Step into the realm of soulful transformation and alignment with Theresa Nutt, a beacon of insight, compassion, and creativity in the world of intuitive coaching and soul alignment design. At Theresa’s Gifts and Abilities, she offers a holistic approach to personal growth, blending energy insight, alignment, clearing, and projection with a deep understanding of authenticity, intuition, and emotional release. With Theresa, clients embark on a profound journey of self-discovery and empowerment, guided by her unique blend of talents and expertise. In this article, we delve into Theresa’s transformative approach to coaching, exploring how she ignites creativity, fosters authentic expression, and empowers individuals to embody their style and essence fully. Join Mystic Mag as we uncover the magic of soul alignment and embrace the radiant path towards personal growth and fulfillment with Theresa Nutt.
What led you to pursue such a diverse range of qualifications, blending nursing, coaching, and alternative healing modalities, and how do you integrate these diverse skills into your work as Director Health and Wellness Coaching at UCI Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute?
Such an important question, and the answer is lengthy, so I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. I have been on my own healing journey. When I was 23 years old, I was rear-ended by a semi, and as a result of that, it led me on a quest of true healing beyond conventional medicine. Though helpful in its own right, conventional medicine didn’t offer much knowledge about pain at that time, so I was pretty much left to find my own way. The good news is, as a result of conventional medicine, I was sent to a counselor to receive some counseling, and she directed me to a massage therapist who was also trained in energy healing. So, my journey began on this integrated and holistic route when I was 24 years old; I was learning from and being treated by people in the integrative and holistic modality world. Then my quest for knowledge about true healing led me to study with a lot of teachers in everything from energy medicine to stress management. I trained in self-hypnosis and a gamut of integrative and holistic modalities, ending with me, as a nurse, wanting to address the broken system of helping others heal.
I saw people coming into the hospital, getting well after two or three days, only to return two or three months later with the same symptoms, which frustrated me. So, the rest of the story is that not only did I become fascinated by my own healing, but I really wanted to help others, which eventually led me to coaching. Coaching focused on not just getting someone well after they’re sick but on optimizing how they think about themselves. When I trained back in 2001, there wasn’t health coaching yet, so I trained in personal and professional coaching, empowering people to live lives that mattered to them.
As a nurse, having that coach training, I went down the road of health coaching before it became mainstream and worked in different settings as a health and wellness coach. That’s my long story, how all the modalities apply to what I do now. I’m trained in energy medicine of all different kinds, which was a big part of the journey. I work in both clinical settings and teaching people how to be a coach. The good news is I have a great foundation in conventional medicine, understanding medication and how to treat people in acute crises, which is an important part of the process for many. I also understand integrative medicine, connecting mind, body, and spirit to heal at a deep level. I’m also really well trained in the energetics, so when people come to me, I can listen at the level of conventional medicine, integrating what modalities might support their optimal health and well-being from an integrative medicine perspective, and also considering the energetics playing in the background. As a coach, I help people create lifestyles that truly optimize health. It’s a blast to have such diverse skills to use with people and apply what’s needed based on where they’re at in their own journey and what they’re seeking. Anyway, I get a little excited, as you can tell.
With your background in nursing and coaching, how do you approach teaching and mentoring students in the Masters program to incorporate both traditional healthcare practices and holistic approaches into their coaching practice?
It’s such a great question because I think it’s really important. So, first and foremost, the program here at UC Irvine is dedicated to behavioral health because we recognize that without good mental health, it’s very hard to have physical health and spiritual health, and vice versa, right? They really play into one another. And we are also seeing in the United States, I don’t know what it’s like in Serbia, but here in the United States, there’s such a gap in good mental health services and behavioral health services, far more demand than we can meet. So, to me, health coaching, one of its gifts is that it really helps with lifestyle, and there are a lot of things we can do for our lifestyle that really support mental health, like tending to gut health, exercise, and how we eat. These factors greatly impact how we mentally feel, etcetera. So, the lifestyle part and the second part of that, just to go on a tangent for a moment, is that for those with severe and persistent mental and behavioral health issues like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc., they often die 20 to 30 years earlier than the average population due to a number of issues related to their other physical health, not usually from their disorder itself, but from other factors. So, lifestyle is a significant key component, and I think we’re all trying to figure out collectively how we can better help people reach a lifestyle that’s going to support optimal functioning and longevity. Some of the things we’re experiencing now include living longer, right? We’re living a lot longer than we ever have, so we’ve got to figure some of this out. So, I want to come back to your question: How do I teach? I teach from, I think, three or four perspectives. Firstly, we have the good fortune here of having the Department of the School of Medicine, particularly psychiatry and human behavior, working in partnership with us. They’ve trained hundreds of providers in integrated full-person care and have conducted numerous lectures on conditions like depression and its treatment, encompassing both conventional and whole-person care approaches.
Secondly, I am pretty experienced in coaching after doing it for 21 years, making a lot of mistakes, and learning from them. I am the director, but I also teach and develop the program, and I have a phenomenal junior faculty member who is quickly becoming my right-hand person, Sarah Meier. She comes from almost 10 years of experience in a combination of culinary medicine – focusing on cooking for wellness, and health coaching and promotion. We work together to teach the core coaching components, and we also invite guest lecturers who are coaches from across the nation. We really look at it from all those perspectives. Additionally, we have specialists in integrative and holistic care, such as culinary medicine and mindfulness. I teach several sessions on mindfulness early in the program because I believe that as a coach, developing self-awareness and the ability to be present with oneself affects how present one can be with others. There are also elements of energy hygiene and self-regulation, as well as stress management, which I am trained in. We also focus on self determination theory, appreciative inquiry, and motivational interviewing as evidence-informed ways to work with people, and we provide many clinical examples. Both Sarah and I work in the clinic. I work one and a half days a week, seeing patients as a health coach in an integrative medicine clinic with naturopathic doctors, traditional Chinese medicine doctors, functional medicine doctors, and primary care providers trained in integrative medicine. We are constantly working together to provide comprehensive care and help patients integrate changes into their lifestyle. That’s really my work in the clinic. So, that is my lengthy answer to your question about how we incorporate it all. We essentially consider all aspects.
What type of services do you offer?
Outside of UC Irvine and the work I do here, I have a private practice called Your Deeper Calling, and I feel like the majority of those who I attract are women. Over the years, I’ve noticed that women are the primary audience drawn to my work and the services I provide. I offer three main services in combination: life and health coaching, energy medicine of various kinds, and style coaching. Actually, I’m trained in a unique style coaching method. It’s about using your energy signature, your deepest essence, and translating that into your style so that it reflects who you truly are to the world. I also offer branding work around this concept.
One of the services I provide is a two-hour Style.Essence session. I’m the first person in the United States trained in this method, which originated in France. In this session, we spend an hour coaching and tuning into a person’s energy, followed by an hour in their closet creating five outfits that truly reflect their essence. We practice until they can recreate these looks effortlessly.
Another offering is a three-hour Essence Brand Makeover. We focus on style for the first part and then delve into branding for the last hour. We discuss how to translate one’s essence into visual marketing materials, considering both corporate and entrepreneurial contexts.
For those seeking a deeper dive, I offer the Your Deeper Calling Intensive, a six-month program. We start by exploring one’s essence and then realigning their life to support and nurture that essence. This program incorporates style work along with intensive coaching sessions focused on soul aligned living and work.
As part of this intensive process, one of the giveaway gifts is a piece of jewelry crafted by my colleague Maggie Moore, who is both a jeweler and an energy healer. She anchors the work done over six months into a wearable piece of art, allowing clients to carry their transformation with them.
Additionally, I offer Soul Alignment Readings, hour-long sessions where we explore what’s happening in a person’s life and identify opportunities for growth and guidance toward their next level.
So, those are the various services I offer, ranging from quick one-offs to deeper, long-term engagements.
As a Reiki Master Teacher and Healing Touch Level 3 Practitioner, how do you incorporate energy healing techniques into your coaching practice, and do you find these techniques resonate with a diverse range of clients?
Thanks for asking that question. It’s such a good one. I was smiling when I read it last night, especially regarding the energy healing part. At this point in my life, let me see. I took my first energy healing training in 1998. I’m aging myself, I know, but it was a long time ago. For a long time, I kept coaching separate from energy healing, doing each one separately. Now, however, I feel like when people come to me for coaching – and I’m thinking of people I worked with last week, how it comes together is really clear to me. The good news at this point is that energy healing is not separate. It’s not something I have to do a lot of preparation for. In other words, whatever is needed for that person, I can do it.
So, last week, someone came with a big generational pattern of not speaking their truth, not being visible as a woman in a powerful position, instead treating herself much smaller than she is, and it just showed up. It was like, “Hey, we have this opportunity to clear this generational pattern.” So, I just asked her, “Are you okay? This is showing up for you, and we can either address it or not. I realize we’re coaching, but this is available.” And then people let me know how they want to work together that day.
So, I feel like it’s just, as the word “channel” gets overused, I’m cautious about using it. I would say it this way: I’m a hollow bone. Whatever comes to me that’s available to my clients, I offer it, and we move in the direction that feels right for them and that they’re ready for. I have no preconceived agenda for what they’re ready for. So, if energy healing comes in and there’s something I can do to support what’s happening for them, we will work there and then integrate it back into the coaching. And then, okay, once you’ve had that clearing, how are you going to behave in your life to move in a direction toward what it is you really want to create for yourself?
In your opinion, what are some of the key challenges facing the field of integrative health and wellbeing coaching today, and how do you prepare your students to address these challenges?
What a great question. I love that question. Yeah, I read that question last night too, and I said I’m going to have to sleep on that. It’s good to sleep on things sometimes. So, what I would say to you is, I feel like there are a number of challenges. Firstly, I think one of the biggest challenges is that certain things in the integrative and whole-person care field, although I know they work from personal experience, don’t always translate as well in research. It’s harder to have proof that they work. Additionally, I think we sometimes forget, and I include myself as a registered nurse who has worked in conventional medicine most of her life, that we really bridge both worlds. It’s important to not dismiss any side of it. Sometimes we can be arrogant; we believe that we have it all figured out. So, some of these traditional practices like traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine, listen folks, they’ve been around for thousands of years while we’ve (conventional medicine) only been around for hundreds. So, I think sometimes we need to put our very sciency ego in check and pay attention to things like the human spirit. What really fuels the human spirit? It’s very hard to put that in research, but that does not mean it’s less important. One of the things I routinely touch on, whether I’m in a clinic or with my private practice clients, is meaning, purpose, and soul alignment because those things fuel the human spirit and can help heal anything. I know this from experience. It can translate to research, but not always. So, first and foremost, we have to open our minds and our hearts to the fact that everyone heals differently, that there is not one right way, that conventional medicine is not right or wrong, and that whole-person medicine is not right or wrong.
Humans are complex individuals with a lot of experiences that shape who they are and what they need. My job always—this is what excites me about my work—is to look for the key to what turns that person on to their own health, their own optimization. People might say to me something like, “Well, you’re not trained in therapy, and what you’re doing with that person sounds like therapy.” It’s not. I’m not delving into their past. That’s not my place to be. But I am paying attention to how what they learned as a very young child impacts how they’re behaving today. With this awareness of that trauma, we’re not going to spend time bringing up the trauma and getting them all activated around it. That’s therapy work. We are going to use it to say, “What is the mindset I want to develop to move me toward what I want to experience?” So, I feel like the biggest challenge is having to prove ourselves over and over again in an arena in which we should be saying to ourselves, “This system is not working the way it is.” That’s why I’m so excited to work at the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute because they are saying we’re not throwing out conventional medicine, we’re not throwing out whole-person care. We’re bringing it together and saying, “This system of healthcare doesn’t work for everybody. How can we do it differently?” Wellness and well-being are individual journeys, and none of us know the best way for a person.
