Empowering Wellbeing: An Interview with Dr. Aileen Alexander on International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day! We thought this would be a great opportunity to sit down with one of our inspiring neospace members.

Dr Aileen Alexander is a coworking member at neospace, with an inspiring career journey that we wanted to highlight. Please find our interview with Aileen below.

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Tell me a bit about your business and what you do?

My business is called Nourish Health and Wellbeing, and essentially I help women with getting away from traditional restrictive diets, healing their relationship with food and building a more sustainable, healthy approach to weight loss. This looks at all different elements of their well-being, and not just calories.

We’re looking at things like sleep and stress and how they impact on food choices, and we're using behavioural change techniques to help them build healthy habits. So it's an evidence-based clinical approach to well-being. In one sentence you'd probably say sustainable well-being and weight loss for a professional woman.

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What inspired you to leave your career as a GP and start your own wellbeing business?

So a few different things, the two main ones would be my personal experience in terms of my journey with exercise and food, and binge eating, stress eating and burnout. The culture of the NHS I really struggled with, so I ended up in a really unhealthy place. And then I learned how to change that by eating different things, getting exposure to sunlight in the morning, going out for a walk, learning how to implement boundaries in the workplace and really taking care of my well-being which is not the norm in the NHS.

The other thing was that the NHS has got a big focus on medications which I believe are to soothe or numb symptoms. They don't ever treat or reverse the root cause of it, so we have so many medical conditions that are lifestyle related. Things like high cholesterol or high blood pressure or migraines or obesity, we're giving out tablets to treat these things but actually if we change our lifestyles and manage stress better, eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly we could prevent that from even happening. So, I just got really frustrated with the traditional medical model and the 10-minute appointments. I didn't feel like it served the patients it didn't serve me it didn't help the NHS because we were just clogging up the system giving out more and more and more pills. I knew there was a different way to do it.

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So would you say even though it was a scary transition it was worth it to do something you believe in?

Absolutely yeah and I did it in a safe way. So I was a locum GP for one day a week and I had my business at the same time. My business grew really quickly and I replaced my income. The biggest thing I was scared about was what my mum was going to say. I’m a first generation professional, my mum was a hairdresser my dad was a fisherman and they're like “can we still tell people that you're like a doctor?” So in my TEDxAberdeen talk there's a line that says “if my granny asks, yes I'm still a doctor.”

But my mum's very supportive, because as a person I'm so much happier. And now it's like gone full circle where people thought I was really weird for doing this thing, and now there's lots of other doctors asking how I did it. So I think in the next 10, 20, 30 years lifestyle medicine and well-being will become so much more accepted. And the pandemic has sped that up a lot, workplace cultures are definitely changing.

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What motivated you to kind of specialise in supporting professional women with their health?

I see so many professional women give so much of themselves to every other area in their life, apart from themselves. They give their best at work, they give their best to their kids, they give their best to their husband, their house is as tidy as can be. They're trying to stay on top of everything but they forget about themselves. Often this comes from low self-confidence and self-worth. And generationally as women we are conditioned to look after other people before ourselves, it's in our DNA.

I get to become that permission slip to show them how to do that while not compromising on the other areas. They can still take care of themselves with other responsibilities. I always say to people: who else benefits when you've got more energy? Who else benefits when you're more confident? Who else benefits when you've had a full night's sleep? Well your work benefits because your productivity increases and, your kids benefit because you don't shout at them for no reason if you get the idea…

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What are some common issues you see professional women encounter when they're trying to pursue well-being?

All or nothing. They're doing all the things or they're not doing anything. For example they may say I'm going to go on a diet, and then as soon as one thing doesn't go right they throw the towel in. It's really difficult to change habits because life is so demanding and so busy. So it's often not a sustainable approach but they'll often jump on the bandwagon of different fads whether it's ZOE or Weight Watchers or Slimming World. We all have this belief that we have more capacity than we actually have. I say we all because I have to check myself as well. I think there’s also misinformation from diet culture and social media. Anybody could pop up and be like a well-being coach, or a nutritionist, or a menopause coach. There's so many people in the industry that I know that are not professionally qualified or insured and don’t know what they're talking about.

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How did the transition from being a GP to having your own kind of well-being business influence your approach to healthcare?

So, one difference is you need to be like commercially aware in your language how you communicate. Then you have to sell yourself, I am now a brand whether I like or not. And with that came imposter syndrome and fear of what are people going to say. You'll also need to manage the fact that people are paying money for your service, whereas you're used to seeing people in the NHS which is seen as being ’free’ or already paid for by taxes. What I’ve found is my patients are more self-motivated. And then there's all the red tape because I am a medical doctor in this space I am still certified and insured and everything as a medical doctor. Whereas other people in the wellness space would just literally pop up and have an Instagram account.

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Have you faced any challenges in your career and how did you overcome them?

I guess the challenges in my career as a GP was that frustration of handing out these pills and seeing like 14 patients back-to-back in the morning. And I just constantly felt compromised because I never felt I was getting to the root of the problem. But in terms of my business, I would say the biggest challenge is imposter syndrome and that really came to light was when I stood on the red dot on the TEDx stage. And I just went for it because I felt so exposed. I was scared that other doctors would see what I do and start to berate me. But actually, it was the complete opposite. They celebrated me and asked me how they can do more of the same!

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How did your TEDx talk come about?

I applied and I was lucky! One in ten people got placed so it was quite oversubscribed. They called me and said "we would love you to be one of the speakers" and I'm like oh my god!

They did quite a lot of the training here for TEDx here at neospace with Bob and Derrick from AB15. Which is one of the reasons I'm now co-working here because I got to use the space. I think you need to be in the space to fully understand. I've got loads of friends that need a space and I'm like come and meet me for a coffee at neospace, come see it! I think the on-site parking as well is a really attractive option for people.

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Could you share a specific experience that taught you a valuable lesson?

Again I'm going to say the TEDx talk. Before the pandemic I used to see some people in-person, and then I went fully online before COVID. My business grew rapidly during the pandemic. People were working from home, they were stressed out, they were gaining weight, but also people were on social media a lot. And I had considered myself to be relatively good at getting leads from social media. But what I learned through TEDx is to give myself permission to share more of me and who I am. That's what you need to do when you have a personal brand. I often felt that I needed to present as really polished and professional. I’m a Doctor after all! But now I've learned that people appreciate authenticity. We shouldn't be changing ourselves to suit the environment, which we often do as women.

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Have you had any like female mentors or role models that maybe influenced your career choices?

So I find it hard to find women that were role models and mentors, which is part of why I want to do what I'm doing. A lot of my mentors were men and a lot of the networking groups I joined were male-oriented, and with that comes a different energy. The way men build a brand, market and the way men sell is very different to how women do it. So, I've had to learn to infuse that it's okay to be gentle. Another problem is there’s a lot of the women who are up there like Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey and they're American. Why are there not women from the UK? It's about taking up space.

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What would be an accomplishment that you're most proud of?

So far I think still graduating with a medical degree. I came from a rubbish school, I didn't know what private education was until freshers week. Don’t laugh!! I did not come from a family that went to university or were professionally orientated. And only a couple of my teachers thought I could do it. I remember at school I had one teacher, Mr Pollitt, that believed in me, but everyone else didn't. Just because I didn't come from a professional family I was definitely singled out, which made me more determined. Then I was like oh my god I actually did it!

So when I moved into the well-being space and I did a diploma in lifestyle medicine. I got a C in English in my Highers and didn't know at the time it was because I was dyslexic. I only found out I was dyslexic last year, that's a career challenge thing and that's why my emails are full of typos. But I got a conditional offer from university and I needed to get an A at higher and an A at advanced higher. I want to do these two Highers and these two advanced Highers. The headteacher at school took me into his office and he was like "I really don't think this is a good idea", but I proved him wrong.

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How would you say you manage work-life balance?

I would say I'm really good at that, but probably because like that's what I do. When you run your own business you've got a million things to do but I feel like when I was a GP I would start each day with a clean slate. Now I've got ideas coming out my ears. I've wanted to launch a podcast for like three years. So I’ve learned to accept that you can only do what you can do. I plan my weeks out on a on a Sunday, and I've got pretty good boundaries around finishing work. I've learned behavioural and mindset tools, and I use exercise to manage stress. You don't become more productive just sitting at a desk. It's actually profitable to take that time out to boost productivity.

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What advice would you give to young women who are thinking about leaving like a traditional career path to follow what their true passion is?

In this situation so many people would say just go for it. I don't think you should just go for it, I think it needs to be a calculated risk. Mine was a very calculated risk, I could have went back to general practice at any point in those two years. If I didn't have money I could have picked up a GP locum shift. But there are other people that left before they completed their GP qualification. I also think you need support. I hired mentors so I could learn from them. People who had set up similar successful online businesses. In essence, I hired people who had already done what I wanted to do. I didn’t guess my way through a medical degree so why would I guess my way through building a business! I think you need to be passionate, and you need to have that internal drive. It's also the mindset, so when you set up your own business you don't know when your next pay check's coming in. It takes time to get comfortable with that.

So I would say speak to other people that have done it, but also take your time to make the jump. I've seen other people leave the NHS and then have to go back, and then leave again. Some people say to me “do you regret spending 10 years training to be a GP?” I'm like no not one bit because most of those skills are transferable. I use a lot of these same skills and knowledge today because many of patients have medical conditions such as type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure that we take into consideration when supporting them. The aim is to reduce medications or get them off completely! Things still click and there's still bits of information that comes in really useful. I still use my medical brain a lot.

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Is there any other advice that you would like to offer to women?

I think the only other thing I would say to women is don't be scared. I think we have in our heads a lot of the time that the business world is male dominated, but it's only like that because we're not putting ourselves forward. So we need to put ourselves forward. I was?really shy and nervous when I was younger, and I would not recognise myself if I walked in that door. Nobody did that for me. I had to do it myself and put the work in. Push yourself, believe in yourself and hire a mentor!

A big thank you to Dr Aileen for taking the time to speak with us! You can find Aileen's website here .