Courtney Baber & Nurse Nancy Pellegrino | How To Have An Optimal Lifestyle For Healthy Skin
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Your skin is an indication of your health. Being aware of the impact of skin products, sleep, water and stress on your body is extremely important. In this episode, our guests Courtney and Nancy explain skincare product ingredients, from parabens to preservatives, and give great tips on how to support healthy, happy, and beautiful skin. Kristel did receive free products from the Route Beauty to try before recording,
Key Takeaways From This Episode:
Why the ingredients matter
Impact of lifestyle on the skin
Recommendations on scrubs
What to do to support healthy skin
Importance of sleep
How to deal with puffy eyes
Disclaimer: All of the information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and they are not medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or qualified health professional for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
About Nancy Pellegrino
Nurse Nancy, 55, began her career working as a nurse in hospitals before getting into aesthetics.
Has performed tens of thousands of procedures since beginning her career in aesthetic medicine in 1999.
Owned and operated Nancy Pellegrino Aesthetics, Inc. in Newport Beach, CA from 2007 – 2020.
In 2009, she began working with Allergan as one of their first Nurse Trainers and taught fellow nurses and Physicians how to improve their Botox and filler. Work she continues to do until today.
She draws upon the Science of Happiness and applies her knowledge daily on her newly launched luxury meets medical-grade skincare collection.
About Courtney Baber
Courtney Baber has over 25 years of experience in the beauty industry building brands for heavy hitters like Sephora (VP of Merchandising for 7 years), Urban Decay (SVP, Global Marketing), and Estee Lauder.
At Sephora, she pioneered the path to debut indie brands internationally and at Urban Decay orchestrated the global roll-out to 30+ countries.
She has guided beauty brands through multiple economic downturns and, as you’d imagine, tried virtually every product on the market.
She started her beauty career as Miss Ohio USA before deciding to be on the other side of the industry, where she remains today.
Connect with Nancy and Courtney
Website: www.theroutebeauty.com
Instagram: @thereoutebeauty
Use coupon code “TheRoute25” to get a 25% discount, valid from 5/11 to 6/11.
If you are struggling with feeling overworked or overwhelmed, access the Top 10 Stress Management Tips for the Overworked free right now.
Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people awaken to their ultimate potential. She is a wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Keynote Speaker, Physician Assistant, & Reiki Master with the goal of empowering others to live their best lives!
Follow her on:
Instagram: @livegreatly_co
Clubhouse: @livegreatly
LinkedIn: Kristel Bauer
Youtube: Live Greatly, Kristel Bauer
To learn more about Live Greatly's transformative online courses for personal development and self-improvement, to discuss collaborations and partnerships, or to book Kristel as a speaker or consultant, click here.
Episode Transcript:
Kristel:
So Nancy and Courtney, I'm so excited that you both are here today, and I'm really, really pumped to talk about skin and lifestyle and lots of interesting things.
Courtney:
Great! We're excited to be here too.
Kristel:
I would love it. If you could just give some of the highlights of your background and what you're really excited about right now, just so that our listener can understand a little bit about what got you to where you are today.
So who wants to start, Courtney or Nancy?
Courtney:
I’m happy to start. So hi, I'm Courtney Baber and I'm one of the co-founders of The Route. And I've been in the beauty industry, the prestige beauty industry for over 30 years. I've worked for big strategic companies like L'Oreal and Estee Lauder also have been on the retailer side at Sephora.
And most recently was at Urban decay. I helped, I was on the management team there overseeing creative and marketing and merchandising and helped sell the brand to L'Oreal. And now I'm working with this lovely woman, um, nurse Nancy, we decided probably close to four or five years ago that we wanted to go into business together.
We, I'd been her patient for now over 10 years and she's completely transformed my skin. I have very sensitive skin. I think I mentioned to you earlier that I have gluten intolerance and lots of tummy issues, which can come out in your skin and she fixed it with medical grade products. And so that's what we're really excited about is very rare to be able to get your hands on medical grade products, unless you're going into an office, like Nurse Nancy’s.
And so we set out to really bring medical grade skincare to everyone, a wider audience. And so that's what we're doing. We launched the brand, the route in late 2019, and we've got a lot of great things going on right now.
Kristel:
That's fantastic.
Courtney:
I'll pause there. And let Nancy tell you a little bit about herself.
Kristel:
Awesome.
Nancy:
So I'm Nancy Pellegrino, nurse Nancy, and I have been a nurse practitioner for 30 years as well. And the first eight years of my nurse practitioner career, I did internal medicine focusing on women's health. So I started dabbling in skincare, um, back then helping women with that prescribing where Nova and all that good stuff.
And then about 20 it's going on 21 years now I discovered the world of beauty and medicine. So combining the two was just an amazing thing for me, and I've just never looked back. I love the aesthetic industry and aesthetic medicine. Um, I was one of the pioneers, so I started injecting back in 1999. And Botox wasn't even FDA approved for cosmetic use.
We were using it off-label but I just loved it. When all over the country learning about it, there were no training programs. Back in the day, we just had to gobble up our knowledge at all the conferences we could get quickly took to it. I've been a trainer now for over, Oh gosh, since 2004, actually. So for a long time, I key opinion leader for Allergan, the makers of Botox. I've been on advisory boards.
And like I said, I've been a trainer for them for a good while. So combining my love of beauty, my love of medicine, it's just been a whirlwind. I have my own practice in Newport beach, which I continue to this day. And then, like we said, she was my patient. She was just a beautiful soul coming into my practice and she and I connected, and it was December of 2016 that we decided to go for it.
And, uh, we've never looked back. We love it. We've been able to infuse everything that we are into this brand, as well as bringing the medical grade to, to everyone, not just people that go through our doors. We know that so so many people don't venture through aesthetic medicine doors. So we wanted to just bring it to everyone.
Kristel:
Love it. Well, thank you so much for giving all that background and I want to dive into skincare. Uh, one thing I'm really excited to talk to you about is why do the ingredients of our products matter? And from my, my background, like I was, I mentioned, I actually worked in plastic surgery for a little while and the products that we were using there were
A little bit more like intense. Then I got more into integrative medicine and I became a lot more aware about certain, Oh, what we put in there on our skin and how it can impact our hormones, how it can impact our health and things like Paraben's things to watch out for certain products that maybe are a little bit questionable.
And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. And if there are any insights that you have into, I guess, healthy skincare and how people and our listener can choose products that are actually going to be healthy for their physical body, as well as their skin.
Nancy: Right.
Courtney:
Nancy, take this one, but I wanted to share with you before she does our tagline is the route.
“Happy, healthy, beautiful skin.” So it's really about having the skin that is, you know, taken care of with raw rockstar ingredients, but also is healthy. And we also she'll share with you. We have a happiness story behind our skincare as well.
Kristel:
Perfect.
Nancy:
Yeah. So it's interesting when I. Before I started into the realm of formulating a product.
I thought I knew a lot about skincare, so you're detailed on them by the reps, medical grade. That's what we carry in our office. Things that aren't available in stores. And you rely on the formulations. You rely on the companies behind them to deliver a good product. Well, We went to UCLA and, and attended a cosmetic chemistry course.
So I got my back ingredients and all that, but what I found out is that. Some of the medical grade, what happens is you've got two schools of thought, so many schools of thought, but I'll just break it down to two there's medical grade. Um, and then there's over the counter or, and that, that includes prestige and so available to everyone and the ingredients are chosen by the formulators, by the chemists. And they're not necessarily used at their efficacious doses and that every ingredient is clinically tested, which is interesting. And then you have the philosophy of the brand and parabens and other preservatives.
We want preservatives in our skincare, right? Because we were, they're constantly being exposed to bacteria and viruses that we don't want in, in our, in our products and the preservatives do mitigate that right. So we don't have, and that was, that was a law put into place in the 1930s when there was no there's no FDA regulation over cosmetics and there weren't any preservatives in the product.
So there was some, some trouble, some people got into real trouble. For example, mascara, um, people, uh, did not have ,uh, preservatives in it. And there was some cases of blindness. So that's when the FDA stepped in and said, you have to have some preservatives in there. So we want preservatives. We want the right kind of preservatives.
And what happens is the lay public sets out and they say, Oh, one thing is very, very bad. And it off this chain of reaction. And then if things get bad, it's kind of a council culture in cosmetics and you have to go back to the science. You have to go back and say, what really happening is, is it just, people are afraid of it.
They heard one thing. They don't really look at the science. I know, for example, parabens, you've mentioned those earlier. Every cosmetic chemist on the planet, almost every is going to say that parabens are okay. They've been tested. They've been around for a long, long time, but they've just got a bad rap.
And I being told that they might be making a comeback. We took a stance that we wanted clinically tested ingredients that all had studies behind them. We were going to use them at the efficacious dose. So the dose that was proven to work in the skin, but we also wanted a preservative system. That's been around a long time.
So some of the newer products, some of the newer preservative systems haven't stood the test of time. And once they do, we may consider them. We looked at all of them, but we chose something else. Phenoxyethanol, it's been around for a long time. It's been shown and proven to be safe. It does not go into the bloodstream and affect the endocrine system, but there's some movement towards removing it because just rumors out there.
But the science is solid behind it. So that's why we chose that. We chose safety first, our products and our ingredients. So ingredients are a tough category because you don't know what is in your bottle. You don't know what's in your product. And when we went out to formulate ours. We wanted those clinically tested ingredients.
We wanted them at their efficacious doses. And what we found out is not every company does that. And we were told by many, many chemists because we do our research and we do the legits that about 70% of cosmetic companies do not use the cut
Courtney:
Because it's not FDA regulated. At least it isn't right now.
And it also is very expensive to do, which we learned when we got to the contract. Yes.
Nancy:
Yes. So that means that only, 30% yeah of companies do that and we don't want to call that anybody. We don't know who those people are, but what we're saying is that we use all of our ingredients the way they should be used.
Kristel:
Thinking, I thank you for clarifying that I want to, how lifestyle can impact our skin. And I have seen this, I, you know what you're putting into your body, your skin is an organ. You know, it's going to reflect other things happening in your life, whether it be stress or diet now, and also hormones and all that stuff.
So I would love it. If you could give some tangible tips that the listener can potentially implement to support healthy skin.
Nancy:
So our tagline, as Courtney said, is happy, healthy, beautiful skin. So a healthy skin starts with a healthy barrier. So there's something called the epidermal barrier and it's the top layer of our skin.
It's managed by our microbiome. It's managed by our lipid system and then how our skin lives every day. The skin is the largest organ of our body and it's a dynamic moving constantly changing system. So the first thing you have to do is you have to protect it every day. And we also have all of our, our products consider all the, the ingredients. And when we use them, we have day products and we have night products and it's because the skin has its own little circadian rhythm. Our body has a circadian rhythm, right. So we know it's time to go to bed when it's dark outside and our melatonin turns on and it makes us sleepy and we'd go to bed and we wake up because the light is on the sunrises and our melatonin turns off.
It's a very simplified version of that, but that's what happens to our skin. To our skin closes that during the day, it doesn't want any of the aggressors to penetrate it. And at night it opens up. So our job is to protect our skin even more because the aggressors are so intense these days. So the first and foremost aggressor of skin is the sun.
So all the UVA UVB damage, infrared damage, blue light, I've got my blue light blocker glasses on right now. So all those things cause free radical damage. Pollution in the air pollution and tar and smoke and all the particulates get they land on our skin and cause that free radical damage. Free radical damage is the most aggressive form of our external skin aging.
So we have to be aware of our environment. And now there are studies that saying our internal it inside our homes could be depending on where we live, it could be even more aggressive to our skin because of internal pollute, inside pollutants. So there's a lot to be said for that.
So you'll see a lot of skincare companies talking about antioxidants because that's whats’s fights free radical damage. And there are antioxidants that fight blue light that fight pollution and flight fight all of those aggressors. So that's the one thing we have to protect our barrier. We also have to protect it by the products we use and how we use them.
We can't over scrub our skin. Lots of people want to scrub off our skin and use products that are very damaging to the barrier. That way people use certain kinds of scrubs that can actually cause little micro tears in the skin. We have to be careful how we use those things.
We have a, something called the party peel. We like chemical exfoliation, more so than physical exposure exfoliation.
Kristel:
So I think, I should get rid of my scrub that I have in the shower.
Nancy:
You don't have to get rid of it, but just don't use it every day.
Kristel:
How often do you think for a typical person with. Yeah. Obviously it's someone with really sensitive skin or other issues would have different recommendations before like a general regular skin.
How often should someone be exfoliating with something like that?
Nancy:
Well, I always say, get to know your skin. What is your skin telling you? It tells you a lot. So in general, we tell people once or twice a week for a chemical or a Uh, scrub exfoliation. Some skin can handle more. I can handle a lot. I can handle two or three, sometimes four times a week.
Courtney:
I can handle one once a week. Right. So if your skin feels inflamed, it feels off, it feels looks red. It looks irritated, then you've done too much.
Courtney:
Okay. So also here, I mean, I think the other thing is. How thorough nurse Nancy is and how thoughtful we really both have been in trying to develop these products, not only for ourselves, but for everyone else, because we wanted them to work.
And we obviously have both been exposed to countless skincare products over our 30 complimentary years in our industries and we still couldn't find it. We were mixing and matching products and, and what we set out to do really, and basing it on this circadian rhythm products used it the day and the night at their efficacious levels, but also to really go after each of the ways that we age.
So not just one, there's a lot of one in ingredient products, but we really wanted to attack every single way that you age cause it's, there's not just one, there's all the internal external reasons. And, and it's very difficult to do. Um, it takes a lot of different ingredients and if you don't want to have a 10 step system morning at night, you really have to have a rockstar cosmetic chemist who can put it all into these.
You know, everything day and everything night, they're called that because they really have everything you need, but simplified down so that you don't have that 10, 10 step process. And that's the other thing is because there are so many, so many things in your lifestyle and so many things about who you are from a DNA perspective that are causing you to age and we want it to go after all of those.
So we have really complicated.
Kristel:
Right. Well, this is helpful. Okay. So we have protect your skin. That's a big thing. We have exfoliate, and it sounds like you are recommending you like the chemical exfoliation versus the scrub because the scrub can be a little bit too intense for some people.
Nancy:
Well, I do like physical scrubs, but chemical scrubs are a little easier to, for you to tolerate for the skin to tolerate.
And it's harder to abuse your skin with it unless you're doing it too often, I guess.
Kristel:
Okay. Perfect. Anything else you would add to that list for general recommendation?
Courtney:
I would add that and that Nancy. It took her a while to teach me this. You don't need to clean your skin with bubbles. I always wanted to be clean and it was tearing my skin apart and I would be replacing all that I stripped away or try to be replacing that with my moisturizers and creams at night and it just was a never ending cycle for me.
And it really caused a lot of my redness and sensitivity. So we don't have it yet. We're all using it, but we have a cleanser coming out, um, in the fall that is magical and it doesn't bubble, but it creams to oils to milks and, and makes you feel clean, but protects that skin barrier.
That's it needs to be in a healthy state to be beautiful.
Nancy:
Drove our chemists crazy. Because I had a cute thermometer at home and I would measure it every day after.
Courtney:
Iit's launching this fall because it was the longest product it's taken for us to make believe. You would think a cleanser would be so easy and it is if you just want it like sets up, you really want it to do the right job and pass the white tab, tell, test, and take all the makeup off, but not, you know, damage the barrier it takes.
Nancy:
It was tough, but we did it, you know,
Kristel:
I had a, such a big shift in my skin when I went from using that like sudsy cleanser to a cleansing oil. And I didn't, I, for some reason I felt like the oil would make my skin oily or wouldn't work, but it was such a difference. And I'm curious what your thoughts are.
Is it okay different when you're going from different age bracket. So like someone who's, you know, in their teens might need something more intense versus that in your twenties, then you get to your thirties and you get to your forties. And then your fifties, like your needs, as far as moisture and cleansing, I'm assuming would probably shift.
Nancy:
Well, especially when you're a teen or twenties and you're battling acne and you have an excessive amount of oil, you can still benefit from creamy or a gentle cleanser. You don't want to strip it away. And that's what people tend to do is they just want to take off every speck of oil. I'm dealing that with my 14 year old right now, she's like, mom, I'm so oily and I'm saying, but you're, but you're damaging.
You're doing more harm because that barrier that we have once lipids there. You have an excessive amount when you're a teenager, you're going through our hormonal change. But so it's a lot of education just like Courtney said. And then as you get into your aging process, aging starts in our twenties, right?
We start slowing down, producing our hyleronic acid. Our collagen and elastin starts getting severe. And so it just depends unless you have a specific diagnosis, people need a gentle cleanser and then women need an oily cleanser cream cleanser to get the makeup off. So we formulated this for an, all of our products for all skin types.
Fitzpatrick's one through six, far as color goes, and then even oily normal combination skin can use these products because they respect the barrier. They respect for all skin types and we have it cream too oily to milk.
So we have a little bit of an emulsifier in there to clean the skin, but it also leaves a little hydration as well.
Kristel:
Okay. So wondering what both of you think about, um, in addition to like what we're putting on our skin, what else can people be doing to support healthy skin?
And I'm thinking about hydration and nutrition and stress management. I would love to hear your thoughts on, on that.
Nancy:
Well, you hit the nail. That's what we need. So we need our eight glasses of water a day. There's some controversy, whether or not that all that water gets to our skin, we need some external help as well.
That's why, because we have something called transepidermal water loss at night when the skin opens up, like we talked about and you lose lots of water. So you have to make sure your products are holding in your water. But yes, healthy water intake is very helpful. Our gut microbiome, which I know, which is a huge topic in your life that contributes to our overall general health.
I mean, that's what our skin is. It's a reflection of our overall general health. So if we're not feeling well, just think about the extremes like liver disease or cancer, you see it in the skin, kidney disease, you see the crystals on the skin, you get the sallow. Look to the skin. So the healthier you are, the healthier your skin is.
Courtney:
I would also add to that for me, especially, and I think everyone's a little bit different, but sleep is so important to having beautiful skin and healthy skin. Um, when I don't get my full and I really do need eight hours and when I don't get that or as a MacBook, Nancy and I are in our fifties. And once you start hitting these like 50 year old bene puzzles skin, you wake up three times in the middle of the night, getting that under control and being able to sleep a solid whatever it is you need.
I think it's really important as well.
Kristel:
That's great. You know, I'm thinking too, one thing that I deal with, and I know when I worked in plastic surgery, a lot of people have this as those like puffy eyes in the morning and especially my upper lids. And I think that's partially genetics for me. I notice it's more like, you know, if I eat salty foods the night before that can impact it, but it just seems to happen no matter what, but I think it's, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how the listener can deal with those, like an under eye or over eye puffiness or even maybe bags in the morning, any specific tips?
Nancy:
Cause I, I totally concur with Courtney on the sleep. Sleep is when our body regenerates overnight. And we wake up sometimes with prettier skin because we've been rejuvenating all night, but then the puffiness and that you talked about is just, is our alcohol intake, our salt intake, just our genetics. Just some people are just puffier. We're laying down all night. So we're not in that, you know, we're not having our gravity drain in the lymphatic system. So what some people do is the only thing I love about a skin refrigerator and it's not to preserve our ingredients cause I went into detail with that. But it's to make them cold and sometimes putting a cold eye cream can help that or having just something cold to put under the eyes. There's also, you know, the rollers and there's lymphatic rollers and they actually, there's not a ton of science behind them, but there's a lot of anecdotal, meaning it works.
You rub it in the way of the lymphatic drainage and you get reduced puffiness.
Kristel:
So I'd have one of those. I'm going to put it in a. I'll put it in the fridge. I'm curious to see how that works.
Nancy:
Yep. Put it in the fridge and then just roll it under the eyes and you will see a difference. There's a difference.
It's temporary, right? It's not doing anything long-term but I just recently discovered it and I have puffiness under my eyes very often. And it's very helpful.
Kristel:
Interesting. Yeah, for me, it's my upper lids. Like, and that's just, I tend to be in the morning for whatever reason, no matter what, they're always just slightly, like when I put on my makeup, I can tell my lids are a little bit more puffy.
If I do it in the morning versus.
Courtney:
Kristel,d o you use your eye products on your lids?
Kristel:
I don't do it on the top.
Courtney:
Yeah. So we actually formulated the sunny eyes, which is our daytime eye product. And the night-night eyes is our nighttime, obviously, so that you could use them on the lid and the under eye area.
Kristel:
You can do it on the lid. Like I've always thought that you weren't supposed to.
Courtney:
But you can, but it has to be formulated so that you can, our products are, and we have all kinds of ingredients in both products that help, you know, definitely with the night products, with the puffiness there's green tea extract and things like that.
That really helped both with the upper and lower puffiness. But the sunny eyes is such a. Been such a runaway hit for us. I mean, the party peels are number one, product times five, and the sunny eyes is right behind it. When the shape beauty best eye cream award recently just, um, it's up for a bunch of other awards this year.
It's really unique in that it, it not only hydrates. But it hydrates slightly. You don't need a lot of topical moisture on your eyes during the day because it doesn't allow your makeup to stay on, but it, it internally hydrates, but doesn't leave a lot of residue, but it lifts and it color cracks as well.
Which is really nice around the eyes, especially if you don't like to wear a lot of makeup, but it like reflects. And we have an ingredient in this product and in another product verse, which is one of my favorite it's called SIM lift. That just gives like a little bit of a lift as well. But definitely you can use product if the product is formulated for the upper eye, you should be putting it there.
And I even put it up around like my brow bone area. Cause that also tend to get a little puffy or wrinkly.
Kristel:
Well, I'm going to try that and yeah, I'm excited. I've been using your product, so thank you for sharing them with me and I've really enjoyed them, but I I'm going to now start putting that on the upper lid.
I will let you ladies know.
Courtney:
Let us know how it works.
Courtney:
You don't need a ton up there, right. But definitely take care of that area as well.
Nancy:
That's fantastic. Five minutes. And then you can put your makeup on top.
Kristel:
Perfect. Perfect. So I want to do a challenge. So for the listener of right now, what I would want you to do, we've been talking about these different things you can do for lifestyle to support your skin.
I want you to count how many glasses of water you are drinking each day. You are probably drinking a lot less than you think you are drinking. So I want you to add to that, unless you're somebody who's like really fantastic at hydrating then kudos to you. You don't need to do this, but if you're somebody like most of us here who is not getting enough water, I want you to increase your water intake and see how that impacts your skin.
So that's something that's really simple. Have a big water bottle with you when you're working or whatever it is you're doing and just drink throughout the day. And then hopefully you'll start to notice some improvements in your skin. So at this point, I want to do a wellness challenge with you ladies.
So there are going to be some fast questions and just give me your first, whatever comes to your mind, you don't have to have a lot of thought. Um, so why don't we do the same question and we'll go from Nancy and then to Courtney and then we'll move to question two.
So it's fair. So you don't, you know, the second person doesn't get all of the questions at once.
Okay. So are you guys, are you ready? You ready?
All right, let's do it. Okay.
To Nancy, What is a book that you recommend?
Nancy:
Oh my gosh. A book. Well, it's so funny. This is not new, but I love Christine Carter and I just happened to have it here. Cause I was looking at it's called raising happiness. It's my favorite parenting book and Christine Carter's out of Berkeley.
Kristel:
Love it. Courtney, how about you?
Courtney:
Oh my God. I can't even think of one right now. Nancy knows this about me. I don't get to read right now because I, I have two children that are pre-teen and teenagers. And I'm starting to.
I loved the fountainhead when I had time to read. That was one of my favorite kind of enriching books, but it's really deep and long and complicated.
Nancy:
It’s for journals and scientist stuff.
Kristel:
Perfect. Perfect. Okay. So Nancy, what is one of your top self-care tips that has worked for you personally?
Nancy:
Gosh, it depends on my early in my career. Oh, self-help self-care, self-care not career.
Sleep. Sleep has been a big challenge in my life for the last decade for lots of reasons. So getting enough sleep, allowing myself to sleep or sleep in tr try to get that sleep deficit going, who has been my biggest challenge.
Kristel:
How about you, Courtney?
Courtney:
Well, I think for me always has been consistency and discipline. I think that anytime you give yourself the out of going to bed with your makeup on or skipping a step, like I'm really about rituals, I've always got to complete all the five steps in the shower with the scrub. And I think that makes me feel better. Getting really keeping all of that intact for me. It's my time. I don't get a whole lot of time. Even blowing my hair dry. I have a little bit of satisfaction in that because it's all I can do right there. It can't be like trying to talk on the phone and talking to my kids. I'm just taking care of myself and I'm doing it consistently.
Kristel:
Perfect. Okay. So Nancy, what would be a top tip that you have as far as having a successful career? What has worked for you?
Nancy:
Early on and it was just devouring all of the information available and just digging deep and going for it and really, really getting into it later on when I had my own practice.
Saying no, learning how to say no, learning how to delegate, learning how to let someone else do something. Cause I had to do it all myself. And then now with Courtney, Courtney really taught me to say, to just take a deep breath. If something goes wrong, take a deep breath and say, it's going to be fine. She taught me to, to just allow it to happen.
Let timing work. It's going to be fine.
Kristel:
Love it. All right, Courtney, how about you?
Courtney:
Everyone who worked with me, Nancy included knows that I'm a huge prioritizer. I used to think I could get everything on my list done every single day. And obviously we all know that never happens, but I think having the list to start with is really important and really doing the things that really matter first.
I think some people can get really lost in all the minutiae of the day. And if you're focused on the big things, you're going to be way more successful than like worrying about a couple of pieces of lint on the floor.
Kristel:
Love it. Okay. Last question. So based on what you know now, what advice would you give to yourself 10 years ago? Nancy that's for you?
Nancy:
Just, you don't have to be the hero. You don't have to stay up until three o'clock in the morning, finishing, whatever it is you're working on. It's not that important. You get more sleep.
It's something I deprive myself as something I regret is that I just, it was a badge of honor that I got just a few hours sleep cause I was just working in busy and doing so just, and then just be more kind to myself. Just allow things to happen. It's okay. It's going to be okay.
Kristel:
That's great. I think everybody can benefit from that.
And Courtney, how about yourself? What advice would you give to yourself 10 years ago?
Courtney:
Well, it's interesting that Nancy said, but she did because we both picked quotes out. We love quotes, but hers is kind is the most beautiful thing to be. And we really have built the brand based on kindness and building this culture of happiness and kindness. But for me specifically, my quote is difficult roads almost always lead to the most beautiful destinations. And I really do believe that I haven't always taken the easiest route, you know, no pun intended. In fact, I, a lot of times taking the most difficult, but I ended up in the right place and sometimes a better place than I would have ended up if I didn't do that.
So don't be afraid to really put yourself out there. I'm naturally everyone that works closely with me, I'm naturally an introvert, but I have constantly put myself into extrovert shuttle places, because I think when you're in those places as you're growing and when you grow, you're just. Becoming a better version of yourself.
And so definitely don't be afraid. Just keep putting yourself out there and know that you're going to end up in the right place.
Kristel:
I love it. That was beautiful. What a wonderful way to end. I'm going to put a link to your skincare line in the episode notes. If this resonates with you, definitely check it out.
And anything that you ladies would like to share before we close, it's been an absolute pleasure having both of you with me today.
Courtney:
Well, it's been such a pleasure meeting you as well. And what I'd like to offer you. If you want to Kristel, we can do a promo code for your audience for how we can discuss it offline, but you can definitely bake it into what you send out to them.
And, um, they can get some special offers, um, on our Website@theroutebeauty.com.
Kristel:
I love it. Okay. So then I will, we can talk about that and I will put that promo code in the episode details, so that music. Fantastic.
Nancy:
And I know Kristel that you love to practice gratitude all day long, not just in the morning or at night.
So I we're just, I know Courtney and I are so grateful to be here and allowing us to talk to you. So thank you so much.
Kristel:
Oh, thank you ladies. This has been so fun. We'll have a beautiful rest of the day. Thank you.
Nancy: Enjoy it.