Search & Replace S02E13: LaJune Singleton

How much do you really love and care about yourself, and how much are you willing to invest in your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health? LaJune Singleton is not your typical personal trainer and nutritional lifestyle coach because she’s overcome traumatic injuries and struggled with weight loss. However, the key to unlocking the success of weight loss for LaJune came when she addressed the emotional trauma of the injuries that had caused her to gain weight. Now, she coaches others and helps them get to the core issues of dealing with mental and emotional trauma to lose weight. LaJune shares her story about investing in your mental health for physical wellness on Search and Replace.

More about today’s guest:

• Get to know LaJune Singleton at lajunesingleton.com.
• Connect with LaJune via her Podcast, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Explore these related stories:

• Releasing My Trauma: The Root of Self-Sabotage, by LaJune Singleton.
• Tips on how to cope with traumatic stress from the American Psychological Association.
• Learn more about the symptoms and causes of trauma.
• Here are ten ways to help you mentally overcome an injury.
• Learn how to recognize painful emotions right away and remove pain with Deepak Chopra’s 7 Step Exercise to Release Emotional Turbulence.

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Transcript:

[00:00:00] Announcer: Support for the following podcast is provided by the user experience specialist at Johns and Taylor. More information follows this episode. 

[00:00:09] Joe Taylor Jr.: What if you spend your whole life and you build a career around avoiding a specific thing and that thing ends up happening to you anyway? 

I’m Joe Taylor, Jr. This is Search and Replace.

Like other personal trainers, LaJune Singleton built a business around keeping other people in good shape. She says that her career choice was influenced by what she saw growing up, but that she couldn’t predict what would happen next. 

[00:00:38] LaJune Singleton: I always loved fitness, health, and wellness. Used to play sports and just, you know, being from the south – originally from Louisiana – and seeing the chronic health issues and it was just something that I never wanted to experience.

2011, I had a knee injury. And I went from 120 and started gaining weight from 2011 to between 2018 2019, got to my highest weight of 193, pre-obesity. And I thought, okay, well, I’ll just work out. I’ll just work out to try to lose it. And I wasn’t losing it because it was internal stuff that I needed to release and get rid of before I would be successful with my weight loss.

[00:01:32] Joe Taylor Jr.: In the same way LaJune used to break down routines for her personal training clients. She realized she had to break down the root causes of her inability to bounce right back. She discovered that her trauma wasn’t just physical, and it involved much more than just the simple knee injury. 

[00:01:49] LaJune Singleton: Even the process of when the knee injury happened, just starting to experience depression, started to relive things that started coming up for me. And I started becoming like really angry and all I was doing was sleeping and eating because I couldn’t drive, it was my right knee. And honestly, my knee did not heal until eight, nine years later because trauma can sit in your body. For many people it shows up differently.

So, I had a knee surgery in 2018 and it started to feel better. But really when I released all my trauma in 2019, it started to fill a hundred percent. 

The first step was I went to therapy after I was sexually assaulted in 2007. And 2019, I went to a seven-day retreat in Bali, and that was really, what was the icing on the cake for me that saved my life. And I learned so much about myself and I was able to release and let go. 

After that, I do work with coaches in helping me, and mentors helping me, having a great support system. Journaling, just becoming more in tune to my emotions and my feelings and just being mindful of how I feel and things like that has really been beneficial. 

[00:03:24] Joe Taylor Jr.: Today, when LaJune works with new clients, she’s not asking the questions you might expect to hear from a personal trainer.

[00:03:31] LaJune Singleton: Typically, I have clients that come to me for personal training. And first question I ask is, Hey, why haven’t you been successful? What have you done? What haven’t you done? Why haven’t you been successful? And we really dive into that because it’s not – it doesn’t start with fitness. Fitness is only like 20, 15%, and that’s just basically toning.

If your mindset and your nutrition isn’t together and you haven’t released your traumas, you’re not gonna be successful in your weight loss, and you’re gonna be right back in that whole little revolving door. With other clients, it may be a certain age period that they’re stuck at. For myself, I lost my dad at six and a half, so being stuck at that time period and reconnecting with that time period in order to move forward, to live the life that you wanna live. 

Get a counselor, therapist, coach, support group because if it was something that we could navigate and figure out ourselves, we would all be some very healthy and happy successful people. 

But you do need someone who can guide you and give you the tools that you need to become successful in your mental, emotional, and physical and spiritual wellbeing. 

[00:04:45] Joe Taylor Jr.: LaJune observes that most of us could work with a trainer like her if we just placed a different value on our personal wellbeing. 

[00:04:52] LaJune Singleton: From what I see from clients or consultations or whatever with potential clients is, a lot of people do not want to spend the money on their health. We can spend money on our exterior, but we don’t want to invest in our interior, and the interior is the overall key to your health. But we can go to different restaurants and get our nails done, our hair done, but we will not invest in our health, our mental health, our emotional health.

The big question is how much do you really love and care about yourself, and how much are you willing to invest in your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health? Invest. Invest in your health. Invest in your wellness. Not just the outside, but the inside, because the inside is the key. 

[00:05:46] Joe Taylor Jr.: And it’s clients that understand this part of her philosophy that get LaJune the most excited.

[00:05:52] LaJune Singleton: I would say any client that comes and wants to make a change in their life, if it’s, you know, wellness, if it is health, if it’s physical, if it’s mindset – that gets me excited because it’s saying to me, you want me to help you hold you accountable on this journey of becoming a better you and a healthier you.

And I am up for the challenge because I wanna see your progress. I wanna see your growth. I wanna see you texting me, even if we have ended our months together and you’re telling me about some great positive things that happen in your life, and now you are excited because you’re seeing the work that you’ve done, like, unfolding in front of you. That’s the clients I get excited about.

[00:06:43] Joe Taylor Jr.: That’s personal trainer and nutritional lifestyle coach, LaJune Singleton. We’ve got links to LaJune’s books and programs in our show notes and on our website at searchandreplace.show. 

Today’s episode was produced by Nicole Hubbard with help from the entire Podcast Taxi team. I’m Joe Taylor, Jr.

[00:07:05] Announcer: This has been a Podcast Taxi radio production. Support for Search and Replace is provided by Johns and Taylor, user experience specialists serving media and technology companies that want their websites to work. Learn more about how top performing businesses eliminate barriers between customers and their goals at www.makethewebsiteworkforme.com.