In this episode, Nathan is joined by Adelle Martin, founder and creator of the Menopause Resilience Club – a private group where women can come together to build strong business and strong bodies through their hormonal change.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- I’ve always been sporty, but when I got to 15 my Dad told me I had to get a proper job – things like Britain’s Got Talent didn’t exist at the time, so I couldn’t make money out of dancing and gymnastics. A proper job at the time meant a job for life in a bank, which I absolutely loved and enjoyed. But, my colleagues bought me the book ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’ because I was a bit direct and rude. But that got me into people, psychology and leadership and everything else around that, so I took evening classes and became resilient and built my career on that.
- During the financial crash in 2008 work suddenly got really busy, but you also didn’t tell people you worked for a bank – if was like being an estate agent! At the same time my daughter had grown up and was of an age and my parents were ageing and I was the one in the family were people asked me for time here and there to help with things. All of a sudden it all added up and I felt really tired and fatigued. After a while it got really difficult, flying between Edinburgh and London for work and we didn’t have the time to check in on each other to make sure we were OK. I remember small things happening, like a speech impediment as a child, that I’d got rid of, started to come back and my performance at work started to be affected. Eventually I collapsed and was taken to hospital and was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, which I know I didn’t have. I made them do blood tests and the results cam back saying my hormones were so low I’d suffered a very quick menopause. I had to take extended leave to understand it and how best to fight it. I went back into HR so I could change the way people talk about menopause. I couldn’t let another woman go through what I did.
- Management don’t always understand it, they often see a top level woman on a career path suddenly drop in performance. It’s easy to say it’s this, this and this. I ask: how old are they? What are the clues? I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but the performance and confidence change due to hormones, we lose it for a moment. Rather than say “she’s up and down with performance issue” we got people to look for the clues and create a conversation around it.
- I’m an action-orientated person. We can talk all we like about the issues but when are we going to move to solutions? As hard as it is, it is a process a woman goes through. When I was pregnant people would tell me what happened to them in their pregnancies and now we’ve got the same with menopause, although we’re all different and our lifestyles are different. I can explain what happens with your hormones, but how you react to that is different. You won’t have your mother’s menopause if you don’t want to.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I had to Google menopause. I can do this the easy way or the hard way, if you ignore the menopause, you’re going to get in a lot more trouble than if you face into it.’
‘Women leave work or reduce their hours due to menopause, not just to set up their own business for the flexibility. We set up menopause cafes and line-manager training around talking about menopause with women.’
‘Not only do we have female advocates from all levels of the business who talk about their challenges, we also have men who talk about their experiences and perspectives with their wives or co-workers. The ripple-effect of that makes a huge, huge difference.’
‘If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Adelle Martin is an accredited Menopause Strength Coach & Bodybuilder as well as Founder of The Menopause Resilience System. She started her...
