395: Origin Story: When Frustration Became Innovation

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Courtney Townley 0:01
I can’t believe it, but in just six weeks, I have a book launching into the world, my first book, and in dedication to this, in celebration of this, I’ve decided to run a six part podcast series called The Consistency Code Diaries: The Stories, Science and Strategies Behind the Book. In this series, I’m going to be sharing with you, behind the scenes content about how this book came to be in the world and what you can expect from it. More importantly, why you should read it and why you should encourage every woman in your life to read it in this kick off episode.

Courtney Townley 0:33
More specifically, I’m going to share with you the origin story of the book, how I turned a lot of frustration as a women’s wellness professional into innovation, and I’m going to be sharing with you real world observations that sparked the consistency code framework, and I’m even going to tell you a little bit about my personal struggles that made me the perfect, imperfect person to author this book. If that sounds good to you. Stick around, because that is where we’re headed in today’s episode of the Grace and Grit podcast.

Courtney Townley 1:05
Welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 1:33
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast. I’m Courtney Townley. I am the hostess of the show, and I am so happy that you have landed here, that you are listening to this show. In today’s episode, I am going to be sharing with you the origin story of the consistency code, which is a book that is launching into the world on November 5, 2025 and I want to say from the outset of this episode today, if you would like to be notified of all the goodness around this book, in terms of when it’s launching, all the bonus material that we’re going to be gifting readers and things of that sort. Make sure you head on over to theconsistencycode.com and drop your email so we can be sure to notify you of all of the good things that are coming down the pipeline.

Courtney Townley 2:21
If you’ve been a longtime listener of the show, I’m sure you have heard bits and pieces of the origin story of this book, but I want to really kind of summarize it here, because I think it’s so important for understanding why I wrote the book, and also the power of the book. Why this book needed to be written, I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, I do not believe a book like this exists. There are lots of books about behavior change science, there are lots of books about menopause, but there are not a lot of books that are really speaking directly and specifically to the midlife woman about how to change her health and happiness in sustainable ways. And that is why I wrote this book so many, many moons ago, literally over 30 years ago.

Courtney Townley 3:15
Yes, I’ve been in the women’s wellness industry now for 30 years, and I entered those waters through the gateway of movement. I was a dancer in my youth, and it made a whole lot of sense for me to fall into the personal training industry. And it was well and good. I really loved teaching people how to become better movers. But what I quickly realized is that people weren’t hiring personal trainers necessarily to become better movers. They were hiring them to feel better in their bodies and about their life. And man, was I ill equipped to do that work, because movement is the only conversation I knew how to have. It was the only thing I felt educated about. So I got called into work. I got called into deepening my own education, around nutrition, around lifestyle principles that help to improve the health of a human, around mindset, work so many things, and there was about a decade of my career where I ended up really doing a deep dive into the fat loss world, because let’s face it, a lot of women are seeking weight loss slash fat loss. They’re not the same thing.

Courtney Townley 4:32
I think fat loss, obviously is a more important conversation than weight loss, but that’s we’ve done lots of podcasts on that, so I’m not going to dive deep into that today, but in my time in that space, I helped a lot of people lose an awful lot of weight, and that was well and good until I started to see this pattern that a lot of women were rumbling to keep the weight off and or. However, women were arriving at their goal weight, and they weren’t satisfied. They still weren’t happy. They still didn’t like who they were. There were a lot of gaps in who they who they wanted to be. And again, I just I didn’t know what to do with that. I was very confused by how this was happening, why people were struggling to sustain their goal. And ultimately that led me to really doing a deep dive into the missing links of why people are struggling so hard to sustain behavior change. And what I really came to understand it was a few things.

Courtney Townley 5:41
Number one, sustainable behavior change is really about reshaping, reinventing your identity. And identity work is not a big part of most weight loss, fat loss programs out there. I also started to understand that the body wasn’t the problem, the food wasn’t the problem. The alcohol wasn’t the problem. It was that people were using these vices in order to kind of numb or anesthetize their life, because they they were trying to escape emotion. They were trying to escape difficult things, difficult emotional feelings. And so I started to realize the importance of expanding our capacity to tolerate the entire emotional landscape. Alongside of that, I also started to understand that our mindset has the ability to generate a really awesome motivational emotional landscape, and it also has the potential to create a very oppressive, dark emotional landscape. And so where were the programs that were talking about the health of the whole human? I didn’t really see that those were out there.

Courtney Townley 6:55
We were like shoving women’s health into this tiny little conversation of diet and exercise, but we all know, you know, I’m sure, as a listener, that health is so multifaceted. It isn’t just how we move and what we eat. It’s the quality of our relationships, it’s how we think about ourselves. It’s our capacity to be with difficult emotion. It’s the environments we live in. It is our connection to purpose. It is so many things, and that became the conversation I really wanted to have. So I just kind of felt this tug on my heart strings to lean into those conversations. And it was risky, because I was very successful as a fat loss coach. I was very successful as a personal trainer, but I also felt like I was stunting my own personal growth to stay in those spaces. And so I did take a huge risk.

Courtney Townley 7:52
I took a huge risk in starting to have new conversations and reshaping my business to help women really honor the wholeness of their humanity and not just hyper focus on their bodies and man. Has that been some of the most rewarding work of my life? I mean, it really felt like a coming home. It felt when I started having these conversations and doing this work that I felt so much more at peace with the work that I was doing in the world. And I also have seen evidence that the work has impacted my clients in ways that the fat loss conversation never could have done alone. And so I’ve expanded. I’ve grown, and the consistency code framework has been a part of that. So what happened when I started to reshape my business model and venture into having these bigger conversations is I hired a business coach to help me kind of curate a business around this.

Courtney Townley 8:58
And it was really interesting, because in our initial conversations, she was very hyper focused on talking about she wanted me to talk about weight loss and fat loss, because she knew that those things sold, they were sexy, and every fiber of my being was rebelling against it, because it just isn’t where I wanted to be anymore. So we had kind of a coming to a come to Jesus moment in our relationship, where she just said to me, okay, Courtney, if you don’t want to be talking about diet and exercise, what do you want to be talking about and what? Like if you could only teach someone four things about health and wellness at midlife about behavior change at midlife, what would you want them to know? And I went away for a few days and really chewed on that, and that is exactly where the consistency code was born.

Courtney Townley 9:53
So it’s four practices, and you have heard me talk about these practices on this podcast so many. Times, the practice of awareness, the practice of organization, the practice of follow through and the practice of realignment. Those are the four pieces of the consistency code framework, which this book, of course, does a deep dive into. But it does more than that. The book, also part one of the book, is really helping to explain behavior change science, the physiology of what’s shifting in our hormonal, our mental, our emotional landscape as midlife women, and why it is so imperative that we approach behavior change with more compassion and more clarity than we ever have in our life.

Courtney Townley 10:46
Even though the consistency code framework is made up of those four practices, of course, it extends well beyond those four practices, right? Because there’s so many conversations baked in to those four practices. So all this to say, after I had that conversation with my business coach, I developed a program. This was a decade ago, 10 years ago, I developed a program called the consistency code. If you have been in my business ecosystem at all as a consumer, you have heard me talk about this program many times, and about five years ago, I really started to have an itch that this course should be turned into a book. I really wanted to author. I’ve always wanted to write a book, but it made a whole lot of sense that I author a book specifically on this course, because I was so passionate about this work. And again, I didn’t see that it was being offered elsewhere in the wellness world.

Courtney Townley 11:44
So five years ago, why the heck did it take me five years to finally publish the book? Oh, my goodness, so many reasons. But I will tell you. The main reasons it’s taken me five years to get this book out into the world is number one. I didn’t prioritize it. I would get distracted by other things in my business. I would kind of forget about my dedication to it. I would make other things more important than it. I just didn’t prioritize it. And so of course, I would kind of dip my toe in the water of writing. But nothing gets done by dipping your toe. Right? We’ve got to do the full body plunge. So I didn’t prioritize it. That was a big problem.

Courtney Townley 12:32
The second thing is, I had so much self defeating, self narrative around writing a book, so much. You know, I’d never written a book. Who am I to write a book? There’s people more qualified to write this book. No one’s going to like this book. No one’s going to read this book. And on and on. It went, Well, your brain loves to prove itself, right, right? So I was giving my brain this job of seeking evidence for why I shouldn’t even write the book, and so, of course, I didn’t sit my butt in a chair in any consistent way to get the book done. So I had to have a reckoning with myself around that, which I did about two and a half years ago. I really had to just have a very direct conversation with myself about hey, Courtney, if this truly is important to you, you have got to change the way you’re talking to yourself about it. Otherwise it is never going to get written and you are going to die with this book in your heart. And wouldn’t that be a shame, because this book isn’t for me. This book is for you.

Courtney Townley 13:43
This book, I know, has so much in it that can make your journey through the health industry or through the health arena so much more grace filled. And man, isn’t that what we all want, like we are sold so much garbage and so much insanity in women’s wellness, and what would be different if we could approach it with more compassion and grace. That’s why I wrote this book. So I had to prioritize the book. I had to change my self narrative around it, and I had to build a system. I had to build a system of how I was going to write a little bit every day to finally get to the place where I had a published book in the world. And I’ll be honest with you, that took a lot of help. I had to hire some coaches. I hired a writing coach. I hired coaches in the publishing industry, in the book proposal industry, I hired coaches pretty much for every dimension of my book, not because I’m independently wealthy, I’m not, but because I was rumbling so hard with making progress, and I knew that I needed help if I was going to cross the finish line. And so a lot of these professionals. Helped me to build systems, and they helped me to prioritize, and they helped me to stay accountable to the work that I had called myself into. And I’m sharing these struggles that I had with you, because these are the very struggles that I help my own clients with in the health arena, right?

Courtney Townley 15:20
So I see a lot of women wanting to improve their health, and yet they don’t prioritize it. They have a lot of self defeating, self narrative they have. They don’t have systems in place. They don’t have emotional capacity to be with difficult things, or they aren’t parenting their brain right like there. There’s so many things that I was personally rumbling with in the writing process that I already had the tools for because I’d been teaching that work for years in a different dimension of life, which is health. So isn’t it interesting that we can kind of tackle the issues in one area of our life using tools and systems and a certain mindset, and yet we struggle in other areas. So I too am incredibly human. I too struggle immensely with consistency in certain areas of my life, and this book gave me an opportunity to really confront that, which was pretty awesome.

Courtney Townley 16:29
So how I wrote the books? Book specifically, I already said I hired a lot of help. I initially hired a book proposal coach who helped me to write a book proposal. I had no idea how in depth a book proposal is. It’s like an 80 page document. It was no joke that alone took me a year. I hired a writing coach to help me start to write in a way that didn’t overwhelm my brain. Eventually, obviously, I had to find a publisher. I could probably do a whole episode about just that alone. I ended up hiring a publisher out of Canada called page two. It’s a women owned business. It is so they’ve been amazing, and I, of course, worked with a lot of editors once I had a publisher to help me format the book in a way that made sense for the reader, and I had to have a lot of deadlines and accountability for myself. So some of that was structured by the people I just mentioned. They helped me to structure that.

Courtney Townley 17:34
But a lot of it just fell on me based on the rest of my life, being a mother, being a wife, being a business owner, having clients, how the hell was I going to find time to write every day? And ultimately, what I found worked for me was really breaking it down into a Num, like, a number of words that I was going to write every day. And it was depending on the week. Some days it was writing, you know, 3000 words a day, which is a lot like if you’re if you’ve ever written, like, 3000 words is no joke. And if I had more time and bandwidth, it would be maybe 5000 and some weeks it had to be 1000 words a day. But I was willing to be flexible in my commitment to the number of words depending on what else was on my plate for the week. But the one thing I refused to let myself do was not write every day. I had to write at least a little bit, and what that looked like was a little bit different week to week.

Courtney Townley 18:35
The other thing that I think is really important to hear is that I had to detach myself from the outcome. Writing a book is a very arduous endeavor, right? Again, I just told you five years I’ve been at this it is. It has been like a second career in terms of the amount of time, energy and mental bandwidth that I’ve had to dedicate to it, and if I focused on this book being the best book in the world, or selling 50,000 copies, or, I don’t know, all the metrics that you could put on a book, I think I would have hid from the book. So my husband and I actually had a lot of conversations about this where he just kept poking it like tell me again why you’re writing this book. Tell me again what this is about for you. And it was really about birthing something that I knew I would regret not birthing later in my life. That is ultimately what it’s about this book I knew in my heart needed to be in the world, and I was never going to feel satisfied if I kept avoiding it. So if I did not write this book, I was going to have so much integrity pain that I would have to live with the rest of my life, and I wasn’t willing to pay that price. So that’s that’s what I focus. Based on I’m writing this book because it feels right. I’m writing this book because it’s needed in the world. I’m writing this book because I wish I had this when I was younger. So not even younger. I even wish, I mean, I wrote this book for myself. I’m in midlife, right? So revisiting the concepts and really doing a deep dive into this work has even lessened my struggle through the midlife era. So that’s how I wrote the book. I got lots of help. I had deadlines and accountability, and I really detached myself from the outcome. So whatever is on the other side of this book, I have no idea, and I’m okay with it, and then I just want to share with you, like, why I think the book is so important. I shared a little bit at the beginning, but why this book matters.

Courtney Townley 20:56
So the book is really if, because a lot of people ask me, Well, how do you define consistency like, what is the book really about? Right in terms of consistency, the type of consistency I advocate for in this book is consistent self honoring, and that looks different for every woman, and it also looks different given what else is going on in your life.

Courtney Townley 21:24
Consistent, self honoring does not always look like the same stuff. One day it might look like letting yourself sleep in a little bit, and one day it might work. It might look like really getting yourself out of bed and into the work that you’ve called yourself to do for the day, but consistent self honoring is is a type of honoring that nobody can do for you. It’s your work. You know your body and your life better than anybody, and to live with power, purpose and impact, we have to self honor.

Courtney Townley 21:59
We have to take care of ourselves so we can be an effective employee, an effective partner, spouse, friend, creative, human, and there are ripple effects to self honoring. Self honoring yes is about you, because it helps you to live a life with health and happiness, but self honoring is bigger than you. It’s about being more fully expressed so you can leave a bigger mark in the world, so you can be a more helpful human, so you can be an example for girls, women, anyone, any other human who needs an example of what it looks like to live with health and happiness.

Courtney Townley 22:51
Because, man, we need those examples now more than ever. And my hope for this book, which is a question that my editor asked me as soon as soon as we started working together, she’s like, What is your hope for this book? Like, what’s really the purpose? And I thought about that for a while, and ultimately, I I want to see more women having the types of conversations that are in this book, because I truly believe that our health journeys would be so much more grace filled, and dare I even say fun, if we were having more of these conversations, and we wouldn’t be bouncing from cookie cutter program to cookie cutter program to cookie cutter program, because we’d be spending more time looking inward and really identifying our own deficiencies in terms of, like, what do I need specifically to be a More expressed and powerful human that is different from what your sister needs or your cousin needs or your coworker needs.

Courtney Townley 24:09
So to close this episode out, I thought I would read just a little bit from the introduction of the book to just give you a little taste. And I’m planning on doing this in every episode for the next six episodes, just to kind of tease you a little bit and hopefully get you really excited about buying a copy of this book, or, better yet, buying many copies of this book, so you can pass them out to the women around you. So I am going to read just a few paragraphs from the introduction of the book, and here we go. Enjoy

Courtney Townley 24:46
For far too long, Women’s Health has been positioned as a physical outcome. Worse yet, we’re sold one side fit, one size fits all formulas that ask us to radically change our lives to try to achieve those physical. Outcomes at the expense of other dimensions of our well being. With the popularity of diet programs, supplements and other quick fixes, it’s easy to assert that women are interested only in fixing their bodies. They aren’t. It’s just largely what’s being sold, and when someone is so desperate to feel better, they will buy into whatever’s available.

Courtney Townley 25:25
Focusing on your body as a problem feeds a superficial health mentality. And if you’re anything like my clients, you want more than that. Hell. You deserve more than that. You deserve deep, delicious cell to soul health, and this book was written to help you better understand what that really is and introduce you to a pathway that can help you attain it.

Courtney Townley 25:53
I wrote this book for you, the woman who knows she deserves more than the superficial health models that have been sold to her.

Courtney Townley 26:02
I wrote this book for you, the woman who feels overwhelmed by the endless stream of information about what you should or could be doing to improve your health, a list that can paralyze you with information overload and make you unsure of even where to start.

Courtney Townley 26:20
I wrote this book for you, the woman who already knows so much about health and wellness yet finds it challenging to consistently apply even a small fraction of that knowledge in your everyday life.

Courtney Townley 26:35
I wrote this book for you, the woman who keeps starting a Hail Mary health plan on Monday morning, only to end up in a full face plant by Monday afternoon.

Courtney Townley 26:48
I wrote this book for you, the woman who is tired of pouring her precious time, energy and resources into following someone else’s rules and regulations, rules that may have worked for their life but never quite fit yours.

Courtney Townley 27:05
Most importantly, I wrote this book for you because I believe that you are here to live with power, purpose and impact, and at the end of the day, that is what deep health allows you to do more fully.

Courtney Townley 27:25
All right, my friends, I hope this got you excited. I hope you got something out of this episode that, yeah, just lights you up a little bit about the day ahead and about your own self-care, because that’s really what this is all about.

Courtney Townley 27:41
Once again, if you want to be notified of kind of all of the things surrounding the launch and all the goodness we have in store for the launch, make sure you head on over to theconsistencycode.com and register your email so you’re among the first to be notified.

Courtney Townley 27:57
I am so excited about this book. I am so excited to have you read it and share it and give me your feedback, because my hope is that it just makes you even more excited and interested and committed to your own self-care.

Courtney Townley 28:16
All right, have a wonderful day, and next week, we’re going to be diving into some of the principles behind the book, in terms of the science, so the shifting in chemistry that happens at midlife, the some of the power of the brain and how the brain works again at midlife, like why we need different approaches to self-care based on the shifting physiology and psychology that’s happening in a female body at midlife. So if that sounds good to you, come back next week, because we will be tackling that.

Courtney Townley 28:53
All right. Have a wonderful day, and I hope to see you very soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 29:03
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self-care. You are worth the effort, and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible.