Angela Cudger is an award-winning international speaker and coach, a top wellness expert, and founder of Legacy Holistic Health Institute, the only accredited black-owned institute for health coaches in the United States of America. She has been styled the Queen of Wellness, and rightly so. Angela is a walking wealth of information and teaches women entrepreneurs a full-circle approach to wellness that has allowed them to experience exponential growth in their businesses.
As a devout vegan, she endorses the use of whole foods, and nutrient-dense sources to steer focus, drive creativity, and increase productivity in business. She has an impressive background in modern medicine, holistic nutrition, physical fitness, and spirituality. In this interview, Angela takes us on her journey to becoming an accomplished wellness expert. Be inspired to pursue your dreams and rise to the top in your business and career.
Angela, you are a top wellness expert and advocate for women entrepreneurs and corporate professionals. Many women lack body confidence, especially as they begin to age. Is it possible to reverse aging, and how can we turn back or slow down the hand of the clock?
One of the things that a friend of mine told me is that if God made anything better than a woman, He kept it for Himself. Right? And I believe in that because we are among the top people in the world who can actually turn back the hand of time with what we do with our body and who we allow around us and in our space. So, people can definitely do an age rewind, but it’s all about the command that they give to their bodies. Scientists have known for years, and now it’s more mainstream that our cells, every last one cell in our body is made to become better over time. So people always wonder, or they assume that they are supposed to age, but we get new skin cells, we get new hair cells, we get new nail cells, we get new liver cells, our body is always making brand new cells and renewing itself. It’s what we say to ourselves with our body image, it’s the things that we think about our physical bodies, and even the food that we eat that can affect the quality of these cells over time. So one of the things I teach our students at Legacy is that we are always renewing and we can either give our body mixed information and mixed command, or we can give it a direct order that says, I want to be healthy, I want to be well, I am healed, I am whole. And a lot of times, I think we get around people that hold these conversations, not knowing that our body is listening to everything that is being said around us. So take, for example, if you send your child, to go and get something, and you don’t give them clear instructions, they say, I couldn’t find it, I don’t know what you were talking about, I couldn’t find it. If you were to give them clear instructions, they could bring you back exactly what you asked for. Right? That’s the exact way every single one of our cells acts. They act like an army that would give us exactly what we ask for. If we ask for fear, doubt, worry, shame, that’s what we get back. If we ask for health, wealth, wholeness, happiness and bliss, that’s what we get back and we exude it. Yeah.
What attracted you to this line of work? What personal experiences, if any, got you on this journey?
That’s a very good question. I don’t think everyone has an amazing story that they can tell, and I think it’s one of the reasons I loved working with female entrepreneurs for many years. For me personally, I actually grew up in very low-income housing here in the States, in Georgia, in Atlanta, and literally, there were twelve of us to a three-room apartment. And there were actually two kids that had special needs. So, I had eleven siblings, and two of them were handicapped; one of them was bedridden, and so from being a little girl, I grew up, living in an apartment that acted as a hospital. And I would watch my mum every day, and she was a single parent, she would take care of my sisters, and I knew, just from being a little girl, that I was not only supposed to help people, but I was specifically supposed to help them understand their body, and from there, I became really kind of obsessed with it. Right? I went through respiratory therapy school and I was a therapist for about 18 years, I was a licensed therapist here in Georgia, and as if that wasn’t enough, I went back to medical school when I was about thirty years old, and that’s been sometime now too, but when I was 30 years old, I went back to medical school as a single parent and went for Anaesthesiology. And from there, in private practice, that’s when it hit me that there’s more to this than medication, that there’s more to our bodies than even what we eat. And so, coming from a medical background, it’s been over twenty years at this point, I dove into spirituality. So I actually took a journey to Egypt last year to become a certified yoga instructor in ancient African yoga and believe it or not, I took my son with me and at the time, he was only nine years old and he became one of the youngest certified yoga teachers on the planet at that time. So, for me, this isn’t a talk, it’s a walk, it’s like my entire life exudes health and wellness and helping other people get there too.
What is wellness? What are the benefits of wellness? And for those who do not practice wellness, what are the consequences over time?
I love that question, and I get asked that a lot. Wellness, for me, is something that we’re born with. A lot of people feel that over time it’s something that they pick up, it’s something that they’ve got to go get or they’ve got to go fix something to make themselves well, but what they don’t understand is embracing wellness is a return to who you already were. So, it’s not something that you go and get; it’s all about that person understanding that it’s their birthright. Right? And by definition, birthright is something that the fact that you were born, it means you own it; you have it. And so the consequences of not understanding the ownership of something that already belongs to you – just think about someone who owns something and pretends that they don’t, say for instance a house, and they say I don’t own the house, but on paper it says Gabriella, you actually do own this house, and you say, no I don’t, well over time the house is going to get overgrown, the gutters are going to need to be cleaned, right? A lot of things are going to happen to it that requires some maintenance and some upkeep. Our bodies and our wellness are the same way. If we don’t think about it in a way that says, I already own this, how do I get back to it? Then the consequences of that is that trying to find our way back to it is going to be something that’s much more challenging, and that’s really what you see people having issues with today it’s not just about having a particular disease, and they think they are not well because of it; it is a lack of understanding that they were already well, to begin with, and they can return to that anytime that they want. It’s a very powerful concept too. Yeah.
Why did you choose to work with women entrepreneurs, and what do you absolutely love about working with this group of women?
The beautiful thing is that because of how we teach, we attract a lot more men now, so that’s a beautiful thing, but when I initially started, yes, I loved working with women entrepreneurs. There is something about women; they have this spark, Gabriella, they bring the passion, they bring the fire to what they do on the planet, right? They’re naturally intuitive, they already naturally know what belongs to them, and believe it or not they know when something doesn’t belong to them anymore. Ask any woman who ever thought someone was cheating on her. They intuitively know what already belongs to them and the steps they need to take to own it, and so that’s why I loved working with women. It was easier for them to see that being well increased their revenue in business, being well, increased their idea or creativity for their programmes, products and services. And being well raised their vibrations to help draw in their soulmate clients, the people that they wanted to work with. That’s why I loved working with women entrepreneurs.
Please tell us about Diva Wellness Network, which you established while working with female entrepreneurs and The Wellness Suite, which you designed for corporate bodies.
Absolutely. So, with the Diva Wellness Network, I invented that for female entrepreneurs, who were really looking to get their spark back. They were already at a certain point in their business, but they were stuck, stuck in revenue, they didn’t understand why their energy was low after a launch, and they didn’t understand how they could come up with consistently creative ideas, and one of the things that the Diva Wellness Network allowed them to do or all of our products or services and things that we did for female entrepreneurs, it allowed them to tap into creativity be able to give themselves self-care time during their launches, and after their launches, and to come up with some amazing things that will keep their business going and generate more revenue. And so, one of the things, we allow women to understand is that when you take care of yourself, everything else falls into place, not the other way around. And a lot of times new entrepreneurs they dive into this, and they don’t understand that self-care is soul care. Like when you take care of yourself, you’re actually taking care of yourself and at a soul level too. And because of that, the energy that you generate in your launches, and in bringing in more money into your business, you can actually start to draw to you your soulmate clients, the people who will pay you over and over again for the goodness that you are putting out on the planet. So, we were able to connect the dot for a lot of female entrepreneurs that way and increase everybody’s bottom line. The average person who came to us through Diva Wellness was able to increase their bottom line by about 40% or more because they could give more energy to their launch and it just opened up ideas that they never thought of. We didn’t give them business ideas; it was already locked into them and it was opened up when they started taking better care of themselves. So that’s what Diva Wellness Network did. Yeah. I love Diva Wellness Network. And because of all the attention we received, we started getting invited into corporate spaces. So corporations, specifically in the pharmaceutical industry, actually started inviting us in and they made it a requirement for every employee to come and see us and get signed off on meditations and mindfulness, learning how to food prep and pack their food and pack nutrients in the food, and we ended up doing quite a few workshops around cleansing and healthy living as a whole. So, we were able as a wellness team to go into these organisations and really kind of rearrange the thought process of the people who were there. I tell people those were really busy days; in one corporation in one day, we would see over two thousand people to coach so those were really busy days for us. Yeah, in corporate, it got really busy. Additionally, they would have us do keynote speaking events, large events for their corporation and require that people sit in the audience and listen to what we were teaching.
Amazing! Then you chose to leave it all behind and move into Legacy Holistic Health Institute. Tell us about that.
Yeah. So, Legacy Holistic Health Institute is a health coach training school. We actually started to develop health and wellness leaders. The reason I started this is because I started doing health coaching in 2014, and I saw massive success not just with Diva Wellness Network but also with corporations by the time 2016 came around. So, in a short span of two years, I saw massive success. And I started looking around, Gabriella, and I wondered where the other health coaches were. What were they doing? What were they doing in their business? And I noticed that a lot of them were struggling. And I started to dig a little bit deeper, and I said, how come I’m seeing success and they are not? And I looked across at what they did or didn’t get, while they were training, and I said, okay, if I can create a health coaching training programme, that would give someone access to my success, I’m going to do that. So, I took a bit of time, in 2017 and I did a lot of research, with the programmes that were on the market, and I saw that they had a lot of holes and people would go to these coaches, but they weren’t seeing the results or the success that they wanted as clients. So, I created the programme at Legacy to block up those holes. And so, as a result, in the first 90 days, we went international. So, our first class started in May of 2018 and it was with 20 women, all in the US. The second started in September of 2018 and it was with 20 people and it had people from Australia, New Zealand and the US. So, it had stretched across borders within 90 days. And to this day we have students in Thailand, Japan, Jamaica, Africa, North America, South America, we have students all over the world to this day. We have a full-time enrollment team in addition to other teachers as well. We have about ten other teachers that teach at the institute and we are well on our way to growing our staff and all of that great stuff. So, it just kind of blew up. People kind of got wind of it and it took off, but as a result, now, and the beautiful thing about this is and I think this is what brings our lives full circle, when your peers can come to you and say, I need help. So now, I’ve got doctors, I’ve got nurses, people who I used to stand beside in the medical field coming to me and saying, you need to teach me what you know so that my patient can be better. So now, we’ve come full circle to where the majority of people that go back to school with us, they’re doctors, they have PhDs, some of them are attorneys, these are people that are wanting to fill in the gaps for themselves and for their legacy. And that’s really what we stand for, so it’s not just a health coach training programme, we develop health and wellness leaders at a very high level in the school.
What brings you the greatest fulfilment and what project are you most proud of?
There are so many things that bring me fulfilment, because I live in a state of gratitude, Gabriella. One of the things that I would say brings me the greatest fulfilment is being a single mum, and some people might say, but why is that? Because I’m a single mum who actually homeschools and I also take care of an aging parent, so my mum is an aging parent that lives with me and my son, and one of the things that bring me greatest fulfilment is to see my son watch me and mimic that leadership. That brings me so much joy, but it also brings me peace, Gabriella, because I know he’s going to make good decisions in life, right? It brings me peace to know that he’s not going to let peer pressure talk him out of making the right decision when it comes to investing, love, his time, his talent, right? And so, watching him grow and evolve, that brings me the greatest joy. Because, some of the greatness we give to our children, but some of the greatness they come here with and aligning those two things together, it has just been amazing. And one project that I’m really proud of that we’re launching is the LEAP Programme, and LEAP stands for Legacy Alumni Programme and for a long time we were making people come through the school and just that baseline level, but I’m learning that there are a lot of people that have a lot of knowledge on the planet but they don’t have the business acumen to go and grow their practice, so what we’ve created is a programme for people to come in and get the business acumen that they need to then go and share their gift with the planet in a way that makes them dollars and that makes a lot of sense.
What words of insight and or encouragement do you have for women?
The greatest thing I can say to a person is to know who you are. Know thy self, and I don’t just mean know how long your hair is, what colour you like your nails, I mean, know who you are physically and spiritually. Every single one of us have this cosmic connection to what we’re supposed to do while we’re here on this planet and if we were to dive into it, who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to be doing, bliss would be simple, joy would be simple, we’d have a lot less challenges on the planet. It doesn’t mean we won’t run into things that allow us to sharpen ourselves, but it would definitely allow us to understand the purpose that is embedded in us, and the way to be able to easily share that with the people who need it on the planet. Someone somewhere needs every single one of us, and we have to tap into this greatness because they’re waiting. I tell my students all the time, they say Queen Angela, I have an idea about a workshop that helps women do this or that, or that helps single women do this or that, and I say, no one else is coming to the planet to do that. You have the idea because embedded in you is a way to go forward and do it. So that person has to know themselves to know that they’re here and they have everything that they need or what they need will show up. So, if I had to leave one little bit of insight, know yourself, know who you are and what you’re here to do.
How can people contact you if they would like to know more about what you do or become your clients?
Yeah, so the easiest way to connect with me is to go to the school’s website. There you’ll find everything out about me, my background, if you’re interested in health coaching, what it is, or how it’s transforming here in the US, they can go to www.discoverlegacy.info, and if they want to connect with me personally, they can go to @queenofwellness on any social media platform. I am @queenofwellness across social media.
