Heike Yates: I'm an Empowering Passionista

Heike Yates is a fitness and nutrition expert with over 30 years of experience in the diet and exercise world. She is a personal trainer who will, as she likes to say, “kick your buttski.” But she is so much more. Heike is empowering women over 50 to take back their health and strength by designing balanced and straightforward fitness, nutrition and mindset programs.

As the creator of the Pursue Your Spark method and the host of the Pursue Your Spark Podcast, she is encouraging women to start with that one little piece of happiness and use it as a catalyst to something bigger. She helps her clients determine those things that bring joy and find ways to turn that into a healthy mindset, which leads to better fitness and nutrition. She has developed a reputation for creating real life solutions and lasting results.

Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Heike Yates.

Passionistas: Talk about Pursue Your Spark.

Heike: Pursue Your Spark is in simple terms, the opposite of dim your lights. Pursue Your Spark came out of a whole bunch of reinventions of this brand. It had different names before and none of them really grabbed me and expressed what I wanted to be. It's that any woman can pursue any spark in their lives. Does it mean you want to get a new haircut? That's a spark. You want to try new lipstick. That's a spark. You want to empower yourself to eat better. That's igniting a spark. It's the catalyst. And they become the catalyst, something bigger. There's this gateway that they can open up with, Pursue Your Spark, to become something bigger than themselves. Something more than they thought they could reach and something that empowers them to do better than they did before.

Passionistas: And what is the SPARK method?

Heike: Oh, this is my top secret. No, I'm just kidding… It is built very similar to what I just mentioned is you first, you evaluate where you are. So you start, you look at where you are, you see where you need help with and where you can grow where your basis is basically, then you take your basis and then you start a plan. Things like I'm a walker. I know I can walk two miles, but I would love to do a 10K race. That'd be like, I always dreamed about this. Okay. So you currently are walking two miles. So now this is your base. What will be the next step is to create a plan that is sensible and doable for you to get to the 10K that we'll be planning phase number two.

And then you go into also the dream and this, in this case, it will be the dream thing. Okay. The 10K is my stepping stone to the next thing to maybe something bigger, but it doesn't have to be. And then you're looking at what's possible and what's not possible. And that's where the roadblocks come in. The mindset like my feet hurt after three miles, this sucks. It's hot, it's raining. I don't know if I can do this or I don't have good shoes. So what do I do now? And these roadblocks that sometimes are just imagined roadblocks, but they're there. And then as I say, in the end, we kick ass and we're going to follow up on the plan that we had from the get go. And so you keep evaluating each phase and you're like, okay, so here's my dream. Here's my goal.

Here's the first plan that I had. Okay. This works great. So we keep going, Oh, we'll tweak it. If it's not working great, let's get the roadblocks out of the way. So we're not thinking of things that are maybe not there, or if it's a new pair of shoes, we'd get a new pair of shoes. And then we'll pursue that goal, that spark until you get to the finish line and you go like, I'm over the finish line, you did it. And that's the SPARK method.

To learn more about Pursue Your Spark visit HeikeYates.com.

Here Heike’s full interview here.