Episode 58: Dr. Leonaura Rhodes - The Beauty of Positive Psychology

0:07 Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to the human Beauty movement podcast. I'm your host Jennifer Norman. Throughout my life, I've been a lover and a seeker of all things beauty from art and dance to cosmetics, and fashion to music and nature. But through my own personal Journey. I've come to discover what I believe is the most beautiful thing. In the universe, the beauty of the human soul, on this podcast, I sit down with beautiful humans from all corners. Of the globe and all walks of life to learn how they are living their own unique, Soul Beauties out loud. You'll hear from game changers. Rebels with great causes stages odds, feeders and Valiant Warriors who fall down seven times and get up eight. This is the podcast where abundant energy flows and supreme wisdom is bestowed.

0:59 Get ready to enjoy the inspiration. Hello, beautiful humans. I'm Jennifer Norman founder of the human Beauty movement. Your host. So as we know, it is a fact. We all want to be healthier and happier, but sometimes we just don't know. The best ways to do it, especially when we're trying to balance work family and all the other rousing aspects of Our Lives. My next guest knows a thing or two about Preparing People to thrive meet dr. Leah Nora roads, Lea Nora is a physician turned executive coach and corporate trainer. She's passionate about health and guides people on their Journeys to be coming. I'm their best selves. She's also part of the human Beauty movement where she provides truly profound Wellness instruction in corporate and Community paths.

1:46 Welcome Lea, Nora. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Jennifer, I'm so delighted to host you here. So now you've got to tell us for many years. You were a practicing physician. You received your medical degree from the University of Manchester and a master's in public health. From the University of London, can you tell us about your early work? Yeah. So when I was about, 12 years old, I did a school project on health inequalities basically, and I discovered that many people in the world didn't have the same access to healthcare and, you know, didn't have access to good food. It was a project about women in Africa, being convinced to buy bottle milk for their babies. When they couldn't afford it, and they didn't have access to clean water.

2:31 And, and I, it just really got me kind of thinking about, you know, about health and about the world. And I just Kind of decided overnight, I was going to become a doctor and so I'd always been interested in science. My uncle is a science Professor biology, professor and Medicine seemed so fascinating to me. So the years went by and I was lucky enough to get into medical school and her get through all of the training, it's different in the UK than it is in the state's. It's five years straight from being 18 and then into being a junior doctor and who? That was intense? I have to say, I found the years And I did three years in hospitals and I loved many aspects of it. It was pretty exhausting and intense and I had mental health problems.

3:15 Then I had a period of time where I was thinking about harming myself. My job was so awful and I was getting bullied and just kind of grim times I look back now and I realized I had no tools, even though I'd been through medical school and Psychiatry training. I had tools to look after my own mental health, so I left No medicine became a general practitioner, that was my dream job. And within weeks, I realized I hated it and it was kind of one of those be careful what you wish for moments, where it was what I'd always wanted to do and I started doing it. And I was like, oh my God, I can't do this for the rest of my life. It was just awful.

3:57 And so I did a year of that qualified to be a general, practitioner in the UK and then I became a public health doctor, and so that's very different field. It's about health promotion, preventing illness, helping communities become healthy, rather than just individual people. And I love being able to kind of look at. And how do we change small things to be able to dramatically impact health? And then my two kids came along and both were very sick. Both nearly died when they were infants and I had to take a prolonged career break from medicine and during that career break, I started training to be a counselor. And then a coach, and I discovered I loved coaching coaching work for me was it was about accepting where you are now and deciding where you wanted to get to and then doing it as quickly as we possibly could.

4:52 I remember when I discovered coaching I was like this is it, this is her. This is what I want really want to be doing with my life. So since then, I've been a coach for 17 years, I did go back to medicine as a developmental pediatrician for a few years and then my husband said, How about moving to America and he really, really wants to come. So I kind of, you know, I said yes. And then started researching and realized I couldn't work in the states as a physician. It's about four years, retraining, and I had little kids at the time, it was like, you know, it seemed way too difficult. So I decided to pick up with the coaching again, and I've been coaching in the States ever since for the last 15 years and started adding in corporate Wellness, probably about 10 years ago and I love it. I'm so blessed to be one of those people that has a job that I really love.

5:42 That's incredible. I think that so many people can relate to the fact that you sometimes have a dream early in life and it is a dream, you think? Oh my life will be so idyllic if I get into this and then once you get there, it's like, oh wait a minute, this was not what I expected. This was not what I thought it would be and a lot of people. Gosh, they've gone through the five years of schooling or they've got parents that are looking at them. We've just paid all of this money for Education. You can't stop this and you need to continue. And so people continue living in live, that they're not really very happy about and feel stuck, I think. And it's nice that you recognized after a period of time that, you know, mentally, you didn't have the tools, you sought those tools environment that you were in. It wasn't one that really suited you very well. So you were able to make shifts and get out. And so that is a lesson unto itself. If is like if something is not feeling, right? If something is really not working for you, it's okay to just cut loose cut ties isn't it and move on and carry forth from there.

6:47 Yeah it's funny I not funny but I nearly died of covid a couple years ago but I always knew that life was very precious, you know, and we kind of oh it's all personal responsibility to live our best life but that incident really reinforced it for me, you know, you've got to be happy. Otherwise, the life can be a bit of drudgery otherwise. So I Really believe in seeking ways to be happy and egocentric way, but I really believe that happy people can be there for other people. They have the energy to be able to help others and to be present. So, happiness is a gift to other people as well. Yeah. And I also find it interesting. As you were saying about getting into health care and working in a hospital medicine and the practice or the science of it, it's not necessarily Wellness.

7:35 There is a difference, isn't there? R. Yes. Absolutely. And it was funny, you know, I qualified as a doctor 30 years ago, I'm showing my age there and we received zero training on diet and we now know that poor diet is like one of the biggest factors in chronic disease and we'd literally had zero training. It's really quite remarkable and so, yeah, I think medicine is very, very slowly changing. I think there's a bit more Integrative Medicine. And holistic medicine coming in, for sure. But still, you know, it's the practice of making sick people, okay?

8:15 And I've done some training in positive psychology, and the idea of that is that normal psychology is helping people get from very sick to being, okay, but positive psychology. And I think positive Health as well as about taking people from being sit, to being well. And you used one of my favorite word's earlier to thriving and preventing illness. Us before it takes a hold. So I love that things have changed a lot since I qualified and I think there's so much that we can do to take personal responsibility for health. It's not guaranteed you do have a client and a good friend at the minute who are suffering from cancer. And if you looked at what they did health-wise, they were pretty near perfect. And so health is not guaranteed but you certainly stack the odds in your favor if you have healthy lifestyle habits. Absolutely.

9:06 So, there is No question that you have a passion for helping other people. I think that early on just even your 12 year old story about hearing about these women and Africa and knowing that your heart poured out for helping others to have better lives. And so that went into your early decision to go into medicine. And then more suitably. Now for you to go into coaching you've gotten so many certifications, this really has helped you to become uniquely, able to understand People's Health and particularly brain health. Can you talk a little bit about your work in brain health, my Fascination for brain, health began, when I was a developmental pediatrician, I was diagnosing and treating kids with autism ADHD, You Down syndrome, learning disabilities and it really struck me.

9:52 How incredibly fascinating it was the different ways that the human brain can work and it's this huge spectrum and so I became fascinated with that then and kind of started studying it from a professional perspective but it also It kind of went hand in hand with an obsession. I had very severe depression at one stage. And there was a book that saved my life called The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. And there was a chapter in this book about suffering being optional. And I remember reading this page in this book, and I kind of stopped, and I was like, hang on a minute. Did I miss this class and school? Did my mother forget to tell me that pain and loss. Are inevitable parts of life but suffering is optional. And I just heard that one of those aha moments. And then I sat in cried for a while because it was like, oh my goodness.

10:46 I have been allowing myself to suffer so much. So then I became obsessed with human wellness and with kind of mental wellness. And like you said, I've done certifications in it. But actually, most of my knowledge comes from obsessive reading. I've read so many books on brain health, and psychology, and neuropsychology. And I think it's fascinating and you know, we know so little about how the brain and mind work like a tiny bit of it. And I think it's really powerful to know that we are more in control of our brain and mind. Then we, then we know and that we can cause great shifts by doing fairly simple things. I think that I was given that book by two different people over the course of my life and I have two equally as life-changing, it was one of the most wonderful books and you know really talking about the value of every living thing even insects You know, according to Buddhism and whatnot. It like everything in life is precious and joy is something that you can feel.

11:43 And I almost feel that now it is, there is this interesting Collision, this wonderful colliding of mental health, emotional, health, spiritual health. And sometimes you don't know the difference in tease out that, you know, the difference of one of the other. It's like if you have a healthy mindset is that your spirit talking or is it that, you know, you just are training yourself in brain health and work. Yourself out of certain of these ills that we might be facing. Yeah, you're so right. I think it almost doesn't benefit us to think about which that is causing the health because it's all tied in and to just fix up that that we're doing something that's good for us. Yeah.

12:23 Yeah. It's all holistic for sure. Yeah. What do you think is the state of people's mental health or Wellness today as you kind of see it and are going out and doing your work? I mean I think we are Probably finishing a mental health crisis. I think we may have been facing one for many years. I remember the American Psychological Association does a stress survey every year, and I think about five years ago, it said we are facing an epidemic of depression, and anxiety at record levels. And so, I think it's been there for a while covid for a lot of people push them over the edge. I think it was very difficult for a lot of people and I think some people Liv come out of it.

13:08 Now, and are bribing because of what they learned during covid, and all the uncertainty, and the different ways of living and different ways of working. But I think it's left some people quite fragile and damaged. That's what I see going on. And I think there is a huge opportunity at the moment to help people become more mentally healthy, and I think it's on society to take responsibility for that. And I see, as you mentioned earlier, I work with businesses also, and I think the businesses that are investing in their people right now, are going to reap huge returns in the years to come. And I think the businesses that are ignoring, it are going to suffer because you people have to be well in most businesses.

13:50 Your people are, you know what makes the magic happen? Yeah, exactly. And so what are you seeing? As far as the businesses that sign up and say, yeah, we get it, we see it, we know about the great resignation, we know about by quitting and all of these things, and we are doing what we can. To avoid that, and to prevent burnout. And, you know, we're here for our people. What should we do? Like, what would be your take on, what the leading employers businesses are doing for their people? So, I think offering Wellness information. It was amazes me how, you know, often, people don't know, some pretty basic stuff. Like we touched on are bad nutrition. If the doctors don't know about nutrition. Then, how the heck, the people been to know about it. And so I think offering good T, Wellness information? Is it place to start?

14:39 Because not everybody knows some of the really basic stuff and some businesses. It's like a monthly Wellness presentation. Some will do something that goes a little bit deeper. I've had businesses that have done, like, six weeks, Stress Management, Programs, or strict, six-week mental resilience programs. And that allows you to go a lot deeper. And then some businesses are also offering coaching. I coach for a big media company and I think, you know the people who You've coaching really see the benefits from it. I think a business has to figure out what they can afford and what they want to make available to their people. But I think when they do people feel cared about and seen and heard and understood and not just seen as a number or a cog in the wheel. Absolutely, I was looking at a study recently, I think it was the World Health Organization that said, for the companies that do invest in Wellness for their employees, just like a 400 to 600 percent.

15:37 Roi benefit on what they're spending because they're having less absenteeism, they're having higher productivity, they're having a higher stick rate, the quality of their products is better and their services is better. So there's so many reasons why companies should invest in and not just look at that as a budget item, but it is something that is going to help them progressively to your point when in the long run. Yeah. And I think it's particularly important for businesses that have gone totally virtual because what I hear, From employees who are facing the lack of one-on-one. And the Deep relationships that you build, when you are able to meet people in person that has to be kind of replaced in some way, and it's hard to do just in calls assist.

16:22 You know, you just don't really build the same level of connection and I think a lot of the leaders that I work with are seeing that, you know, productivity, in some ways has gone up, but engagement is often down, especially in meetings, and I think It's a good time to get creative about how they Bridge those gaps that virtual world has created. Yeah, absolutely. Because you are entrenched in these sorts of programs, and you've been coaching for so many years. He, there are people who are living with, chronic stress, anxiety, depression fatigue. You were one of those people and you were able to rise out of it. And also had a big Health scare recently with the covid happening and also were able to see the good side.

17:05 Now, a lot of times we go through the Things and I almost liken it to being like we can have a nervous breakdown or we can have a nervous break through. And so it's up to us there to decide on how that is going to play out. Maybe that suffering is optional, but how in the world do we get away from it? How does somebody who is living in this place of just, you know, this chronic negativity, but they want to have health, they do want to have happiness, they want to have abundance, they just don't know how to get there. What would be for somebody getting from the This place of being overwhelmed to thriving to feeling powerful in our lives. Yeah. Well, the first thing I would say is, I think the, I would really urge people, if their level of suffering, especially anxiety depression.

17:50 Any other mental health symptoms is significantly high, and is therefore, more than a couple of weeks, I would really recommend that they go and see a doctor because sometimes medical problems can show up. As mental health. Problems are really simple. Anxiety is anemia. Wear your red. Blood count is low. That can often show up as fatigue and feeling depressed. So, I would urge people go and see your doctor have basic screening tests. Done to make sure there isn't anything physical going on because you can do a lot for mental health, but if you're fighting against a physical problem, it's like trying to swim upstream so that would be the first thing to say. And I think there are some people, the level where they are mentally unwell enough to need psychiatric or psychological intervention.

18:37 And I have to say with clients that come to me, who I am worried that they might have those, I will say to them, I will not work with you unless you're also seeing a psychiatrist or a psychologist and not all coaches. Do that worries me about the profession. I think we need to be very careful about that my going back to being a doctor you know. One of the caveats is Do no harm and I think there is a potential to do harm if the wrong people are caring for you. So so that's the best thing to say. So you mentioned when something bad happens. You can either Thrive or you can suffer and from the world of positive psychology. There's some very interesting research on this and a lot of the research was done in veterans who've been in war situations and what the research shows is that bow to a half of the people go through a period of suffering and stress and coping with trauma, and they have kind of a dip in mental health, but they fairly quickly recover.

19:32 So that's about half of the people and they kind of go back to where they were before. Or back to their kind of homeostatic. Line about a quarter of people will end up with PTSD where they have significant. Mental health problems that are impacting their ability to live a normal life and then quarter who Thrive goes through that period of transition because it would be unusual if you weren't affected mentally by something extremely traumatic and those quarter end up to their beginning line was here but they end up here. And so then positive psychology, they studied. What's the? Prince between the people here and the people here. And so there are seven things, I'll tell you them quickly.

20:13 One is experiencing positive emotion regularly and simply put doing things that make you happy. Things that make you laugh. Things that bring you excitement or Joy, or any of those kind of wonderful positive emotions. The next thing is to do things where you're really engaged and that can be doing something that you find fun, or exciting, or it could be mindfulness practice because When we do mindfulness practice we're engaged in our breath or focus on on something other than just all sorts. So engagements the next thing then relationships and they need to be positive ones. So, having good friends having Community, this was one of the things we're in with the veterans.

20:56 They did the most intervention, they would put them in groups, they would have them doing social things together and it had a really big impact. And I think it was one of the reasons why people struggle so much to Covid because social connection was so difficult. And zoom call is great, but it's not the same as being in person. So then the next thing is meaning and purpose finding things that are really meaningful to you things that you really care about that. You're passionate about then accomplishment, which is doing things that make you feel like you're making progress in life. One of my clients told me a quote today. I've never heard this before, stagnation is a slow death. And so we need to feel that we're a company.

21:37 Polishing things and they don't need to be like Hugh things, it can be checking off your to-do list. It can be doing something good for somebody else. So it's the smallest compliments that are really good for us. Next is brain health, so doing things that keep your brain healthy. Broadly speaking, the mind is the function of the organ of the brain. So in order to have a healthy mind, it really helps to have a healthy brain and body. It's clearly connected. But you know, the brain is a really greedy. It takes 25% of all your resources so your oxygen glucose, your blood goes to your brain, so it's greedy. So anything that bad that's going on in your body is going to really affect your brain. And then the final piece is doing things that help you become more resilient doing things that help you and that teacher program and resilience.

22:28 So doing things like looking for the silver lining in a negative situation, it can be really hard to do, especially in the immediate aftermath A mask, but in the long run, if you can learn to find the good in the bad things that happen, I did that with covid. I went through probably two months of really suffering mentally after having covid and then I became pretty determined. I've got to find the good in nurse because otherwise I'm going to be miserable. So that was kind of this body of research from positive intelligence says, to do those seven things and people who do those things regularly and if they're not feeling good, they kind of look at the seven things. And they say, what's Sing for me right now and what can I do?

23:09 Yeah. Brilliant. Those seven things are so tangible for people to really be able to make an impact on their lives. To be able to say hello. I am, I nurturing myself with positive emotions and my stretching myself in terms of, you know, making sure that I'm on the right track on all of these things. The one question that I have in terms of resiliency training because I think some people might associate that with putting up or tolerating a bad situation, it's like building up Up. And how do you know that if you're not prolonging the suffering is like, okay. I'm building my resiliency, I'm building tolerance. I, this is a toxic situation, but I must metal through it, because I'm just getting stronger. And I'm able to deal with it. Like, what would be some tips or some indicators to enable somebody to see very clearly? If there is a situation where, okay, this is something that I can build up resiliency for see the good good and overcome. It's just an eventual thing, or this is not healthy. So I think that's a really great question. And I think it begins with monitoring how are feeling regularly and pausing when we spot that we're in a negative emotional state, a lot of people don't do that. We're so busy that we kind of Zoom through life and we don't take a pause and just say, how am I feeling right now? I have my clients draw and it's a simple line that goes from minus 10 to +10 with a zero in the middle. And I tell them to keep it they like on their computer or they put it somewhere whether they'll see it. I often and they just kind of check in where am I on the scale of minus 10, being the worst

24:42 feeling I've ever felt in my whole life up to plus 10, being the best feeling I've ever felt. Most people spend most their time probably six points, either side of zero and I think you know to get good at kind of monitoring where you are. I have one client who used to come to me every session to be like, oh my God, my stress is so off the charts and she'd like talk at me for 5 minutes, telling me all of these, all things matter. So where are you on the well-being scale and should be I'm a minus one and it's like, really? You just tell me all of these things and you just a minus 1 and she suddenly go, oh my goodness. You're right. She was causing yourself a lot of suffering and dramatizing what was going on and making it feel so much worse. And when she paused, and just said, am I actually feeling it actually wasn't that bad? And so when people can start to notice, you know, when they're heading in the - and to take a pause and say, do I want to go there because you can't Choose to suffer, I've had periods where I'm like, I want to be miserable for a day but then it's a decision that you make, you know, you want to kind of do well and navel gaze for a bit and that's just fine if you're doing it consciously.

25:50 Yeah, but if you notice that you're feeling a negative way for long periods and you're not doing anything about it, then that's kind of on you or prolonging your own suffering and you should do something about it. So, there's three steps to developing resilience. Number one, noticing when you're feeling negative, thoughts and negative feelings and challenging them and saying this is not serving me. I don't want to feel this way and then you take a pause and you do some mindfulness practice and I used to do a pickle neurofeedback, which was a so that people's brain wave activities while they did different tasks. It was a really cool and when I talk people to meditate, you would start to see dramatic shifts in brain wave activity within two minutes.

26:36 The first time I saw it was like it's like magic. It's like how can that be, how can it be that quick deep diaphragmatic breathing? That kind of thing. It can change your brain activity within two minutes remarkable. And when you do that, you calm the stressed part of your brain and you activate the wise part of your brain. They're totally different regions of the brain. And we call this the sage, the wise, Sage part of your brain. And you asked the wise Sage, what is True. And what should I do? And that's how you develop resilience it isn't from. Like you mentioned it isn't from just putting up with the situation that is awful. And hoping that one day it will get better. Because that's kind of ignoring that first step of I feel really bad.

27:23 Nobody should getting really bad for long periods of time. Wow, those are some really interesting tips for people to really understand and be able to place themselves in better situations going forward and develop healthy resiliency. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, resiliency doesn't mean tolerating a negative situation, for sure. Yeah, good distinction, Little, Italy and Nora. You have also written a few books. One is called Beyond soccer mom. And then more recently wrote a book called Life by Design. Can you tell us what they're about? Yeah, so beyond soccer, mom was the book that I wanted when my kids were little and I was really unhappy with my life, you know? I loved being a mother, I had to give up my career because my kids were both sick and they needed me to Around for them. But I kind of went into a spiral of kind of losing confidence total disruption of identity.

28:15 I felt like, I didn't know who I was, and it was very difficult period. So I wrote the book that I wished I'd had, then I didn't know what to do. And as I mentioned earlier, I found that art of happiness and the Art of Happiness, was kind of the starting point, but it didn't answer the whole question of like, how do you thrive while you're raising children and still have a really good life? And I think it's really important for mothers and fathers anybody in a parenting situation to thrive while they're raising their children because it's good for the child to it's win-win. So beyond soccer mum. The idea was it helped you kind of discover who you are and then build a life that will make you happy and healthy going forward and be able to enjoy the journey of raising kids because it's difficult quick summary of raising its obstacle Was beyond soccer mum. It's a physical book.

29:09 I also wrote some books for publishing firms, and then last year, I decided a lot of my clients are not parents and I decided that I wanted to take, you know, the best bits of Beyond soccer mom and turn them into a book that was more General. So I've always loved the kind of concept of Designing, the life that you want to be living of kind of taking responsibility, taking control and designing it the way you want it. Like I said, life is short and really precious. This. Why not live the life? You want to be living as soon as possible. So that was Life by Design. It's also a course and I love it. It's a great starting point for anybody who wants to explore the world of personal development. So yeah, I'm pretty proud of both of those, I love writing. So yeah, I think Journey, I'm a big proponent of being able to sit in silence and get quiet to the point of meditation. A lot of people think that you're just sitting there doing nothing, but so much work happens. When you're doing nothing.

30:04 And when you just dig inside of yourself because you are Will to get to that place where you get to know yourself and to your point of not really understanding your identity. It really helps, you know what you're feeling and get in touch with your inner being so that you can then manifest and design your life as you wish. And you're not at the whim of other forces, more than anything, you are able to control the outcomes of the situations that you're put into, because you're not in a victim mindset. You're in a lab in a very empowered and leading my own life in the way that I wish. Wish to lead it mindset. And so I think that all of those things that you're helping to inform people of is so so beneficial and needed for people to really feel happy and to thrive.

30:48 Yeah, absolutely. And I think another thing to know about life is it's really unpredictable. And the interesting thing is even though it is unpredictable, the people who are more conscious and more deliberate about how they live their life, they tend to have a better life than people who are just like, well, I'll just they plod through. I've kind of just settling for what comes their way. So even though you might set goals and you might not achieve the perfect outcome that you wanted, you will still achieve a better outcome than if you didn't do any goal setting or any of the deep work. That's my belief on that. Yeah I was listening to some lyrics and spoken word the other day and one of the repeating affirmations was I am the vision board like I don't need to look around 22. See what I want into my life, like I create this Vision. I am the vision board which I thought was kind of astounding. Yeah.

31:43 Yeah. Would have great concept dr. Leonardo Monroe to thank you so much for joining me on Role Models today. It was a pleasure to speak with you and I'll put all of your contact information in the show notes, so people know where to find you. Wonderful. Thank you so much Jennifer. Thank you for listening to the human Beauty movement podcast. Be sure to follow rate and review us wherever You stream podcasts. The human Beauty movement is a community-based platform that cultivates, the beauty of humankind, check out our workshops, find us on social media and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at the human Beauty. Movement.com, thank you so much for being a beautiful human.