Menopause-Savvy Workplaces with Lauren Chiren

Lauren is an entrepreneur and expert in menopause transition. She provides evidence to the UK Parliament, sits on the BSI committee that created the landmark Standard on Menstruation, menstrual health and menopause, is a regular commentator in the media and is an award winning global motivational speaker, trainer & coach on executive women's wellbeing.

As a trusted expert, Lauren has helped thousands of executives, celebrities and athletes globally. She is qualified in psychology, mental health, nutrition, coaching, personal training and many more human performance specialities!!

In this conversation we discuss 

  • the challenges women face in the workplace during this stage of life. 

  • Lauren’s personal experience of leaving her job due to menopause symptoms 

  • the need for education and support and importance of creating menopause-savvy workplaces for individuals and businesses

  • practical changes and solutions workplaces can introduce

  • the importance of informed decision-making - Dr Vikram Talaulikar is a Dr that Lauren recommends following 

Prefer to listen? Get the podcast here: Menopause-Savvy Workplaces - a conversation with Lauren Chiren.

“I'm so grateful to Lauren for joining me in this conversation where we talk specifically about the workplace during the time of perimenopause, menopause and thinking about the challenges that we may find in working in workplaces, in how we show up at work, and some practical and emotional and mental support and solutions that we might be able to support ourselves with and think about if we are in an organisational context as leaders, as managers, as people who care to create workplaces that are menopause-savvy, as Lauren calls it.

Lauren is an expert in negotiating and navigating and advising organisations and companies on creating workplaces that are fit for purpose for women. She is an entrepreneur. She is passionate about supporting people to successfully navigate menopause. She provides evidence to the UK Parliament, sits on the BSI committee that created the landmark standard on menstruation, menstrual health and menopause. She regularly speaks, keynote speaking motivational speaking and rights for media. She is a trainer and coach on executive women's wellbeing. Some of you may have seen her out there in the world or attended some of her courses and has helped thousands of women at work, executives, celebrities and athletes globally in navigating their midlife and holding careers or businesses or showing up in workplaces.

Lauren is qualified in psychology, mental health, nutrition, coaching, personal training. At the time of recording this, she was soon to be a yoga teacher too. So she really is expert in so many different fields. We dive into misconceptions, hormonal changes, what that means in a workplace for us both internally, externally, in our bodies, in our brains.

I'm so excited to share this conversation with you and I'm hoping you're going to get so much value from it. Let's dive in.

Lauren, thank you so much for coming and having a conversation with me and whoever is listening about the menopause transition and particularly how that might look or feel in a workplace and the work that you do around that and the challenges that you see. So I'm so appreciative of your time and your expertise. Thank you so much.

I appreciate it. I love talking about the subject and the more we talk, the more we can hopefully make positive change.

Yes, agreed. And when you think about the work that you do, and maybe give us a little snapshot of who you are, where you are in the world, and what you do in your day to day, could you give us an introduction.

I'm a Scottish person living in the southwest of England in a place called Bristol. I'm a sole parent to a nearly 18 year old at the time of recording. So if I take you back 10 years ago, I left my job thinking I had early onset dementia. I'd been a senior exec in financial services, leading global transformation projects and programs, dealing with regulatory and compliance change. So lots of complex, intellectually stimulating work working with big teams and really thrived in everything that I did. But I got to the point where I was struggling to speak up in meetings because my throat was so tight with anxiety, I could barely squeak a word out without sipping hot water or holding on to the arms of a chair, watching the clock tick down in a meeting because my heart was beating out of my chest and I thought I'd fall on the floor if I let go of the chair.

Anyway, after a period of time, about 18 months, I genuinely thought I'd early onset dementia. So I left my job and you could have knocked me over with a feather if I hadn't already been sitting down when my doctor turned around and said, you've just been through the menopause. So in that minute I was like elated. I was the happiest menopause of women in the UK. And I literally turned around to my doctor and I remember sitting here, I'd been sitting there in tears and I'd been really upset. And all of a sudden I was like, my goodness, menopause, is that all this is? And I remember leaning forward in the chair and looking at them in the eyes and going I have to stop anyone else from going through this. I have to stop any other employer from losing valuable, talented individuals because this is something that's entirely avoidable.

And I say that because I've got a really deep background in anatomy and physiology, personal training, sports therapy, psychology, mental health. I was aware that intellectually, this was something we can manage, but I was clueless.

I thought if I'm clueless with my background, then how do people learn about menopause?

And I soon discovered afterwards that people just don't. And yes, we've seen a lot of change in the last 10 years, but we still got such a long way to go.

I think one of the things that has been surprising or is surprising for my one-on-one clients is when I ask them when they're in their early 40s and they're talking about things like anxiety or headaches or not sleeping at night. I'm asking about the menstrual cycles or asking them about getting their hormones checked. They're kind of surprised and taken aback because they think of menopause as that moment in time, maybe in their early 50s where their period is done, right?

We think about that, number one, as later in our lives than the beginnings of the hormonal changes. And number two, as a very physical thing, it's often centred around having a period or not having a period. What you're talking about is in my mid 40s, I'm having feelings and thoughts that feel different to me. So I'm not immediately associating that with something that's happening to me on a physical and chemical level.

The reality is for me that I became menopausal at 37 and I was utterly clueless. If we say that in the Western world, typically Caucasian individual in the Western world, typically the research will show that someone's going to become menopausal between 45 and 55. Well, that means they're perimenopausal if they become menopausal at 45, which is the normal age.

They've probably been perimenopausal since their late thirties. So we really need to start educating people and creating workspaces that are both menstruation and menopause savvy and supportive. I think the conversation has started an awful lot earlier than we think. And I believe that where we're having those conversations, people can have accommodations made for them, which allows them to continue at the same level of performance without the stress and the cortisol spikes that come with the anxiety that is ever increasing because we suddenly feel, look, behave differently because of these hormonal changes, but we don't know what's going on.

We spend two, three, four years before we can identify what it is and get the right help and support. But if we just knew what that was earlier on, we could make those changes from the get go and not have to spend two or three or four years, going around different doctors, having tests or trying to mask, which is a thing. Don't know if this is what you see in your work, but I definitely was one that masked what I was going through. I'd get my hair done, I'd get better makeup, I'd have my nails done, sharper suits. I did everything to hide what was going on. So I looked great on the outside, but on the inside I was absolutely crumbling and all of that energy could have been so much better spent.

I could have had a much better time of it if I'd just known what was going on and had someone like yourself who was aware of these cycles and changes that we go through that could ask the right questions and help us start thinking about what we can do to help ourselves.

Two things that I want to pull out of what you're saying is thinking about how the way we're feeling and thinking as part of that transition, right? These anxiety levels or the criticism or the confusion or the forgetfulness or what's happening inside our brains as part of that transition. Because often in our Western world, we tend to separate that right of cognitive intellect and body are two separate things and seeing that as part of the same complex and beautiful and intriguing system.

And the other piece of that is when I don't feel alone, when I don't feel like, this is just me getting it wrong. This is me not succeeding. And I see that as a normal, this is a change in my life that 50 % of the world's population goes through. It creates that neutrality around it of I'm not making a mistake. I'm not screwing it up in some way. I'm going through something that I can be supported in.

Absolutely. And that I can make different lifestyle choices and different ways of managing day-to-day life. So I can actually create some time for self-care, which women are notoriously bad at doing. And I can also start to nourish myself, ask for help and support instead of always being the one that gives the help and support. And I think there's an irony in that because every time I do a survey that says to people, how do you feel?

When you are helping somebody and someone asks you to help them, they're like, I feel amazing. I love helping support someone. And then I ask, so how often do you ask for help and support? How good are you receiving it? And like, no, no, no, no. I'm the one that gives, I'm the one that helps. I'm like, but you're denying people the opportunity to do what makes them feel good.

It's just that moment of reflection where people are like, but it's not something we're great at doing.

It's a time of life when we need to be asking our employers, our bosses, our partners, our family members, our friends and our doctors, what can they do? What can they do to support us? Because we spent 40, 50 years of our lives supporting everybody else. So it's time. It's time to redress that balance.

Yeah, there's two. I'm laughing as you say that, because it's a question that I often bring up in my one-on-one coaching as well. That kind of reframe of how we see help and support for ourselves or for others, not wanting to be a burden, but loving it when people come and ask us for help and we can step up and support them.

The thing that I'm thinking about or that I see over and over again is also building that skill of boundary setting or building that skill of asking when we haven't done that for 40 years, when we've almost been socialised and trained out of it in a way, being in service to other people and learning how to do that is also a process. We're not necessarily got it and can feel clunky at the beginning and seeing that as not you doing requesting wrong, or you doing setting boundaries wrong, but also seeing that as a practice and something we can get better and better at.

Yeah, I think that we are so good at just doing stuff because it's easier. Oftentimes we'll ask for help and support, or we see people not doing stuff when we want it or how we want it doing. So we just step in and actually we're denying people the opportunity to grow. We're denying people the opportunity to learn and we need to, we need to step back and create that space for other people and have patience, have patience to allow people to do things in their own way.

And to be more tolerant at a time when we can feel least tolerant, you know, the least tolerant we've ever been in our lives. So the boundary setting is also interesting because like you said, we have been conditioned and I think in the workplace specifically, we are the first generation that has worked as long and late into life and held down as many senior roles as we've held and as we're holding now. So we've tried so hard to fit in, so hard.

We've really done that to our own detriment in many ways. And actually we're born to stand out. So it's time that we take that layer of masking off and just get to the core of who we are, because we're already performing a really super high level and masking everything else. So can you imagine what our capability really is if we could just be authentically ourselves or appropriate authentic ourselves, because we don't always bring all of ourselves to any one situation.

Bring that authenticity to the work without having to hours of thinking about, putting makeup on, doing our hair, what clothes are we going to wear? I was reading an article yesterday saying that on average, you know, women spend 20 minutes a day getting ready for work just on what they're wearing and their makeup and somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour a day on their hair. And then we look at the man that's available to go and play a game of golf or play squash every lunchtime. Well, we're spending so much time doing all these other activities that our private time, our personal time, is getting quashed. Anyway, I just digress. My apologies.

I love the digression. It's one of my personal interests as well. When we think about that socialisation, the norms around what women quote unquote should look like in the professional world.

Then also the decision making that that takes. What am I going to wear? When you think about your Steve Jobs and his black turtleneck and jeans, like he was saving his precious brain power for creating the iPod.

When you think about challenges within the workplace for women in their forties and fifties, what I see so often in my one-on-one clients is it's the time where they're really stepping into career in a way that they haven't before. They're getting promotions, they're in leadership positions, they're building businesses, they are performing at higher levels to ever before. And then they're going through this transition within their body or they're facing these changes and it's making them feel questioning or confused.

What are the main challenges that you see within the workplace for women?

I think that when we think about the traditional office-based roles, I see a lot of what you just talked about in terms of people are at the peak of their career. What I've found in the work I've been doing over the last 10 years, working with employers to help them create menopause savvy, menopause supportive cultures, is that women at all levels of the business, whether they're entry -level jobs, mid-level, junior to mid-level management or senior roles, are facing the same challenges and they become more complex depending on what the role is.

You've got someone in an office-based environment versus someone who's on the frontline, a healthcare worker or a factory worker. You you've got a lot more flexibility usually as an office worker where you may not have the same kind of clock in clock out. You may have some more flexibility over the hours you're working or you might be able to work from home. There's a little bit more flexibility than if you're an ambulance driver or you're a paramedic or you're a doctor or you're working in an aerospace factory.

So there are different parameters and so the common things tend to be the temperature fluctuation, that inability to control your temperature. So it's too hot, too cold. It's layers of clothing on, layers of clothing off. And again, you've got to think about uniforms. You've got to think about the environment. Someone's access to cold water, natural light, air conditioning or boosting the temperature depending on you could be working in a refrigerated environment. People also have chills, they go through menopause, not everyone has hot flushes, some people have the opposite end of the spectrum.

So we need to think about that. We need to think about that ability to really focus and concentrate and do the detailed work when you're under pressure, because when our cortisol levels and adrenaline levels are spiking and that anxiety is creeping in, then it becomes more challenging to get your work done right first time on time.

We want to start thinking about how can we help people get out of sympathetic into parasympathetic so that they can be focused, see the bigger picture, get things done right first time round. And so we need to look at the type of pressure cookers that we set in the workplace with deadlines. What are real deadlines and what can be moved? What reporting is done that could actually be taken out of the schedule? We see often people just feeling that loss of confidence, that loss of self esteem, as their anxiety levels or low moods increases, or that inability to control their emotions. So one minute they might be ready to fly into rage, the next minute might feel on the verge of tears, for what feels like no apparent reason until we unpick it all. Just being able to be aware of what menopause is, knowing that we can talk about it freely.

We know from studies that makes women feel more like they belong. They feel less threatened by what they're experiencing. So their stress levels aren't so high and therefore their performance is better and the symptoms are alleviated more easily. So in the workplace is very much focus and concentration, self-esteem, loss of confidence, that inability to speak up and perhaps the brain fog or not being able to do detailed work quite as quickly.

But all of these things can be managed and all of these things we can provide tools to support people and skills to support individuals how to navigate this time of life, which I'm sure you're seeing in your work when you're helping people rationalise it and find solutions moving forward.

When you talk about a menopause savvy workplace, you've talked about considering what the environment is like in terms of temperature or uniforms or flexibility in work hours. And you've talked about creating environments where people can focus and maybe removing non-urgent work or being able to have conversations about menopause. Anything else that you feel like are practical, tangible things that workplaces can do that make it feel like a friendly environment to be?

You’ve also got to be mindful that when we talk about menopause, we've got to be inclusive of some of our transgender, non-binary and gender questioning colleagues as well. So having appropriate sanitary wear in toilets is, is important as well for someone who has leakage or a heavy bleed. So one of the campaigns I talk about is the dark cardi campaign where people will have dark long cardigans like navy or purple or black that are hanging up. People, if they have a problem, can grab a cardigan and wrap it around them until they can sort themselves out. Having a change of clothes, making sure that we have toilets that have got a sink basin, wash hand basin in with the toilet so that if someone's using a menstrual cup, that they don't have to go out of a cubicle into a common area to wash that out. Thinking about bringing in, you know, someone like ourselves, like women of a certain stage to do menopause awareness training, line management training, helping make sure that our HR, our colleagues and our occupational health colleagues actually know how to look at supporting somebody in an effective way and don't misdiagnose with stress and depression, which our doctors also do. And then the other thing that when we're working on strategy with a workplace with an employer, we'll look at the colleague job design, person spec, all the way through recruitment onboarding for the entire life cycle of the colleague.

We'll look at engagement surveys, we'll look at everything to do with the colleague journey. And making sure that it's both menstruation to menopause savvy and supportive. I train menopause coaches, menopause mentors, menopause champions, so that workplaces have either got access to a specialist coach at this time of life, or they can have. Many of my clients are now training menopause coaches in-house because they recognise how important it is to have the right help and support. And I think that's been one of the things that really has come out since the pandemic is that desire for more companies to be more blatant and strategic about their numbers of women in senior leadership roles.

I had an executive coach when I was going through all of this. She didn't ask the right questions. She helped me, she was an amazing coach. She's a psychologist so she was very well qualified, very experienced, great coach, but she wasn't thinking menopause.

And she wasn't asking the questions that helped me get to the bottom, the root cause. So we were putting sticking plasters over everything. And that's why having executive coaches who've got that extra skill level of understanding cycles, understanding menopause is so vitally important to the workplace. I'm on a mission to create 20,000 menopause coaches in the next 10 years so that nobody else leaves a job thinking that they can't cope at this time of life.

I love the work that you're doing because it's leading the way and it's cutting edge and I think it's so vital to make sure that we're not disadvantaged for yet another reason, because we were born having the anatomy and biology that we have.

I definitely think there's a lot that employers can do and they need to start looking at their metrics and looking at their HR systems and looking at what are they doing with that information?

Training is important, but it's only one aspect, having the right support is vital because there's no point training someone on what menopause is, if you don't then help people get proper effective support that is going to give them the confidence, give them the tools and skills to be able to navigate this time of life. That's where the magic happens. After 10 years, that's definitely where I see the difference between the employers that really get it and the ones that are just kind of like coming on board and coming around to this way of thinking. There's plenty of work out there to do.

You're talking about practical, tangible things that people are doing. Think about your sanitary way, thinking about how your bathrooms are structured. How are you supporting your people? How are you having these open conversations? How are you making sure that your people who are supporting people are thinking about this as something that's going to happen in a lifetime to enable that talent retention?

I know companies always look at bottom line, right? What am I going to get out of that? And so when you talk to that point for corporates or for big businesses, what are the benefits of having menopause champions, mentors, coaches, awareness strategies in place?

If you have a menopause awareness strategy, it will cost X amount of money. You're not talking a lot of money in someone's budget. If you look at the loss of one colleague, one colleague at any level in the business, it's going to cost somewhere between 112 and 220% of their salary to replace them, let alone the skills, knowledge and experience that walks out the door with them. So if you take 112% of someone's salary as a minimum, of maybe an even an entry level worker versus the amount of money it costs to do the training. It's a no brainer. It's a very simple business case.

So for me, that conversation is really super simple for any organisation that is committed to its wellbeing for its people, its diversity and inclusion for its people, or having a certain quota of women in senior leadership positions. So take any one of those three strategies and you’re winning.

We're not talking about 1%, 2% of an organisation here where there's a real minority that needs to be seen and heard and supported. We're talking upwards, in healthcare, education, 70 to 80%. In other industries, even at entry level roles, we can be talking 60, 70, 80% of women, even though it gets much smaller at the top layer. But we can start to even that out if we can put the right mechanisms in place and keep people longer and bring down the overhead of attracting talent and make sure that we can retain people for a lot longer.

Also interesting to think about as we think about our aging differently, right? Of being active in the workforce differently. It used to be that maybe we'd be thinking about retiring at, mid fifties. And now we're looking at being active for much longer or reaching a second stage within our career or business. so educating ourselves around transitioning into post menopause and feeling good about ourselves and healthy enough to do that is so important.

You talked about doctors, coaches, therapists, not necessarily knowing or thinking to ask or having the expertise required. And I think this is such a big challenge in the world in general. If I, as a woman want to educate myself, where do I go to? I go to the internet, I'm asking other people, or I'm confused about my symptoms and I'm not getting the help that I need.

It sounds like you're training people in terms of providing answers or being able to ask the right questions. Is that what the menopause training is about when you're talking about champions and mentors?

So there's a number of different ways that we approach this. One of the key things that I know we all find when we go online is that, your one doctor says X, another doctor says Y. So one doctor is pro-HRT or MHT and one is not. One says this small amount for a short amount of time and another one goes as much as you want for as long as you need it. So that can be really confusing and it's not my place ever to advise on the medical side, but I think I'm just using that as an example of the confusion that's out there in the media.

And then you've got, have this exercise or take that pill, use this supplement or buy that product. The world is becoming hugely overly complicated when it comes to menopause. The reality is we need to learn what's going on in our body. We need to understand what are the available treatment pathways and what we can do to support ourselves. To bring that back in, in terms of, how we move this forward, it's about making sure we provide the right information. So when we're going out to support employers, the very first thing I do is every two months I run a free menopausal basics course, and that's completely free. We've taken, we've just worked out it's just over 150,000 people through that. And it means that every two months we're updating the information, we're making sure it's current, we're presenting that as three half hour slots every two months so people can learn the basics, the facts, ages and symptoms.

The second day is all about how to successfully navigate menopause and the third day is all about menopause and work. So the first thing for all my clients is they've got access to that. So every two months they've got access to a free course that whether their people have been on the paid training or not, they've got access and they can share that with family members and that their network.

The actual training itself is about helping people just open the conversation on menopause, learn the facts, start to get comfortable, confident and competent talking about the topic. The line manager is less about learning about menopause and more about understanding how do you notice signs and symptoms in a colleague? What language do you use? How do you have that conversation? How do you intervene before they get into performance management situation? And then with the HR and occupational health colleagues, then we're looking at how do you do your risk assessments? How do you make sure that when someone has a challenge at work that you're including menopause in the possible scenarios that they're facing and you're not immediately jumping to stress, anxiety, depression, which is often what menopause is mistaken for. So these are the types of things that we're doing.

Then the champion is someone who is potentially like a mental health foreseeer. They're like an intermediary between the manager and the HR colleague. They're like a go-to safe person to go and talk to who's got enough knowledge about menopause, to know how to signpost somebody.

A mentor is someone who's been through it. They've got much deeper knowledge of menopause. They can actually use the personal experience to help someone figure out their way forward. And then the coach is someone who's got the coaching skills, the listening skills, a really deep knowledge of menopause, and they know the right questions to ask. Our coaches have got a seven week coaching framework that they can use to help people really create their own personal menopause plan so they can utterly thrive through menopause.

And so they play different roles and depending on the organisation structure and size, it will depend which of those or all of those roles is right for them and how many of them. But it's just, when people feel seen and heard, you know what it's like when you're coaching somebody, it's that magic when they've get that moment to be heard. And that in itself is just magical. When you can create that for somebody at work and they feel safe, psychologically and physically safe to do that, that can be utterly transformational in itself. So I think that there's lots of different ways that different companies can help just depending on their makeup and their culture.

One of the things that you've talked about is people having something that feels customised. I feel heard, feel validated. I feel like I can have this conversation. And then I'm looking at my own body and my own symptoms and my own needs to create a plan that moves me forward through this transition that maybe is 7 to 15 years of my life, right? Of how am I looking at supporting myself in various ways through that? And that's such a double edged sword in a way. Cause it would feel so easy if we were all saying, well, it's menopause, great. So let's all do X, Y, Z, and then we're going to feel really good. But what we're seeing is what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for the other person.

What are the commonalities, the pillars where you say, when people implement this, I really see their quality of life improve, or it feels really supportive for them. Are there any things where you would say that's the thread that pulls through?

I think you're right. There is no one size fits all. There's no one diet or exercise plan or pillar or anything that is the quick fix for anybody. And it is a seven to 15 year transition. And it's a significant transition. The same way as puberty is a significant transition. And I think, the commonality is that when we build our knowledge and understand what menopause is, that's a massive pillar because knowledge is power. And it's that uncertainty that not knowing that not having a clue about who to turn to or what to do.

So knowledge, mindset. Once we learn what it is and we embrace it, that's transformational in itself. And then we're looking at the things that in the Western world again, well, actually across most of the world, we are dehydrated or at some level or another, which hinders our performance. So you've got hydration. So you've got knowledge, mindset, hydration, nutrition, movement, health, self-care.

Morning and evening routines, you've got all of these things that when you put them together, and this is what our coaching framework's based on. When you take people through this framework in a way that is not in any way, shape or form, giving any advice, not indicating what anyone should do. In fact, we don't even use the words diet or exercise in any of the work that we do because they're so triggering for so many women. It's incredible what people will come up with for themselves.

Every single person comes up with a unique plan for themselves. it's really just, holding the mirror up to what is within your gift and what is within the gift of the people in your life. Like your manager, if you live with somebody, the people you're living with, your doctor. Having these conversations, resetting your boundaries, all of these things, I think, are fundamental to successfully navigating menopause. But there is definitely no one size fits all.

That's a big part of everything that I do in the free course, everything I do in the coaching course and the training, it's freely available information. It's just helping people implement it, which is really important and where the magic can happen.

Where the rubber hits the road, right? Because easy to talk about, nice in theory, but it's creating change in my busy everyday life that always feels so difficult. What this requires is almost a radical reframe in my health is important, my body is important, what I do for myself is important. And I know that in so much of the one-on-one work that I do with my clients, that that's often the thing that gets pushed to the side. I can push my body down or I can stretch myself or I can do a little bit more. And then it gets to the point where you can't anymore. And that same behavior just doesn't work. You can't bounce back. You're not as resilient. You can't put the same amount of things into your body in terms of glasses of wine in the evening, you're seeing different effects.

So implementing these pillars of movement or hydration or time or sleep often requires a kind of sifting through and filtering through and resetting of priorities and having discussions and saying no, that can feel so different for a lot of people who've been working and living in a certain way for often 20 years when they get to that point.

Absolutely. And I think that's the beauty of coaching, isn't it? It's giving people the space and time to talk through what their challenges are. And often, you if I am coaching, usually I normally have like a 90 minute session or a 2 hour session when I'm working with my execs. The conversation is always centred around, I've got this challenge, I've got that challenge, got this deadline. I'm feeling this way. I'm struggling to meet all of these things. I don't know if that sounds familiar, but these are the types of challenges.

That was me. I know I was there and these were the conversations I had with my coach, but because she didn't have the knowledge that we've got and that we're talking about, the wrong questions were coming out or not the wrong questions. quite, there were missing questions. So we never got to that root cause as I said earlier. So when we can have these conversations and you can actually show someone, look, you've just created an hour, 90 minutes, 2 hours to sit and have this conversation.

You've just created your first lot of self-care time and you just watch the penny drop. You're not creating a dependency with each other. You're creating that entirely independent relationship. And if you come to the end or when you come to the end of the coaching relationship or the sessions become further apart, however it naturally progresses, you get people to really realise how they can use that time going forward.

It might be for meal prep or it might be for a walk with a loved one or just some quiet meditation time. Could be whatever lights them up, brings them joy or the activity they stopped doing as a child that made them filled up with happiness. When we give people that time and space to stop and we're not judging and we're holding space and there's gaps and their brain starts to quieten and they start to realise, okay.

Then they can start to make that incremental teeny tiny habit change from session to session. We're only looking at 1% or I'm only ever looking at 1% habit change from week to week or month to month. And just by that one tiny change that they make in their day to day life, which could be as simple as one less cup of coffee, one more glass of water. And they see the difference, they experience it, they feel it.

That then becomes the new kind of go to, well, if I did that and it didn't bite into my time and it helped improve, what else could I do? And so then that increases the curiosity on their part to be able to see what else they could do. I just love that magic when it starts happening and seeing the changes that they can make. There's information and there's implementation and there's making it happen. And that's what I think the magic of coaching really is.

Also the magic of starting small, right? I think often what I see is women putting an unrealistic amount of pressure on themselves of transforming, you everything would be okay if I got up at five o 'clock and I had a green smoothie and dry brushed my body for five minutes and then, you know, went onto a yoga class and whatever it is. And I think when you were saying like having an extra glass of water, can I walk around the block for five minutes? Can I drop my shoulders and breathe in between a conference call, can I stand up and shake my body or have one dance? And those are two or three minutes. And we realise how that makes a shift in our energy. And then we feel like, this is something I can do. I think often when we get wrapped up in those Pinterest boards or ways that we should be supporting ourselves. Another way to criticise ourselves, another way that we're doing it wrong. Social media is so damaging.

There's boundary work to be done there too, for sure around technology. One of the things that I think can be really confusing out there, we've talked about how do I support myself in terms of lifestyle or maybe people around me? Do I have a coach who's versed in this or a therapist or my workplace or looking at my exercise, my movement, my nutrition, my hydration? There's also that question on hormones. Do I look at replacing my hormones or not?

Would you be comfortable sharing what you've done and why you've made those choices and whether you do them again?

I don't know really. Would I do the same thing again? Not really sure. So I'm 18 years post menopausal and I found out a few years into being post menopausal that I was post menopausal. So at the time I was premature menopause. The prevailing wisdom is that you go on to HRT until you're at least 51 so that your body has the benefit of the hormones to the average age of menopause. And then you get to decide what you do going after.

I was correctly put on HRT by my doctor at the time. It made me violently ill and I really didn't get on with eostrogen or progesterone at all. They both made me very, very sick. So I'm basically 18 years post menopausal having only ever taken HRT for a very, very short period of time because of that reason. Knowing what I know now, having seen the advances in HRT and hormone replacement therapy or menopause hormone treatment, I don't know that I would have made the same choices, I might have persevered because I've got a much greater understanding of the endocrinology. I've got a much greater understanding of what we don't know.hat has definitely opened up my eyes. So I am a massive advocate of people making sure that they learn their local country's guidelines for menopause, going with those guidelines and their questions and a symptoms list to their doctor and having a really good conversation to explore options and treatment pathways and not be fobbed off. So every individual in the same way as we said before, there's no one unique experience of menopause. There's no one right way to manage it either. But I do think that as we're seeing an upsurge in HRT, certainly in the UK and across Europe, that is that it's quite media driven. The research is increasingly demonstrating that that is a positive option going forward. But again, I'm not a medic, so I'm not here to advise in any way, shape or form. That's definitely something you have to do with your doctor.

Two things that I've been surprised at is the links in terms of bone density and cognition around the recent studies that are coming out. And that's given me some pause for thought with my family history. And as you say, every family history might be different and might lead to different kinds of questions and conversations with your medical practitioner. I love the stepping into power around what information can I gather and then go and have conversations with my healthcare practitioner. One of the things that I did is kind of put together those lists of symptoms, I can't remember, 26 or 36, and saying, have a look at that, think about what applies to you, go with that list and have a conversation with your doctor because they may not be as informed as you around this.

Continue to ask about the hormones. And I think that's something that you're saying is also it doesn't work for everybody. There might be different tweaks and different combinations that you might try, which I think is also quite challenging, of being able to stay in the process and say, well, this didn't work. Can we adjust it? Or what other options do I have? And staying with that for a couple of months before giving it up.

That's definitely a conversation to have with your doctor. They're going to be best placed if they're not, if they haven't done deep training in menopause, they will have that information available to them. In the UK we've got the NICE guidelines. These are basically like guidelines on what should happen in any given situation. What questions should you ask? Follow the framework, follow the flow chart of questioning to get to the outcome with the treatment pathway. Each country has their own. So it's important that you afford your medical practitioner the opportunity to do that.

But I definitely think because there's a dearth of training for our medical practitioners, it is important that we go in stating very clearly that we want to talk about perimenopause or menopause and taking that our own country's guidelines in with our questions, with our symptoms list so that we can support our doctors to support us to make the right decision going forward.

At a time when it can be really hard to advocate for yourself is probably the time when we most need to step up, which goes right back to the very beginning of the conversation about educating about menopause and doing that early enough in our lives so that we don't stumble into and then spend two or three years trying to figure out what's going on before we ask for help and support.

When you think about your favourite research or resources, maybe that's a book list or podcast, or you've got a link for yourself that you'd like to recommend to people of where could they start if they're wanting to find out it sounds like your trainings that you're running every two months is a great place for people to hop onto. Is there anything else that you would recommend as research or resourcing?

I don't think there's any one source of research. I could list a whole range of people that I follow because there's so much variation in terms of what people think and believe and what research they're focused on. If you focus in this area, you're forgetting about that area. So you have to have a broad range of trusted resources. And one of the people that I very much follow because he uses a broad range of other people's research and brings it into public is Dr. Vikram Talalikar, who's based at UCLA at University College London Hospital. He's an amazing doctor, incredibly humble, but also very, very collaborative, and really making sure that he's promoting research going forward. Bringing research into the domain, making what can be really complex reading into simple to understand language, and also making sure that healthcare practitioners are getting the training that they need as well. So because he's so broad and open and collaborative and collegiate, I think he's someone that if I was to mention one source, it would definitely be to follow him on Twitter, I don't know what other social media, LinkedIn.

It just feels very science-based, very research-backed and common sense is a word I want to use, but it's more than that. That would be my go-to.

Thank you for the recommendation. Sounds like having that variety of sources is something that you're pointing us towards. It's easy to have one book or one person that you follow, but are you informing yourself from a set of different backgrounds and perspectives, which may be different.

If we would close with your best advice for women who are starting to notice maybe some changes, maybe they're in their late 30s, early 40s, what would you recommend to them to do at that moment in time?

Get informed, definitely get informed. Start to learn about menopause and talk.

Make sure that you realise that you're one of nearly a billion women in the world who are coming up to and going through menopause. So you're definitely not alone. That 51% of the population are going to go through it. So find someone to talk to. If it's your doctor, a friend, a sister a helpline, it doesn't matter. Just find someone to talk to about what you're experiencing and be ready to receive help and support. I can throw in there, drink lots of water, easier said than done.

I see this is what I see in the corporate world is women masking and hiding and pretending it's not happening and then they suffer 10 times as much for 20 times as long when if they just opened up and talked. I know this is a closing question, but if we saw our children or people we loved suffering, we would immediately jump in and help get them support. And yet we suffer ourselves in silence for weeks and months and years.

Why do we do that to ourselves?

So let's treat ourselves with the love and the respect that we give to everyone else and ask for help and support. So talking for me is probably the most powerful thing that we can do.

Getting informed, starting a conversation and treating yourself with friendliness, with care.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Lauren.”

Connect with Lauren and follow her here:

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