather walk into town or go for a bike ride. The lines are much blurrier for Europeans between exercise and the rest of life because movement is simply more a part of their lives. I found this part especially interesting and a good wake-up call for we Americans--to slow our roll, so to speak, and break down the rigid walls between “exercise” and the rest of life.
Whatever you're wanting from the other person in a relationship, give it to them 10x, because whatever you're giving to them is going to bounce back to you.
Often, we throw ourselves into exercise in an attempt to avoid being alone with our thoughts and reflecting on how we’re really doing.
That discussion gobbled up most of the conversation. But we hit on the second statement from her bio briefly before landing the plane:
“It was then that I finally understood why so many people never achieve their goals and simply settle.”
Penney explained that in the midst of training hard for a big ski touring race, she tore her ACL one day while skiing. She was so discouraged, and was tempted to throw in the towel. But she rallied, rehabbed the knee, and came back to compete in the race a couple years later. Key bits of this part of the conversation include:
Deeper empathy gained for her clients, who often come to her feeling desperate and somewhat hopeless that they’ll be able to make the changes that they want and need to make. She knows better now how big of an “ask” it can be of people who have a big health hill to climb.
The power of choice in those moments of discouragement and defeat.
The power of a compelling “why” to find the will to move forward.
This part of her story further focused and fueled the way she lives out her purpose in the world today.
Today, Penney focuses less on “fitness” and much more on whole health and wellness with her clients--creating plans specific to each person’s needs and objectives and built to be do-able and sustainable.
What About You?
The good news about other people's stories it that the same story can mean something different to each person that hears it. Maybe Penney's story helped you gain a little bit different perspective on your own health and wellness journey. Maybe it motivated you to get even more meaningfully involved in the life of someone you love before it's too late. Maybe, it even helped you see how your own Story is pointing you to your unique purpose in the world. Any of those takeaways would be be a huge win.
No matter what insights you had, though, they'll never fulfill their potential to create transformation in your life if you don't apply Action to them.
What can you do today to insure that you're not the guy or gal who has an inspirational moment...only to realize a few weeks from now that that's ALL it was? All it takes is the commitment to do ONE THING TODAY. Don't wait to take that first step. Call the person who came to mind. Contact Penney to start upgrading your own mindset to achieve a greater level of whole-person health and wellness. Instead of banging out a few more emails, close the laptop and go for a walk with your significant other. Whatever you do, don't do nothing. Your life and the lives of those you love are simply too valuable and too important. By doing just one thing today, you become a little bit more of the person you were made to be and get a little closer to living the life you were uniquely made to live.
Remember, you ARE going to die. But you're not dead yet. So get after it!
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