Transcription of Girl Power #20
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast, recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine and broadcast on 1310 AM Portland, streaming live each week at 11:00am on wlobradio.com and available via podcast on doctorlisa.org. Thank you for joining us. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is made possible with the generous support of the following sponsors: Maine Magazine, Tom Shepard of Hersey, Gardner, Shepard & Eaton, Robin Hodgskin of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Pierce Atwood, UNE, the University of New England and Akari.
Lisa: Hello. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Welcome to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast, show number 20, airing on January 29th, 2012, first airing at 11:00am on WLOB Radio 1310 AM Portland, Maine. Also streaming on wlobradio.com and of course available via podcast on iTunes.
This week’s show is on the topic of girl power or, as one of our guests is going to show us so remarkably, women power. Actually, I guess all of our guests, right Genevieve? All our guests are going to talk about there’s power in being feminine and not just being girls.
Genevieve: Yes. I’ve always through it an interesting conversation in the girl/woman, remember when I was at Bowdoin, I used to get in big arguments. The women would all say, “It’s all about women power, women power.” We all have a girl inside of us, just like every man has a boy.
Lisa: Yes. Genevieve has already poked her head into the conversation but this is my co-host Genevieve Morgan. We call her the wellness editor because we just decided that’s her title for Maine Magazine. Certainly, she is the head of the wellness department at Maine Magazine. I’m glad to be here again with Genevieve.
Genevieve: Thanks, Lisa. Hi, everybody.
Lisa: Girl power. Whether we talk about girl power, women power, feminine power, sometimes that can get people’s backs up. Not all men, but some men don’t like it when we talk about this.
Genevieve: I think there’s a perception that there’s a lot of attention paid to that and maybe boys and men are getting left out but I think your take on it is a really interesting one. I think everyone would love to hear about this because I’ve certainly learned a lot.
Lisa: What I believe is that there’s just differences. In Chinese medicine, you have yin and yang. If anybody who knows anything about Chinese thought or Chinese symbolism has seen the yin and yang symbol. This is a circle and it has two fish looking things.
Genevieve: Black and white, right?
Lisa: Black and white but within the black, there’s a little dot of white and within the white, there is a little dot of black so there’s always yin within yang and yang within yin.
Genevieve: What is yin and yang?
Lisa: Yin and yang is one of the fundamental principles of Chinese thought, Chinese medicine and actually Taoism. If you think about yin, yin is the more calm, receptive, cool. It’s the energy of the moon and darkness. You think about yang, it’s more heat, it’s the light of day, it’s the sun, it’s an outward pushing energy generally it’s more ambulant but they both co-exist peacefully, sometimes not so peacefully but they both co-exist, that’s the important thing.
Genevieve: In everybody and in every living thing.
Lisa: In everybody and in every living thing. The reason why it’s interesting related to girl power specifically or women power or female power is that the yin is traditionally thought of as a feminine energy and yang is traditionally thought of as the male energy.
Genevieve: Right. Yielding and passive and of yang as more active and …
Lisa: Forceful.
Genevieve: Forceful, yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. It does get a little tricky because of course, women don’t like to think of themselves as passive or yielding. That’s why I like the word receptive. You think about women as a vessel of creation, if you think about an alms bowl, being the openness to receiving.
Genevieve: I like that word. Open.
Lisa: Yes, Open is good. We have yin and yang. It is important to note that every male has yang predominant mostly, testosterone of course but also underlying yin. Every female has predominant yin but also yang. Every family has an interesting mixture of yin and yang aspects and some of the children who are female, they can still have the male energy or they can have the female energy but there’s always a balance.
Genevieve: Dominant.
Lisa: Dominant, yes. That’s right. This is why we’re talking about yin power or girl power this week because even though we think of the sun of being this powerful, forceful, beating us down, heating us up energy, you can equally be forceful as being a cool, calm moonlit force of nature.
Genevieve: One actually needs each other.
Lisa: They do and you can’t have the contrast. If you only have that hot summer energy, if you’ve never had a winter, you would only ever know that hot summer yang energy.
Genevieve: I think our guest coming on, it’s interesting that we’re talking about this because some of them have had to use their yang energy to get to where they’ve been. Some have exhausted that energy and reconnect with their yin energy. Everybody’s had this challenge with finding the balance of the energies which is of course what you help people do in your practice.
Lisa: That’s right. When people come into my practice as patients, I will see where they might be deficient or excessive. People can be both deficient and excessive and different sorts of energy. It is about learning yourself and figuring out what makes you balanced. This is what each of these women are going to do.
Today on the show, we have Robin Hodgskin from Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. We have Margaret Minister O’Keefe, who is a fellow Bowdoin graduate,
Genevieve: Yes. My year.
Lisa: Go, you Bears! who works as an attorney at Pierce Atwood. We also have from Maine Magazine Minutes, Joanne Arnold who is fitness trainer, a former award-winning weight lifter and is trained to be the first chaplain of the body so she’s very interesting person. She is featured in the March issue in an article called Fit to Feast, feeding your inner athlete at Maine Magazine. Then, we also have Tara Treichel for the Coastal Studies for Girls in Freeport.
There’s a broad variety of women. They’re going to come in and talk to us about learning how to use that particular yin energy, that female energy and learning how to co-exist within in a world that has both yin and yang.
I’m also interested in hearing what you just say about the stereotype of a successful woman having to be more masculine to get ahead. Do you think that that’s necessarily true if you’re accessing … Do you always have to access that yang energy in today’s world, in business and the law firm and weightlifting. All of these women have really ventured into what would be considered more male dominated fields but they have this great success.
Lisa: I think the most successful women or actually the most successful people of any sort are those who could read a situation. If you go into a situation and you determine that it requires more of the forceful energy and you’re able to adequately apply it, then you’ll be more successful in that situation or simultaneously, or I guess conversely, if you can be In a situation and you don’t need to be that forceful. You can read that energy. You can be less forceful and you can use a different sort of energy, then you are going to be more successful.
I don’t think it’s necessarily you have to be more male in the male situation. You just have to be able to read the situation correctly.
Genevieve: Really, when we’re talking about girl power, we’re talking about the girl power that’s in all of us.
Lisa: Yes, the girl power that’s in all of us. Also, the adaptive ability that we have as females but also as males to communicate, to move back and forth within the situation we find ourselves in.
Genevieve: It sounds like it’s going to be a great show.
Lisa: It is going to be a great show. I appreciate your deep dishing with me about it this week. I do think it was very interesting when I was reading Our Daily Tread which is the book that we put together to honor my Bowdoin college classmate. Again, go you bears.
Hanley Denning who died actually this month in 2008 when she was at a fairly young age but we’ve been reading from Our Daily Tread. The quote that I came up with was an Anna Quindlen quote. “Sometimes we end up doing what we are capable of whether we like it or not,” which I think is pretty appropriate because that just means, again, you go into a situation and sometimes you end up having to change your energy based on the reading of the situation.
If you’re interested in Our Daily Tread, go to islandportpress.com. The proceeds from the purchase of the book will benefit Hanley ‘s organization Safe Passage.
I know that everybody’s going to enjoy this show. Those of you who are not yet podcast subscribers, please go to iTunes, Dr. Lisa Belilsle, and become a subscriber, go to our website doctorlisa.org for more information about our radio show, about my medical practice, about Genevieve Morgan and John McCain who are superstar Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast team. That way, we can talk to you all the time, not just on Sundays.
Lisa: That’s right. If you go to Facebook and if you like the Dr. Lisa page, then you get to have little personal comments from us.
Genevieve: We promise we’ll write back.
Lisa: Yes, we absolutely will. Thank you for joining us.
We are fortunate each week to be sponsored by the University of New England, a wellness innovator to be sure. It is appropriate that they sponsor their wellness innovation segment. This week’s wellness innovation is something that probably many of us have thought about. It comes from a piece on scientificamerican.com.
“If there are any men left who still believe that women are the weaker sex, it is long past time for them to think again. With respect to that most essential proof of robustness, the power to stay alive, women are tougher than men from birth through to an extreme old age. The average man may run a 100 meter race faster than the average women and lift heavier weights but nowadays, women outlive men by about five to six years. By age 85, there are roughly six women to every four men. At age 100, the ratio is more than two to one and by age 122, the current world record for human longevity, the score stands at 1-nill in favor of women.”
It’s an innovative thing to be a woman and yet something you don’t have much control over. Learn more about this at scientificamerican.com. Learn more about wellness innovations at the University of New England at une.edu.
Speaker 1: Support for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour comes from the University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at une.edu.
Lisa: This week on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast, our theme is girl power which actually one of our first guests is asked that we call women power because she said she’s not feeling very girlish. I know she’s a girl at heart, this girl is Robin Lynn Hodgskin who’s a senior vice president, financial advisor with the Global Wealth Management division of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Portland, Maine. Hi, Robin.
Robin: Hi, Lisa.
Lisa: Next to her, we have Margaret Minister O’Keefe who’s a partner at Pierce Atwood in Portland, Maine, formerly the in-house council at Angela Adams. Hi, Margaret.
Margaret: Hello, Lisa.
Lisa: We also have Genevieve Morgan who does not want us to forget that she’s sitting next to me so hi Genevieve.
Genevieve: Hi, Lisa.
Lisa: I can’t start without acknowledging the fact that in the most recent issue of Maine Magazine, there is a profile of Margaret and a great picture. It’s interesting to me because this is the quote.
“Life showed me again and again that people are never one thing, that identity is complicated and that those who wear suits can be as radical as they guy in leather picketing City hall. I learned that artist and arts advocates come in all shapes and that corporate entities are not always blind to the power of art.”
This probably gives you an idea as to … I don’t know, the range of your experience and your background but I also know that Robin did something very interesting and creative this last spring. Tell us a little bit about that program that you had.
Robin: We sponsored an event called Act with Passion. It was all about how women … It was a women’s event, on how women can get to a place where they feel a little stuck and that if women act with passion and follow their heart, they’re not only happier but more successful. It was fabulous event. We had Bettina Doulton speak about her decision to start a winery after being very senior executive at Fidelity.
We had other speakers along those lines. It was really great.
Lisa: It was standing room only?
Robin: It was. We couldn’t get them out of the room at the end of the night.
Lisa: That’s right. I think, Margaret, you were there at that.
Margaret: I was. It was a wonderful event. It was very inspiring.
Lisa: These two women who are sitting across from me as well as the women who sits next to me every week, these are no ordinary financial advisor/lawyer types. I just want everybody who’s listening to know, that these are some creative women. It’s not just about the power but it’s also about the creativity.
Tell me, you’re both successful. It’s fairly obvious to any who would pay any attention to your lives, what has helped you to create success in your own lives?
Margaret: Robin? I will start. I think some of the themes that your show talks about which are being your authentic self, relying on those around you, really building yourself within your community and tapping into those relationships to support you.
Genevieve: Margaret, can I ask you a question. When you were studying law, did you think you wanted to go into intellectual property law. Did you know that?
Margaret: I didn’t at all. In fact, I thought that I wanted to be an environmental lawyer. I wound up at a big international law firm in D.C. and within the first month, the partner that I was supposed to be working with on environmental matters went to another big law firm. I got stuck in the international trade department.
You never know. All the best laid plans, right? From there, it just evolved into my current practice.
Genevieve: Both of you, it’s so interesting to me. Both of you went elsewhere and did things elsewhere because, Margaret, you’re from Arizona originally and you went to Harvard for law school but you came to Maine to go to Bowdoin.
Genevieve and I of course, we went to Bowdoin. You’re Genevieve’s classmate and then Robin, you did something similarly. You went to Bates here in Maine and you went elsewhere. I think you worked in … I want to say Boston.
Robin: I worked in Boston and I spent 10 years in technology, related fields, financial services in technology fields and decided, when I was having my first child which was 25 years ago yesterday.
Lisa: Happy birthday to your first child.
Robin: Happy birthday. I’m sure he’s going to listen to this. Of course he will but I decided that I really wanted to have a little bit more control over my career and my success and so on. I, during Smith Barney as financial advisor 25 years ago and spent 10 years as a financial advisor and then came to Maine to manage the office 15 years ago.
Lisa: You did that at a time when not many women were making that choice.
Robin: That’s true and there still aren’t that many women making that choice.
Lisa: Margaret, you have a, I believe a 10 year old daughter?
Margaret: That’s right.
Lisa: You have a 10 year old daughter. Your daughter, Robin, is 18.
Robin: She’s 18.
Lisa: Uh-huh. How has this changed the way that you have chosen to approach your lives from a business or a personal standpoint. I guess I’ll ask Margaret first.
Margaret: Wow, well, that’s a broad question but a really powerful one. I think parenting changes all of us. It changes our ability to relate to others. Early in my career, right after I had my first child, I remember one of my partners telling me, “You will never try a case in the same way that you did before you had children.”
Lisa: Was this a male or a female person?
Margaret: This was a male.
Lisa: Uh-huh. Interesting.
Margaret: I think parenting experiences for men and women share a lot of course in common and I didn’t quite know what that meant until the next time that I showed up in court and had to relate to those jurors. It doesn’t matter that it is not a case involving a child. It is just a different way of relating, a different way of being able to communicate, sometimes very complex concepts in laypeople’s terms, in ways that people can relate to both emotionally and intellectually.
Genevieve: I think this is important with what you do but with both of you do as a writer and a female. Dealing with money and protecting my rights as a creative person are two of the things that make me feel the most powerless. It’s taken me now 20 years to do exactly what you both are saying we need to do which is find help, get help because when you’re a writer and you get hired or somebody buys your work, you’re just so happy that somebody’s going to pay you that you don’t think about all of the other … the ramifications and the complications. It’s just too complex. You’re just happy someone wants your work.
Margaret, maybe you can speak a little bit to that.
Margaret: Sure. First of all, you’re not alone. Second of all, this is a common phenomenon, I think more common for women to undervalue their work, to believe that they will be treated fairly and properly in the business place, to believe that keeping your head down and doing good work ultimately will lead to recognition.
Genevieve: Exactly. If I just did my job nice, they’ll like me.
Margaret: Of course, of course, they’ll like you. It will all work out but unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out. You really need to take steps to secure your rights. You need to take steps to ensure that you are fairly financially compensated. You need to get over this … There’s a women named Dr. Valarie Young, calls the impostor syndrome which is, “I’m not really good enough. They’re going to figure out at some point that I’m just playing the game,” or that, “I’m pulling one over society.”
Once you really recognize your own value, I think you can move forward and make sure that everything is lined up so you’re protected.
Lisa: Then, once you get your paycheck, you turn to somebody like Robin and figure out how to make it work for you, which is another big hurdle for many women.
Robin: That’s right. I’ve always felt that there should be more financial competence both at high school level and at the college level not just for girls but for boys as well. I have a son who’s graduating from college this year. He gets a credit card in the mail at least once a month. I think to myself, “That’s really frightening.”
Genevieve: Not just because it’s your son, just in general.
Robin: Any child who’s graduating from college, that’s a little bit too much too soon.
Lisa: Yeah. It’s interesting to me that you’re quoting Valarie …
Margaret: Young.
Lisa: Valarie Young. I read this book. I think that you got this out of your book Women Don’t Ask. Is that perhaps the case or now you didn’t but it happens to be in that book.
Okay, so that book, what’s interesting to me is there’s this book Women Don’t Ask by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. One of the times that I met with Robin because I was a woman who came to Robin and was asking Robin, “I have this new radio show. I have nothing to show you. It’s just air time but do you think that Morgan Stanley Smith Barney will come in as a sponsor?” She went through this incredible process to get me in there. At the same time, she said, “Thank you for asking and you need to read this book about women not asking.”
Then, I had to go ask you, Margaret. Do you think that Pierce Atwood would be a sponsor? This is not the reason you’re on our show but it just speaks to this notion that it’s so hard to ask. Do you find that that’s one of the challenges involved in being female. You said this already.
Margaret: Absolutely but it’s also one of the strengths. I think that women in particular are available and excited to help each other out. We have a natural network there. We have natural skills to network. There’s a real wealth that we’re not tapping into. We don’t recognize often that there is an unstated quid pro quo that our perhaps male colleagues understand. When they pay a favor, they are looking for a favor back. I don’t think that women as often think about favors in those terms. We ought to start thinking about them in those terms and feel free to go and request help in return.
Genevieve: Robin, maybe you can speak to this. There’s also an element of shame. I was one of those people who got a credit card in my mailbox at Bowdoin my senior year and moved to San Francisco with it and ended up $3,000 in debt. I’d never been talked to about credit by my family. I was ashamed to call my father and say, “Bail me out.” I think there is … That’s still occurs. Even now when I’m 45.
Robin: I think that’s huge at some … about taking personal responsibility and really understanding what it means whenever you go into debt that it means that you can’t afford to pay for something. Unless there’s an event that in your future where you know that you will be able to pay that back, then you really shouldn’t use that at all. You really should stay within your means.
I have a story about something that happened to me that changed the way I think and it is that when I was a manager, I was asked to speak at a national meeting. At that meeting, I was honored to be asked to speak. I prepared diligently, put my head down, spent hours doing research and coming up with what I was going to say, practiced, rehearsed, went to the meeting and did a good job and got some good feedback.
I was talking to one of my colleagues who was also asked to speak at the meeting who was a man. I said, “What did you do to prepare for this?” He said, “Well, I got on the phone. I called 12 of my friends, colleagues and I got their best ideas and I made an outline of their best ideas and I presented it at the meeting.”
What happened there was, first of all, he had a much broader perspective for his audience. Secondly, he got buy in from 12 people in the audience who were then out speaking his praise. Thirdly, he built his network. He had these people who were invested in his presentation and then his success and were a part of a club, if you will, an ever-expanding club.
That’s not quite Women Don’t Ask but it’s also about just raising your head and realizing that you don’t have to keep your head down and do it all yourself, that just go out and talk to other people. You actually end up with a better result as well.
Speaker 1: We’ll return after our feature after acknowledging the following generous sponsors. Akari, an urban sanctuary of beauty, wellness and style, located on Middle Street in Portland, Maine’s Old Port. Follow them on Facebook or go to akaribeauty.com to learn more about their new boutique and MediSpa and by Robin Hodgskin, senior vice president and financial advisor at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Portland, Maine. For all your investment needs, call Robin Hodgskin at 207-771-0888. Investments and services are offered through Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, member SIPC.
Lisa: One thing I wanted to make sure we talked about is the fact that this is a girl power / women power show but we all here in this room have sons. Is what we’re talking about translatable to the males in our life?
Margaret: Emphatic yes. We have an obligation to educate our sons about the value of a different perspective, the value of a women’s perspective. We have an obligation to roll model for our sons that women can be powerful. Women can be successful, women can speak with authority.
I would encourage everyone out there to make sure if you’re not valuing yourself and your career, at least value yourself in relation to your family because that is making sure that the next generation takes on this mantle that we’re talking about.
Robin: I would say emphatically yes, to paraphrase. I have two sons and they are 25 and 21. The world will never change unless the men change. It isn’t just a woman issue. I often say that one of the problems with corporations that aren’t making these giant leaps is that they keep trying to change the women instead of understanding that they just have to understand that Women Mean Business which is another great book. I can’t remember the author so I apologize but it’s about the fact that if women are at the top of organizations and particularly if they’re at a significant numbers, that if there’s just one women on the board, she’s completely ignored but if they’re … In organizations that have significant numbers, it’s just a really powerful marketing strategy. It’s a powerful financial strategy. It’s a powerful strategy in every way to have more women at the top of organizations.
Lisa: I’d like to know individually from you two what you would go back and tell your late teen early 20s selves if you could. If you could travel in a time machine back then, what would you say to those upcoming girls as they face their future?
Margaret: Be bold and courageous.
Talking a little bit about again, about this imposter syndrome, recognizing that you have something to say and you need to learn how to package it in a way that it is going to be heard and understood by people of all different backgrounds and gender, since that’s what we’re talking about here.
Part of it is learning to speak with conviction. Part of it is learning to value yourself. I think you hear this story a lot that women in their 40s finally become more comfortable in their own skin. I wish I had been more comfortable in my own skin back in my 20s.
Robin: My first advice would be, don’t apologize. Women tend to apologize for their work, apologize that things aren’t quite right, et cetera. For example, they may turn in a paper or work product and say, “You know, I’m really sorry I didn’t quite get this the way I wanted it,” and so on, so they immediately put people in a place where they’re evaluating their work in a much lower level. That’s about valuing yourself but think very clearly is a mantra, don’t apologize for your work.
The second is the authentic self. Find a place where you can be your authentic self. If you’re in a job where you can’t be, then change your job but don’t be afraid to be. Don’t be afraid to let people know who you are and to bring forth all of your best qualities in your authentic skin.
Then, my third advice would be to really consider making changes. One of the things that women tend to be more loyal instead of making changes in their jobs and careers. Often that doesn’t serve you as a young women. You go into a new job, you make a bunch of mistakes. Then, if you move onto a new job, they don’t know about those mistakes. They just know you as the person who’s learned from those mistakes.
Often, having a new job and being able to take it forward that your new self is really powerful. If you look around, women don’t do this often as men.
Genevieve: We beat ourselves up for making mistakes which is a natural part of the learning process, a natural part of becoming more of an expert is taking those risks and learning from the risks that you perhaps should not have taken.
Lisa: This has been a fascinating conversation, talking with Margaret Minister O’Keefe and Robin Lynn Hodgskin and Genevieve Morgan, all the estrogen in the room where you all have a lot of power. Of course, I already knew this before or I wouldn’t have had you in there today.
Thank you so much for coming in. I hope that people that are listening are empowered to go out and do great things in their lives.
Robin: Thank you, Lisa.
Margaret: Thanks so much to both of you.
Genevieve: It’s great.
Lisa: This week’s Bountiful-Blog post found on bountiful-blog.com speaks to something that many of us are thinking of or feeling for longingly. The post is from August 31st, 2011. It is called Summer Girl.
“I am at heart a summer girl. Summer is, according to traditional Chinese medicine, the season of the heart. It is the season of fire. It is the season of joy and laughter. I live interestingly enough in a state where the summer stint is brief. One might think that this is nonsensical. If I am such a summer girl as I claim, then would it not make more sense to live in a warmer climb? It might and someday perhaps I will but right now, I can be content with this place, Maine.
“Maine is known as vacationland for good reason. We who live here understand why. Those who visit us soon learn. Maine is a place for those who wish to reconnect to what is real. The realness that many are not privileged to live most of the time. Maine as a state of passion and intensity. We feel things to our core. When it is hot, it is sweltering hot. When cold, it is frigid, which is why I live here. I live here because I like to live. I like to feel things to my core.
“Give me not perpetual moderation. I’ll take the sweltering heat any day. I will take the brilliant sun and the offshore breezes. I will take the brisk dark Atlantic waters and we’ll take the succulent green trees, which are soon to transform into dervishes of whirling color. I will take the sharp granite rocks under my soles. I will take the coastal sunrises unobstructed.
“I will take all of these and absorb them into my being passionately. With fiery lust, I will live them with great joy, with laughter because I am a summer girl and a Maine girl both at heart.”
Read this post and others like it on bountiful-blog.com.
Speaker 1: Your life is calling. Are you listening? Our bodies are often the first indicators that something isn’t quite working. Are you having difficulty sleeping? Anxiety or chronic pain issues? Maybe you’ve had a job loss, divorce or recent empty nest. Dr. Lisa specializes in helping people through times of change and inspiring individuals to create joyful, sustainable lives. Visit doctorlisa.org for more information on her Yarmouth, Maine medical practice and schedule your office visit or phone consult today.
Lisa: This week’s theme on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is girl power. We have a guest that has recently been sharing her powers with Genevieve Morgan, the host of the Maine Magazine minutes segment. Genevieve going to go a little bit more into this wonderful guest.
Genevieve: Thanks, Lisa. Joanne Arnold is here with us today. I know she’s a beloved figure around Falmouth and Yarmouth in Portland and has trained many of our kids in the community. She is a former competitive body builder who won titles of Ms. Maine and Ms. Natural New England and was a finalist in Miss America, AAU Bodybuilding Championship.
She was and still is a very strong woman and persona in the room. Joanne may be best known for her work as a strength trainer with Ian Crocker, the Olympic gold medalist. She’s currently in her first year at the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine and will soon be the first ever ordained chaplain of the body. I’m so glad you’re here Joanne. Welcome.
Joanne: Thank you very much.
Genevieve: You and I spent a few hours talking about fitness. The word fitness has a different meaning for you than it does to many of the people out there when they think of fitness. I just wanted you to tell me a little bit about your idea of fitness.
Joanne: I think fitness includes our spirituality and that was not something that I experienced in my time out in the world as a body builder. The heart and soul and intellect of the athlete at that time was as little considered as an old dirty sock in the corner of the room. It was not part and parcel of what their body was.
I resisted that. I felt that fitness had to include the deeper aspect of the person, the more whole aspect of the person. Fitness should include or in my estimation include awareness, consciousness, your spirituality.
When I say spirituality, I would mean whatever practices, whatever you need to do to explore yourself completely. Fitness is not just the aspect of how we look or dragging a bunch of weights around for hypertrophy to make muscles. There’s so much more to the beauty of the nervous system, to the beauty of the body that doesn’t get addressed when we define fitness as strictly as something about the body.
Genevieve: Interestingly, you talk about the weights people need to pick up but more importantly, the weights they need to put down. That was something you came to after a long, hard struggle yourself, am I right?
Joanne: I have plenty of my own struggles with weights, both lifting and then putting them down and with other folks but to lift weights we all know about the value of that. I don’t think that’s a mystery but frequently, it’s the stress we need to put down in order to experience ourselves more completely.
Lisa: Joanne, I’m interested in what you have had to say about your own having a second child in needing to come into your physicality that you didn’t even have when you were younger.
I see this in my own practice with women that they will watch their body’s change as they have their children. Then, they find the need to find their bodies again so it does seem to me that we are having more women in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are training for triathlons who are training for Peaks to Portland, who are doing Try for a Cure. What do you have to say about that?
Joanne: It’s interesting that as women, regardless of an athletic background or career prior to child bearing is that we watch our body’s change remarkably during pregnancy, It’s astonishing. There’s not one women, regardless of how minimal the changes are that doesn’t note that there’s enormous transformation occurring during pregnancy.
The beauty for me can become when we’ve delivered that child and hopefully everybody’s healthy and sound that then we can continue to transform and continue to change and to do so in as loving a way as we did when we were pregnant when we were careful about what we ate and hopefully, we didn’t smoke and hopefully we didn’t drink too much. We took care of that transformation so well when we were pregnant. Now, it’s time to turn that attention back on the body of the mom. That was the critical junction for me and gave me great energy to invest.
Genevieve: Let’s get back to what you were saying about meditation and the subtle mechanisms in your body that were getting drowned out by the strength training. First of all, how did you know that that was important? Second of all, how did you come back from there?
Joanne: Good questions. I’ve been a mediator since I was 16 so I had to practice, regular practice. When you have a regular practice, it’s like collecting data. You have a familiarity with the experience and with that intense training, fatigue was the major demon, if you will, that so transformed my nervous system into something that was less strong, even though I was winning trophies for muscles. I was the least strong as a person.
How did I know that? It’s because my meditation experience fell apart. I had all this data from years of meditating. My mind wouldn’t settle at all. Not to say that meditation is a completely settled mind but there’s a process where the mind settles down during meditation. It wasn’t happening. My body was too exhausted.
Genevieve: Would you say that you’ve seen that in this group that Lisa’s talking about with insomnia, other symptoms of stress, even as they’re training for their triathlon?
Joanne: I think frequently, that’s happening. I think you have to go person by person, you can never generalize these things. You really do have to do a forensic study on each person to understand but there would be the general conversation about if your problems with sleep are increasing, big tell-tale sign. A big tell-tale sign.
Genevieve: A loss of libido. A loss …
Joanne: Loss of libido, depression, anxiety, increasing injuries, disturbances for these females, disturbances in menstrual cycles. People don’t talk about that. It’s taboo. That’s a big deal. It’s a real clear marker for females if they’re nervous system is functioning in a normal pattern for them. Again it has to be relative to them or is that changing, too? It’s a real signal.
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Genevieve: What you’re saying is really interesting and I think Lisa sees this all the time is that while people are in the pursuit of one idea of strength, they’re actually losing strength. What did you do and what can you tell our listeners they can do to round out that training?
Joanne: The big turnaround for me personally was learning from John Diard many techniques that helped physically reclaim my nervous system to a place that was not … I was not burdening it with stress during training. It was actually a method that could de-stress the body.
This was a huge turnaround from a lineage of stress and recovery modality that just beats the heck out of you and you hope you have something left at the end to show. This is a ridiculous method of training. It is still by far the biggest training out in the world. It’s a myth. It’s unfortunate myth.
You can build a body based more on the parasympathetic nervous system which is the quiet or more organized nervous system that we have. It’s the opposite of the fight or flight response. We can build a body from there.
How the heck do you do that? One of the ways you do it is in your training, you adopt nasal breathing. Very simple nasal breathing. What do I mean by that? The oxygen goes in through the nose and you breath it out through the nose and that stimulates the vagus nerve, tenth cranial nerve gets stimulated and when that cranial nerve, the vagus nerve gets stimulated, the nerve system shifts from the high anxiety or high adrenaline, high stress hormone type functioning. The flight or fight response then shifts to the parasympathetic nerve system which is orderly. The function of the organs are more orderly. The heart rate lowers a bit which does not interfere with output athletically. It’s fascinating. You can actually achieve quite a lot at much lower heart rates. You can accumulate rest while you’re training. This is an extension thing. I often-
Genevieve: That is …
Joanne: It is.
Genevieve: The whole idea.
Joanne: People look at me and they go, “Yeah, right,” but …. Here’s some data in my own experiences when I was first doing this program. You check your morning heart rate to get, again, to collect data on what this body is telling you. If you’re going to listen to the body, there are different ways to listen to it. Monitoring the heart rate in the morning was one way to do that.
I’d monitor my heart rate as I began this program. My heart rate in the morning was about 70-75, which is different for different individuals but for me, that’s what that was and I at that point then started training with nasal breathing. I subdued the heart rate. I got a lot more rest.
Three months later, my morning heart rate was between 40 and 45. I was training for a nationally-ranked competition. I was doing my work but I was doing it in such a way that was no longer stressing the body. My body was accumulating rest. My heart was functioning with the same output at a much more efficient, much more precise way.
What was the experience of that? Was that I had resources, I had energy, I was kinder to my family, I was a better mom, I had resiliency. I had a sense of humor which I had lost. When we start training in this method, we tend to get … We just hook, line and sinker go towards the workload. We had to work this. He had to working, we were already all working too much.
Genevieve: You know so much about the physiology of the body, Joanne but you’re also investing a lot of time becoming the first ever chaplain of the body. What is that and how will you practice?
Joanne: I think I came to the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine with the acronym is ChIME, I came to ChIME with the experience of really living in the world as chaplain of the body, the work with people is very intimate about their recreation of their body.
I felt that it was already happening, I was giving a language to that, giving a level of respect also that the body must be chaplained both from the community and from the self.
I have many doctors for clients and one notable doctor who does a lot of work around women and hormones. She said, “You know, we’re telling our patients all the time that the body’s a temple,” but she says this wonderful comment, she says “but we know there’s nobody in the temple.”
It’s a lovely comment. It’s clear. We disavow the power of our own bodies and what’s possible. Being chaplain of the body is being companion to the body.
Genevieve: Populating that temple.
Joanne: Yeah and inviting you to come into your own temple, not for me to hang out in your temple. I have my own temple. I can share. I can be in the temple with you. I can sit in it with you and until you come into it yourself but I think that’s the most important value of that is to hold the space for someone until they truly make the leap into the ownership of their own body. You see this with athletes all the time.
Genevieve: Then, that segues right into my next question which is, our show is called girl power or women power. We’ve asked our first two guests this same question. I’m going to ask it of you. What would you coach, how would you train the younger you, if you could go back in a time machine and look at your 20 year old self, how would you get that person into the temple faster?
Joanne: I think this is a great question. I think I would have reassured her that even because I knew about the temple and there was harshly criticized for going into athletic endeavors because of the fear of being taken away from the temple.
For instance, I was thought little of for going into athletics because I was thought of as more spiritual person and I would have reassured, per your question, I would have reassured her and said, “Hey, it is cool. You are walking directly into the temple. However you get into it, if this is the way you get into it, go that way. Be reassured, you’ll find your way.”
Genevieve: That’s terrific. Thank you, Joanne for joining us here today on girl power. You are the epitome of a powerful women, powerful girl. We appreciate you having it and you being here.
Joanne: Thank you very much.
Genevieve: I interviewed Joanne Arnold for March, 2012 issue of the Maine Magazine in a column called “Fit to Feast: Feeding your Inner Athlete.” Every month, I write a wellness column for the Maine Magazine which you can read online at the mainemag.com or pick up an issue at your local newsstand.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is brought to you by the following generous sponsors: Shepard Financial. With offices in Yarmouth, Maine, the Shepard financial team is there to help you evolve with your money. For more information on Shepard Financial’s refreshing perspective on investing, please email [email protected] for more information and by Mike LePage & Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With ReMax Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at Rheritage.com.
Lisa: In the studio for today’s giveback segment is Tara Treichel, who’s the director of education at the Coastal Studies for Girls in Freeport, rhe country’s first science and leadership semester school for 10th grade girls. You can find them through Facebook and blog links of the home page of their website which is …
Tara: www.coastalstudiesforgirls.org.
Lisa: You’re so good. You embody this whole idea of leadership. You just jumped right in there. I’ve got Gen Morgan here. She’s also about girl and leadership.
Genevieve: Hi, Terra.
Tara: Hello.
Lisa: This is a great organization. It’s exciting and it’s so unique, this fact that you bring girls into Freeport. This is near Wolf’s Neck Farm, is that right?
Tara: Correct.
Lisa: To explore things that they might not otherwise have the chance to explore. Tell me a little bit about your programming.
Tara: There are a number of semester schools around the country. Ours is the first to cater just to 10th grade girls. There are semester schools that focus on programs like arts or ethical decision-making. There are other programs that even focus on science but we really wanted to cater to girls and just to the 10th grade age.
The 10th grade age is an age for girls when they can get lost. We target girls who are curious and love learning and love science. We wanted to give them that opportunity to really be themselves and not have the competition of boys and then to be able to just delve into their love for learning, for science, for a communal living experience. It’s been a tremendous success in our first couple of years.
Lisa: What are you looking for in an applicant?
Tara: It’s actually quite simple. We really seek a student who wants to be there. She sees herself at the school. She’s curious. She has a desire to learn. She loves learning. She is capable of being academically successful. Not necessarily straight A student but someone who is college-bound and who would jump at the opportunity for adventure and rigor and challenge and the opportunity to live with 15 other girls for a semester.
Genevieve: What do you offer in a semester school?
Tara: Students apply to attend a semester school. They leave their home school or their sending school in the fall or the spring and they attend our school for 16 weeks. Then, they take all of their classes through us so they take English and world history. They take for math, they take geometry, advanced algebra or pre calculus. For science, we have a coastal marines ecosystems class. In foreign languages, we offer Spanish and French. Then, we also offer our leadership adventure class.
Students return to their sending schools and they pick up just where they left off. They can attend from anywhere in the country.
Lisa: Where can girls or their parents find out more about your capital campaign or your organization, how to apply? What’s the best way?
Tara: The best source of information is definitely the website which as I said earlier was www.coastalstudiesforgirls.org. There you can find information about how to apply. I want to also mention that we starting this summer, we have summer opportunities as well, not only for girls but also for women and educators. We also are seeking ways that people can help which what might include supporting a student, we have a lot of students, especially from Maine who aren’t able to afford a program like ours without a little bit of financial assistance.
In addition, ways to support the capital campaign for the barn would be extremely helpful. Also, if anybody has connections to a particular student or school that might like to learn about coastal studies for girls or an organization, a women’s organization and other educational organization that would like more information.
Lisa: Thank you very much. It’s been great. This is a perfect fit with our girl power show. We know you’re doing great work. You’ve been in it for two years and we hope you have many more.
Tara: Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here and really excited to spread the word. Thanks for your support.
Lisa: Today’s Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast co-hosted by Genevieve Morgan worked with the theme of girl power. Girl power, women power, female power. Really, what we were talking about was this yin power that was discussed widely in traditional Chinese medicine. This receptive energy, this power of the moon in contrast to the power of the sun which I spoke about in my Summer Girl reading from Bountiful-Blog.
Ultimately, as we talked about in deep dish, power is really about having the capacity to change and work with your talents. We at the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast are indeed all about power and energy and giving you the power and energy to be inspired to live your life in a more bountiful way.
Thank you for being a part of our world. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Tom Shepard at Shepard Financial. Mike LePage & Beth Franklin with ReMax Heritage. Robin Hodgskin at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Doctor John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. Pierce Atwood, UNE, the University of New England and Akari.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the office of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Doctor Lisa Belisle. Original content produced by Chris Cast and Genevieve Morgan. Our assistant producer is Jane Pate. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain.
For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Tune in every Sunday at 11:00am for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast on WLOB Portland, Maine, 1310 AM or streaming, wlobradio.com. Podcasts are available at doctorlisa.org.