Making Connection Between Financial Accounting and Health with Kaitlin Borncamp

Finding a connection between what you are doing and what you want has somehow been encountered in our life. What makes it more difficult to transition from point A to point B is that they are not much related to each other. However, if we can overcome this barrier, it can lead to a deeper understanding of our desired path, ultimately resulting in a more meaningful life. In this episode, Kaitlin Borncamp takes us through her remarkable journey of transformation from a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) to a Wellness Advisor. Kaitlin shares her insights on how the principles of financial accounting can be applied to health and wellness, and provides valuable advice on overcoming the obstacles that often prevent people from making significant career transitions. Tune in to this inspiring episode to learn from Kaitlin's experiences and gain valuable insights. --- Listen to the podcast here: Making Connection Between Financial Accounting and Health with Kaitlin Borncamp Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Oftentimes in life, we want to make some sort of change, some kind of a transition, and we have a limited mindset with regards to the stories that we tell ourselves about what is possible, what is related. We oftentimes hear something along the lines of, “Find your transferable skills,” which, for some people, only means the obvious, and for some people, only means that you can only make small changes, say, from software engineer to data scientist or something that’s quite a bit related. However, my guest today, Kaitlin Borncamp, who is the founder of Feel Great with Kait, made the transition from accountant to nutritional wellness coach, if I’m saying that right. --- Kaitlin, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks for having me. And is that right? Nutritional wellness coach? Yeah, I like to go by wellness advisor because there’s so much more to nutrition --- or so much more to wellness than just nutrition. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s like one aspect of what you put into your body but there’s like do you move your body, do you get sunlight, do you put yourself under stress, all those things, you probably have a more comprehensive list than I do. Exactly, exactly. So the first thing I want to ask is that there’s probably a lot of people listening and also a lot of people out there in the world that are doing something that they’re not so thrilled with at this point in time, looking to get something different in their lives, looking to make a change, and not seeing maybe even a connection between what they’re doing and what they want. Now, accounting to wellness advising, to nutritional type of thing, does not sound obvious to most people. What is the connection and what makes them in your view related to one another? Yeah, I love this question and I actually get this response a lot when people kind of hear my background and things. So, I would say a few ways that financial reporting accounting are related to health and wellness and one of them has to do with how it impacts us personally. So, when we think of something like accounting and finance, like an organization, the health of an organization, there’s so many different things going on and, most oftentimes, most people in the organization, they don’t really want to know what the accountants are doing. They’re like, “Yeah, you guys got it covered. We appreciate you. We know we need you,” but most people in an organization are like, “You guys got it, you know, I don’t really want to know.” Yeah. It’s a very complex system. There’s a lot of different points of information, data, as we call it in financial systems today, coming from a lot of different parts of the organization. In fact, all parts of the organization, right? They need to be rolled up, they need to be consolidated, for us accounting nerds out there, those are called adjusting journal entries and it goes into financial report, if you’re public, it gets reported out to Wall Street, which sort of indicates like a stock price so let’s just compare the health of an organization to something like a stock price because these are things that people can relate to, versus going into our health and really thinking our bodies are complex systems as well. We take in information from all different parts of our life, like you’ve already mentioned a few of the big ones, exercise, sleep, sunlight, stress, all of those things beyond just what we typically think of as nutrition and the food that we put in our body. Our body is doing this subconsciously, kind of like in an organization where we don’t know what the accountants are doing, we don’t really have to know all the fun health stuff that our body is doing all the time, right? Yeah. It just does it, and so if you give it the right sort of data, like in a system, if you get good data in, good data out versus, in health, if you give it the right nutrients and the right things, the inputs, you’re going to have overall a really high sense of wellbeing, high level of health, that sort of thing so that’s sort of from a theoretical standpoint as to how financial reporting and accounting are similar to health. I would say from a more tactical and personal perspective, it’s about understanding that our daily choices impact our overall and long-term wellbeing.Share on X So, on an organization, you think about on a day-to-day basis, there’s hundreds or thousands of transactions, depending on what type of organization that you have going on, and on a day-by-day basis, we’re not always looking at certain snapshots of, “Hey, how is this doing?” And, similarly, on health, you may not see sort of the changes on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, maybe a little bit in terms of, hey, if I don’t have my coffee, I might get a headache type of thing, your body’s trying to tell you something, but how does that trend to the long-term health? Because, ultimately, that’s what we’re all looking to achieve is balancing the short-term satisfaction of the yummy food and the things that we do on a daily basis versus the long-term health and we really do want to have that sort of longevity to our life. So it’s that similar balance both in finance and in health, and sometimes they’re together. So, for example, you could take a night and say, “We’re gonna have a great night out, we’re gonna get the fanciest food, we’re gonna have some drinks, we’re gonna dance until 3:30 in the morning,” and that’s probably going to be bad for your health in the long term because of the food you consume, the drink you consume, the alcohol, and it’s probably also going to be bad, especially if you live in a pretty major metropolitan area, you could easily spend $100, $200 on a night out like that, possibly more to be honest, like I bet there’s a lot of people out there with fancier tastes than me. And those nights feel good, they feel good to your body in some way, or psychologically, but they’re not a habit, whereas if you were to do that every single night, you’d end up, well, in a load of hurt, both financially and health wise. Right, yeah, your bank account. You’d be getting a lot of points on your credit card but, yeah, probably not great for your overall monthly budget. You’re exactly right. It’s sort of that balance of --- and nights like that, they may feed your soul. You may have a really great time dancing at 3 a.m. at the bar or something, whatever you like to do at 3 a.m. If you do that every day, that’s when you’ll start to get in sort of a world of hurt. Yeah, for sure. And so what is the balance? So what do you say in both capacities toward nights like that, or any event like that, it doesn’t have to take the same form but it could be any other way of like, “Okay, I bought a cake for my birthday, and cake is not the best thing for me but I’m gonna have it,” and if you live life never splurging, never going for the thing, there’ll be a certain monotony to it. I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s like a balance you can find where people can figure out how often or in what capacity they can nourish their soul with something that’s bad for their long-term health but also still maintain their long-term health through normal daily habits. Absolutely. This is such a great question because it totally comes up when I’m talking to people and everybody wants to be healthier but, of course, we want to eat the donut too, you know? And it’s like, okay, how can we have both? Can we have both? I think the answer is yes, obviously, in moderation. So what is moderation? How do we define that? I like to go sort of by the 90/10 rule, or maybe the 80/20 rule, depending on your level of health. So, if you’re at a pretty good point in your health, you don’t have an autoimmune condition, you don’t have any sort of large underlying diseases or anything like that, most people can kind of get away with an 80/20, where 80 percent of the time, you’re eating very nutritious food, majority of them are home cooked, they’re high quality, they’re well-balanced meals, all the good things, you’re getting movement, you’re getting exercise, and then the rest of the 20 percent, those are your Friday, Saturday nights where you’re able to have the pizza and drink the beer type of thing. As long as you don’t let that additional 20 percent sort of creep in and you don’t have huge vendors on the weekend that takes you three days to recover in the next week sort of thing, you’re going to be okay, and that’s one thing I always like to instill with people that I work with is our bodies are very resilient. They’re actually much more resilient than we even realize, and so we have a lot to be thankful for and also we can use that in our benefit to enjoy those sorts of fun things. And another way I would relate this back actually