Ellen Palmer, Ideal Life Method
Meet Ellen Palmer, a visionary in holistic health and life design, dedicated to helping individuals unlock their fullest potential. As a certified holistic health and life coach, keynote speaker, and founder of the Ideal Life Method, Ellen has spent over a decade guiding professionals, entrepreneurs, and young adults toward balance, fulfillment, and overall well-being.
Her journey began in the corporate world, where she thrived in national account sales and marketing for a Fortune 100 company. But after facing personal health challenges, she embarked on a transformative path, immersing herself in functional and alternative medicine, ultimately healing herself and inspiring thousands to do the same!
Through her Ideal Life Method, Ellen empowers people to break free from overwhelm, embrace mindfulness, and cultivate daily habits that support their unique strengths. She also helped co-found the Healing Meals Community Project, a nonprofit that provides organic meals to individuals facing health crises while fostering youth leadership development.
Ellen’s work is a powerful reminder that true success begins with the courage to live in alignment with our values, our health, and our purpose, proving that an intentional life isn’t just possible, but also transformational.
It was an honor to sit down with Ellen and explore the lessons, challenges, and inspirations that continue to fuel her work.
Ellen, who is impacted by the work you do? Do you have a personal connection to this work?
I primarily work with young adults and leaders, driven by my personal experiences and how I felt growing up. I didn’t know how I was supposed to be - whether I was behind or ahead, what my path should look like, or if I was supposed to have it all figured out. Thankfully, my deep curiosity pulled me out of that space of confusion and led me to new experiences.
Working with leaders feels natural to me because of the impact they have. We’re always influencing others, and if we aren’t whole and healthy—if our own condition isn’t elevated —we end up leading in ways that may not serve everyone in the best way possible. It just makes sense that if I can help people elevate their condition, then more people will thrive.
Especially young adults. These young adults are amazing - their curiosity, their resourcefulness, their unwavering commitment to doing it better. They can sometimes be blamed for that, but I think it's going to be wildly successful if it's rounded out right. I feel like there are certain skills that we haven't done a good job of as adults, parents, and leaders, and it's a disservice to them. So we have to help round out that skill set, so they can feel whole and healthy and move from that place.
We have this unique opportunity to help them be grounded and present and engaged because we've taught them how to be disengaged and distracted. And as adults, we have created that. There's no blame or shame or anything. It's just this awareness of if we've created this through our technology and through isolation, what is it doing to our young people, and how do we help blend out their experience, so they do have a solid foundation. They feel grounded, they feel present, they feel engaged, they're curious, and they can grow into anything from that place.
While rewarding, purpose-driven work can also require significant energy. Do you have a self-care routine that helps you maintain balance?
Most definitely! I've gotten so much better about this over the years than I used to, and I feel like it's always evolving. Let’s see, things that are absolute, non-negotiables for me. Time outside in nature every day. Meditation and mindfulness every morning (or at the end of the day if my morning doesn’t allow). It gives me time to be grounded and liberated in my mind, frees my body up to feel better, and frees my energy up to be more expansive. Also, healthy food, as best I can, water, and reading. I know, it seems basic.
It's interesting because when we speak in corporate on the topic of wellness, we speak on intentional leadership and other things, but on the topic of wellness, the one thing that people can't get over is just the absolute critical hygiene of sleep. It's not a luxury, and it's certainly not bragging rights if you're getting less than six hours of sleep. We’ve been conditioned to treat sleep deprivation like a badge of honor, but what's happening in the body and the brain is really destructive.
Over the last four or five years, I've gotten really lovingly intentional about sleep, and helped people understand the impact that it has on your ability to be present and to make discerning, right decisions, and to engage and to remember. So many people are concerned about their memory. If we're not getting enough sleep, our mind can't sort the data that it's consumed throughout the day and tuck it away into important filing cabinets that we can recall. It's not that we necessarily have a memory issue; we have a recall issue because of a lack of focus, often caused by a lack of sleep. It’s become a really important part of my self-care.
Has there been a particular challenge in your own life where you realized it was a pivotal moment in your growth journey?
For years, I had suffered in my body. I had the weirdest symptoms - gut issues, hormone imbalances, weird symptoms that they couldn’t figure out. I was repeatedly dismissed and called a hypochondriac. They put me on medications that then destroyed my gut, which then made me anxious, which then made me depressed, and I developed skin issues. There were lots of foods I couldn't eat. I even had these weird seizures. The whole time it was, “What a hypochondriac.” Interestingly, my gynecologist at the time, who was a female, was the worst. She would say, “ ..Well this is what this is, and you're going to have to suck it up. It's going to be this way until you hit menopause, so you just really need to suck it up.” Then, when she was out, this male gynecologist met with me and said, “ ..This doesn't seem right. This just feels like you're really suffering.” Sure enough, he did a procedure and found out I was loaded with endometriosis. He said, “I don't know how you're functioning.”, so they did a couple of different surgeries and procedures, and I had different meds. Those years of suffering and no one listening had shaped me.
Fast forward to when my oldest son was handed over for emergency surgery on his second-month birthday, December 1. Something clicked. I will be damned if this child is going to suffer the way I have. There's no chance I'm going to let him just go on in this never-endingness. Something changed inside me very dramatically. I went rogue. That was in 1999; there was no such thing as integrative or functional or holistic medicine. If there was, it was sort of underground. I started researching, and finally found a physician in California, Salt Lake City, Utah, and then New York, and was blown away at the different healing modalities and many people who were willing to just listen to me and understand. They were so curious about … “Wait, you had this, and then you had that? Did anyone talk to you about this? No, oh, you also had that, and then you got that afterwards? Did anyone talk to you about that?” It just blew my mind - people were willing to listen. They didn’t blame me. They didn’t shame me. They didn’t dismiss me.
From there, it was a steady evolution of feeling well and feeling equipped to help my son. Then I made the very conscious decision to go back to school to learn how to help people the way that I was being helped. And of course, you teach that which you need to learn, so it was all about digestive health, all about hormone balance, all about mental wellness. I didn't expect to change my career, but there was no turning back. The day I graduated, it was okay, of course, I'm going to do this. I got my certification, my insurance, my licensure, and hung up my shingle, and I've never looked back. And so that's taken on many different evolutions with working one-on-one, to developing programs, to working on a program for college students, and then helping start Healing Meals and corporate speaking. I'm not grateful that Matthew was sick, but I'm especially grateful that it turned on my awareness - that it was time to do something.
We talked about how powerful love is, especially the love we have as mothers for our children.
It just took it to a whole different level. I look collectively at parents now who are just so concerned about their kids, and I think … We have to change what we're feeding them. We have to change our food supply. We have to look at pharmaceuticals. We have to look at vaccines. We have to look at the school structure. Is it the right school structure? We have to look at technology, and is it being used for its highest use and purpose? It’s an important time for us to pause and just say, “How are we doing and where are we going? Are our young people equipped to really thrive?” I do feel like it's our responsibility as adults, as parents. The time is now.
Community and mentorship are so important. Is there a particular person or persons that you've drawn inspiration from over the years?
My grandmother, I feel like she was this pioneer. Born in 1917, she faced some really hard challenges, made very hard decisions. Decisions that were inconvenient and sad for her, but needed to be done. I took such inspiration from her and how she helped people every step of her life, and how she always worked very hard in the shipyard, then helped build airplanes. She was this tiny little dynamo, but strong and smart, and always with an eye on helping people. She was in my community, in my family. Then, growing up, I was a part of Junior Achievement. I always had a passion for business from an early age, from like age 13, and when that program became available to me, it was like, “Wow, there are other people that share this same passion!” And we get to play! And there are adult mentors here that are helping us stay open and curious, but in a safe way, because we couldn't make too many bad decisions - they would always coax us back to center. That was really important. Then there was the Healing Meals community. Being in community with our team and our youth volunteers, there has been such a home. It felt like home. And there've been two authors that I feel have been mentors to me. I've never met either of them, but when I read their writing, which I’ve read several times over, it is such an alignment with the core of my being. The first is Michael Singer, who wrote The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment. If you haven't read them …They don't land right with everyone, but for me, they just are perfect. The other is Dr Bruce Lipton. He wrote a great book called The Biology of Belief that we read in school. It was foundationally healing, and just cracked the door, the window wide open for possibility. He was way ahead of his time, and I appreciate that. I've done things in my career that have been a little ahead of their time, and then when the world catches up, there's a little bit of an “Ahhh” moment.
We talked about the power of leaning in and walking in our truth, even if it may not be understood by others. How different our world would be if people like Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t stand in their truth.
It’s so profoundly important that we all live into who we are and purposefully guided to be. What is your intuition telling you? What is it that you need to speak about? Because everybody wins when you do. It’s not selfish. It’s not braggy. It’s not arrogant. It’s how we collectively win.
What advice would you offer the woman with a whisper in her heart to lean deeper into her power?
It is your absolute birthright to be the full expression of who you are. And so if, if there's a whisper or a calling or a passion that is so beautifully and purposely placed within you, the world needs you! That is your place, that is your privilege, that is your honor - to share it with everybody, because everybody wins. You win, your family wins, your friends win, the community wins, the culture wins, and the world wins. It’s about: Can we just be a little bit braver and give ourselves the grace and honor of giving birth to that whisper?
We talked about the beauty of leaning into our gifts.
“It's almost like it's a fraction of its full expression. When we use our gifts to serve, then it becomes whole. It's such a rich experience for everybody involved. It happens in coaching, too, or if I’m giving a talk on a school campus. When you're young, you don't have a sense of how, when you're older, you're still just showing up and hoping for the best. We never have all the answers. We don’t have it all figured out.
There’s just so much growth on both sides. And I think adults would be better served to be transparent and share that, and young adults to consume that and really understand - you’re such an important contributor. Now that I know differently and better because of our experience, I can then go and help impact from a much more whole place with a broader experience to draw from, and with more curiosity about what someone else's experience is. It's always community, but I think we're at a time in our world and in our cultures where people feel separate and isolated. Perception is reality, but if you really take away many of the infrastructures that are in place, like social media, smartphones, Discord, computer games - We’re not different. We don’t need to be or feel as isolated and separated, because it’s a feeling. It’s not necessarily true. I think it’s our responsibility to help heal that.
