Influential Woman · Health and Wellness
Shelly Besancon
Life Coach and Weight Loss Coach, Private Company
Chattaroy, WA 99003
Her Story
About Shelly
For Shelly, each moment is a new beginning, wide open to every emotion this world has to offer.
She spent 15 years married to an alcoholic and drug addict in what became a mentally abusive relationship, raising two beautiful children while living under chronic stress that slowly reshaped her body from the inside out. During those years, her nervous system lived in survival mode. She developed chronic digestive issues, hormonal imbalance, and experienced something most people cannot imagine. She did not sweat for over 20 years. Her body was so locked in stress that even its most basic detoxification systems shut down.
She functioned. She raised her children. She built and operated a successful housecleaning business for 17 years. She showed up. But underneath, her body was keeping score.
After the marriage ended and her former husband passed away by suicide, Shelly made a decision that would change everything. She would no longer live in survival. She would learn how her body actually worked. She would heal her nervous system. She would stop fighting herself.
Through deep emotional processing, trauma recovery work, biological education, and holistic health practices, she not only restored her health but transformed it. She released 65 pounds and has maintained that weight loss. More importantly, she rebuilt metabolic trust. She regained her ability to sweat. She restored hormonal balance. She repaired her relationship with food. She reconnected with herself. She embodied the ability to feel every single emotion available to her without making it good, bad, right, or wrong, and learned instead to listen to the guidance this incredible system was offering her.
Today, Shelly lives with her husband, enjoys her grandbabies, and leads her life from regulation instead of reactivity. She knows what it feels like to live in chaos inside your body. And she knows what it feels like to live in peace.
Her lived experience is what gives her depth. She does not coach from a pedestal. She coaches from embodiment.
Shelly believes weight loss is not just about what we eat. It is about why we eat. It is about stress, identity, trauma, safety, biology, and self-trust. She helps women extract the gold from their experiences instead of being defined by them. She helps them move from survival to strength.
She is a certified Life Coach through The Life Coach School and a lifelong student of human behavior and biology. But her greatest credential is this: she rebuilt herself from the inside out.
And now she helps other women do the same.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Shelly
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to radical emotional ownership and the decision to heal at the deepest level.
After 15 years in a chaotic and mentally abusive marriage marked by addiction, I reached a moment of clarity and asked for a divorce. When I refused to repair the marriage by his rules, the situation escalated into physical abuse, and shortly after, my husband took his own life.
From the moment of his departure from this earth, I knew I had been set free from the chaos and I was no longer having to live in survival mode, and I was open to create something different for myself and my two children.
My first commitment was to create a safe environment for me and my children to heal.
After years of living on the receiving end of anger, I made a conscious decision that I would not pass that anger forward. I believe emotions live in the body and it is our responsibility to process them, not project them or store them. They are meant to be felt fully.
I rebuilt my health, first by doing the emotional work and releasing 65 pounds, I restored my nervous system and regained my ability to sweat after more than 20 years, and most importantly, rebuilt my relationship with myself.
My success comes from choosing regulation over reaction, ownership over blame, and openness over bitterness. It comes from doing the internal work required to break cycles instead of repeating them.
Success, to me, is becoming emotionally sovereign. To feel on purpose, and to understand what the body is communicating.
And that is the foundation of everything I teach.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The truth is, I haven't received one single piece of career advice that actually shaped me. Most of what I've built has come from lived experience, trial and error, and learning what does not work. But if I had to name the best advice I ever got, it would be this: do not build a business that costs you your nervous system.
After years of living in chronic stress, I refuse to recreate chaos in the name of ambition. I build slowly and intentionally, from alignment, because my business has to support my life, not consume it. That has become my guiding principle.
I don't mind hard work. I actually thrive on it. But my health always comes first, including my sleep, because if I am not taken care of, I cannot show up as my best self. That comes from life experience, from almost losing my quality of life to stress and trauma, it is something I will not repeat. Daily practice of taking care of your emotional health is top priority.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
My advice would be simple: become the work before you teach the work.
This field is not about having the perfect script or the trendiest program. It is about presence. It is about being able to sit across from someone and not flinch when their pain surfaces.
Continue your education, yes. Strengthen your skills, absolutely. But more importantly, do your own internal work. Heal your patterns. Understand your nervous system. Learn to take ownership of your emotions.
Women can feel authenticity. They can feel safety. They can feel when someone is grounded.
Build your practice around your values, not around what is popular. Long-term success in this field comes from integrity, patience, and truly helping women create sustainable change.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The coaching industry has always carried a lot of noise and hacks, but with the internet and information available instantly, it has become more accessible, and that has turned the volume up. So many women are overwhelmed with conflicting advice, quick-fix promises, and every solution out there focusing on calorie deficit and willpower, as if that is the whole answer. Sometimes the real answer is as simple as not eating enough, and each individual has something unique to look at as to why they cannot lose weight or why they gained it in the first place.
The opportunity lies in going deeper.
More women are beginning to understand that weight loss is not just physical. It is emotional. It is hormonal. It is nervous system regulation. It is trauma-informed. The industry is slowly shifting toward sustainability instead of restriction. Just because a diet works for someone else does not mean it will work for you. It has to be something built for the long term, something you will actually want to keep doing. This is not a plan you follow until the weight comes off and then leave behind. It is ongoing work. It is a daily practice.
The coaches who will lead the next wave are the ones who prioritize emotional safety, long-term healing, and true embodiment over trends.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The most important value in both my personal life and my work is self-responsibility.
I believe we must take care of ourselves first. In fact, we need to be a little selfish with our self-care, and that is a good thing. My daily life reflects that. I value my mornings. I continuously regulate my nervous system. I meditate daily.
When my husband died, my priority was creating a safe healing environment for my children and myself. I had to give back to myself what I had spent years giving away.
Another core value for me is emotional safety. Women need to feel heard. They need to feel held without judgment and have safe spaces where they can speak honestly without being rushed to fix themselves. In my work, I create that safety first. Transformation happens when a woman feels safe enough to be seen and can feel real love.
I have fallen deeply in love with who I am, and that changed everything. From that place, I help women reconnect to themselves so fully that external change becomes a reflection of internal alignment.
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