Unlocking Business Success Through Menopause:Embracing Your Second Spring with Lesley Waldron

In this episode, Rachel is joined by certified women's health coach Lesley Waldron to dive into the world of perimenopause, its impact on women, and how it intersects with their entrepreneurial journey. 

Lesley shares her personal journey of burnout and rediscovery, shedding light on how understanding your hormonal cycles can be a game-changer for your business.

Discover the power of embracing your "second spring" and using menstrual cycle awareness to optimize your business strategies.

Chapter Markers:

• Introduction (00:00)
• Meet Lesley Waldron (01:20)
• Lesley's Entrepreneurial Journey (03:45)
• Understanding Perimenopause (07:28)
• The Impact on Business (13:15)
• Harnessing Your Cycle for Success (19:12)
• A Positive Perspective on Menopause (24:45)
• The Importance of Self-Awareness (27:50)
• Where to Find Lesley (31:15)
• Closing Thoughts (32:30)

Connect with my guest:
Website: https://www.lesleywaldron.co.uk/
Blog Posts: https://www.lesleywaldron.co.uk/blog
Mini Guide to Peri-Menopause: https://www.subscribepage.com/perimenopause
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lesleywaldronhealthcoach/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-waldron/

Let's Connect:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheBusinessGrower
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thebusinessgrower/
Website: https://rachelsmith-thebusinessgrower.com

Coming Up Next Week:
Your 5 Day Money Mindset Reset - Transform Your Money Mindset & Become Wildly Successful - 5 insightful episodes and resources to help you scale your business.

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Thank you, love Rachel x

Let's Get Connected-

Connect with me further:

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If you have any questions about scaling your business to consistent months of high income, drop me a message here: http://help@rachelsmith-thebusinessgrower.com

Love Rachel x

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and a really warm welcome to this another amazing episode where I've got one of my incredible women who are part of my world, who's going to come and share how your hormones have a massive impact on how you show up in your business at different times in the month and the impact that that has on your success. So it may make you look at your business and your time scales in a different light, but we're going to get into that. So, if you haven't met me before, I'm Rachel Smith, the business grower, and you are listening to the Money, mindset and Miracles podcast. I am a business coach for female entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their business to consistent months of five care and beyond, and I am delighted to be joined today by the lovely Leslie Waldron, who is a certified women's health coach. And Leslie's been part of my world for a long time and I think this is going to be such an impactful podcast episode for you to listen to.

Speaker 1: 1:04

Now let me just give you a little bit of background about who Leslie is and why she's here to talk to us, and then we're going to get straight into actually having a conversation with Leslie, which is going to be great. So Leslie's work has actually impacted thousands of women since 2014, when she began focusing on supporting women through the peri menopause. She has a passion for the great outdoors and for helping women find their zest for life in midlife and beyond. Leslie is based in the south west look a girl and has a successful private coaching practice and also runs an outdoor fitness business a wild country women. Welcome Leslie to today's episode and I'd love for us just to kick off with that whole. You didn't set out in life to become a health coach specialising in peri menopause, but I would love for you to just share a little bit about how you started your entrepreneurial journey.

Speaker 2: 2:06

Okay, thank you so much, rachel, and thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it. So back in 2014, I actually I hit burnout. I was working in a national public policy organisation and I also had a two-year-old son who didn't sleep, and the impact of trying to do what was actually an impossible job trying to get national organisations to agree on something they were never going to agree on and not having any sleep was actually starting to make me feel quite ill. And so at the time, I was 38 and I was having conversations with a friend of mine about it and she was like about some of the, some of the things I was feeling or that thing that were kind of a burnout. I was having eczema, my cycle was all over the place, my mood's all over the place, I had insomnia, even though I had was so sleep deprived, and a friend of mine suggested it was perimenopause, and I was horrified. I'd literally never heard the word before. Menopause was something that happened to people right to women, obviously but like, but it felt like it was a million miles away from me. So I was like perimenopause, what are you talking about? Anyway, I put that on my back pocket. She's still a friend now, but I wasn't entirely sure how friendly that was. Anyway, she was a big friend.

Speaker 2: 3:31

And then I actually started a train, initially as a personal trainer, because a thing that supported me through that burnout and through getting back to feeling good again was exercise, was the outdoors, was meditation, and the avenue I thought that I could help other people do that through was personal training. So I qualified as a personal trainer. Most of my clients were in their late 30s, 40s and 50s and all of them were in different stages of the perimenopause journey, and so it didn't take long for me to then take a course, because I'm a lifelong learner in what's called the third age woman. So it was looking at how you can improve lifestyle, how different parts of your lifestyle habits and exercise, nutrition and such sleep and such like to improve your experience of perimenopause and also your long-term health. Through that I got to understand so much more about the perimenopause and also about our menstrual cycle and our hormones estrogen and progesterone and I was like, whoa, why doesn't anybody, why was I never told about this before?

Speaker 2: 4:44

And so I went off on a little tangent around and exploring menstrual cycle awareness and menstrual cycle tracking and found it was an incredibly useful tool, both for me but also for my clients. I knew when I could push them slightly harder and less hard, but I also wanted to do so. Many of the women that I was working with was really stressed, was struggling with their sleep, and in the course of doing the qualification, I'd come across this incredible woman called Jessica Drummond who had set up the first ever organization to run a women's health coaching certification. So all of the evidence that they were using was as women specific as possible and, as many people know, there's not actually nowhere near enough evidence around women as there are men, and so that course and information continues to evolve. And because I wanted to be able to serve my clients better and deeper and I needed to also, I kept getting injured, so teaching lots of fitness classes and running lots of personal training sessions was becoming taking its own toll on my own wellbeing, so I transitioned away from doing quite as much in terms of fitness and into one-to-one house coaching, and it all means that I can coach people all over the country and indeed all over the world.

Speaker 2: 6:02

I've had clients from the States and different parts of Europe, which has been brilliant and I love it.

Speaker 1: 6:10

And it's really interesting that you were first. Your attention to the Perimenopods was first like you were 38.

Speaker 1: 6:18

And for me I was 43 and it was my younger sister who started to have like terrible fatigue in her life and she started looking at all sorts of different causes for it and she realized that she was in Perimenopods. And she said to me I think you might have this as well and I honestly and I appreciate that that was 10 to seven years ago and there's so much more information and awareness about the Perimenopods and the menopods. Now I knew about the menopods, but I didn't understand about what the Perimenopods was or how impactful that was. And back in when I was 43, when this was happening, I was like, no, don't be ridiculous, cause I'm very stoic and very like, oh, I'm just going to get on with this. And then my business results started to take a dip and I was actually blaming other things that were like in my business, but not me.

Speaker 1: 7:19

There were other people within the business and I could see that my profits were taking this downward dip and it took me a long time to appreciate that actually, it was how I was thinking, feeling in and therefore behaving in my business that was having this like terrible impact on my business, on my clients and whoever was in my business supporting me at the time. So this is why what you're sharing, the work that you do, is so important, leslie, and I would really I can't wait for you to you know share the knowledge that I've been able to gain over these years From working with women like yourself and with other experts in this field, to really understand that, what this link is between our hormones and the success that we're looking to achieve in our businesses.

Speaker 2: 8:10

Yeah, so it's that. So what's so the perimenopause just to explain briefly, is this phase before around menopause? Peri kind of means around Menopause is actually kind of Officially one day. It's the day that you stop that you. You are 12 months from your last menstrual bleed, so you've had 12 months with no period. That's, that's menopause and and generally that means then there are no more after that you are postmenopausal. But they're really interesting bit.

Speaker 2: 8:45

The bit that we associate with menopause a little bit more the hot flashes and the aches and the Insomnia in the mood swings is actually in our perimenopause and it can start as early as our late 30s, mid to late 30s and some people actually have a much earlier onset. It's called premature ovarian Interficiency. Basically, every month our ovaries produce estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and as we go through our 30s and 40s and beyond we start to have cycles where we don't necessarily ovulate, or we ovulate but Ovulation isn't necessarily successful. So we don't necessarily produce the same levels of estrogen and progesterone. And because those hormones have a Impact on our entire body, on all, almost all of the cells in our body will have a student or progesterone receptors.

Speaker 2: 9:35

Then there's a knock on impact. That but the first one and that's probably what was affecting you in your business and might affect others is Is often that the declining progesterone for many people affects their mood. So you might find that you are look, you have a low mood or higher anxiety, that you lose some of your confidence, that you are Second guessing yourself, or that your brain feels really foggy and it's harder to make decisions, and and and that's one of the things that when we're running our own businesses, and particularly if we're kind of a one woman or two woman band, then Then actually there's a knock on impact that almost instantly, because we need to be able to show up with confidence to our clients, we need to be able to deliver whatever is we're delivering. If our brain feels slow and our bodies feel slow, then it can have a real negative impact on us. But it doesn't have to, and I think this is One of the messages that I'm most keen to talk about is that there's a lot more coverage in the menopause that on the medicals nowadays.

Speaker 2: 10:40

When I ran my first course that was aimed at the perimenopause, I called it the feel good forties. I didn't mention menopause in the marketing or perimenopause, and because it was still very much a taboo word and that has changed an awful lot in the last few years, which is great, but there's a bit of an emphasis on the negative side effects. Like you would read it. If you just watched documentaries or read certain blogs, you would just start to dread it.

Speaker 1: 11:10

You should just like get in your bed, pull the doofo over your head and like back in ten years time when it's all over, yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:17

But what I have found the most useful, both in running my business but also in managing my family and other aspects, is this idea. That is, the idea that this is a really important phase in your life when you get to know yourself again and you pay attention, because often those those symptoms of anxiety or higher we have higher responsiveness to stress or amplified PMS Then. But they're also a really important signal to us that we need to look after ourselves better, that we need to re-prioritise our self-care, and our self-care has a massive impact on our business. In this stage in our life. What I generally suggest to all of us business owners and anyone I come across is that you start Tracking things like paying attention to things like your mood and your anxiety, noticing if they have a cyclical nature, noticing if there are times in that cycle then when you don't want to go out, where you, where you don't give, you can't give a hundred percent in your you're giving a presentation because or running a workshop because you just don't have it in you. And by tracking and paying attention you can start to build mitigations into your business practices and you can also start to plan things a little bit differently. Now I'm 47 and my cycle is starting to change slightly so it makes it slightly harder to plan. But I can still understand when I'm best off doing the outward facing stuff and when I'm best not so, and that that often the outward facing stuff is in that middle part of our cycle around ovulation, so when, if we are ovulating, we've got higher levels of estrogen and progesterone and I find that if I'm doing workshops or presentations, that that is the best point in my cycle to plan them and not around that lower energy. So really low progesterone, really low estrogen, really low outward facing energy. But at that point in our cycle we can be really well tuned into our own intuition, we can be more creative and we can plan better. So when we think about so, if you're wanting to plan, do a plan or vision boarding or something like that. That's a fantastic time in your cycle to do that. If you need to have difficult conversations, then sometimes that's not the best part of your cycle because you might be slightly more frank than you are in other parts. But actually at the same time, if you need to get somebody to talk out of your life, maybe use that period, use that particular phase. But I think that self awareness can be massively helpful when we're running a business.

Speaker 2: 13:59

Energy. You said your sister was struggling with fatigue. That can be a huge, huge thing, but actually making certain tweaks to your diet and sleep and rest, or perhaps even for that week or so in the month where your, where your energy is on the floor, you will actually go right. Well, I need to go to bed earlier, I need to make sure that I eat really well, I need to dial it back on the exercise that I've got planned and I need to make sure there are gaps between meetings in my diary, things like that, so that and now in yourself to go. This is what's happening to me, and it's not a bad thing. It's an opportunity for me to explore how to look after myself better, because the habits that we create in perimenopause will pay off in the long term, both for our businesses but also for our long term health, which I think is actually even more important.

Speaker 1: 14:51

It is, and I think you know what you're describing is very much about.

Speaker 1: 14:55

It's a it's quite challenging for women because we are raised, or we have been raised, in a very masculine way, in the mass of energy which is like take action, be hustly, bust through things, whereas actually this is about the feminine, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 15:12

It's about recognising that we are women and we are quite different from men and therefore those things that you're talking about about self care, self awareness and harnessing your cycle rather than fighting against it very much about moving into accepting and practicing being in that feminine energy and using it in a positive way, which, you know, I've got a teenage girl and the first time we talked about like her cycle, like I remember that conversation that I had with my mum and it was really negative and my conversation with my daughter was really positive.

Speaker 1: 15:53

It was like this is how you use your cycle. I mean, she thought I was some sort of mad witch and I'm sure this conversation I'm going to have to have with her many times, but I just, you know, I love the fact that you know our daughters and the next generation are going to understand much more about the feminine power than we did, like we've had to get to our thirties and our forties to understand that there is such power in that cycle, even in a changing cycle that you can use that in your business, and you've just described it in the most elegant way, leslie, thank you.

Speaker 2: 16:29

Yeah, it's interesting. My 13 year old daughter what is not interested in me talking about this to her either. So she's got a little stack of books and she knows where I am. But I think, understanding that there's an opportunity, as you say, for it to be a positive and not a negative thing and not to only focus on the bleed as the part of the cycle that we pay attention to.

Speaker 2: 16:54

I remember coming across the work of Alexandra Pope and Shani Hugo Wurlitzer at Red School and how there was something in there that was about. They've got a book called Wild Power, which is about the menstrual cycle, and another one that's also about menopause, and I remember something about that about how you bleed is how you end up experiencing will impact the whole of the rest of your cycle, and so allowing rest makes a massive difference, and in peremenopause I feel that that becomes really much more important. And in our businesses too, it's a bit like if you're watching, a tree does not bloom all of the time. Even an evergreen tree does not produce blossoms or fruit all of the time.

Speaker 2: 17:39

It knows that there's a time to blossom and a time to retract, and we can learn that lessons and we're much more connected to that as women, because we have a cycle, and one of the things I'd love to leave on is actually there are two things. The first one is that the Chinese call menopause our second spring, and I think that's a really important thing. To bear in mind is a great book by Kate Codrington called Second Spring. That there is a positive in that next part of life Post menopause is when we actually we give less to others and we, but we can actually create an incredible impact on the world because we're no longer caring individually for so many people, but we can really step into our power and really create negative things. It's not the end of our lives, it's the beginning of our next opportunity and I think that's really positive.

Speaker 1: 18:37

I think that's lovely, leslie.

Speaker 2: 18:39

I think it's. I love that phrase and I think it's worth holding on to. And the second thing is is that is to actually? Is that paying attention? If that's one thing that you can do, it gives you an armory of evidence. If you want to go and talk to your doctor and just as you did when you were like, what's going on with my, with my business, why my profits not where I want them to be, it's an opportunity to also explore what's going on in your business and going well actually, is my energy and focus off? Am I not allowing enough rest? Am I pushing through when actually I need to just take a step back?

Speaker 1: 19:12

Yeah, I love that and there are so many key lessons there and for anybody who's listening to this, I'm sure you've had some like both moments from it. I really encourage you to go back and listen to that kind of call conversation where Leslie is talking about how your hormones impact your business, because I think the more that you can hear that and and adapt to that, the more successful you will have in the much more graceful way, which is what we're all about. So, leslie, thank you so much. I know that we could talk endlessly about this because it's such a massive topic, but for the people listening to this podcast, where can people find out more about you, know what you do, how you can help and support them? What's the best place for people to do that?

Speaker 2: 20:03

So, um. So my website, leslie Wardron dot. Co dot UK, has a blog with lots of little insights. The idea of those blogs is that it can be read in under five minutes and implemented in less than half an hour, so that there's things that you can do daily to support either your understanding of yourself or lifestyle habits. You can also find me on Instagram under Leslie Wardron, health coach, or on LinkedIn. I'm there quite a lot and you can just search me, leslie Wardron and when I have a business page on there too. And what I have got for you guys as well, which I think you'll put in the show notes, is um, I've got a well being tracker resource, so it's a way of kickstarting that menstrual cycle tracking kickstarting. You can track whatever you want. When you download it, you'll get a short series of emails that kind of act as a little mini course, and a reminder to use the resource, and it can be helpful to do that for at least three months and start to see patterns and look at your business alongside it as well.

Speaker 1: 21:07

And I love that, leslie, but, yes, we will put all of the details about Leslie where you can find out on social media, but also that really essential resource. So thank you, leslie, so much for being here and sharing that and, really, you know, helping women to understand just what might be happening in their business right now, because I wish I'd had this knowledge in 2019. It would have helped me massively. But, thank you so much, really appreciate you being here.

Speaker 1: 21:36

Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here and just before you head off, I've got a super important announcement, which is next week. I am going to share with you a five day money mindset reset. This is your opportunity to transform how you think about money so that more money flows to you. That's going to be available via this podcast. Next week there's going to be all five episodes some really cool resources to support you with. That it's going to really help you to transform your business results. I can't wait to share this with you. Have a great week and I look forward to connecting with you again soon. Bye for now.