Business Innovators Radio - Changing the Conversation Around Wellness with Tanya Leake

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

I’m excited to introduce my guest, Tanya Leake!Tanya Leake, NBC-HWC, BCPA, graduate of Stanford University’s engineering program is a National Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach, Patient Advocate, and experienced wellness facilitator with a mission to change the conversation around being WELL. Her trademarked programs cultivating deep self-love (EmBODY LOVE(TM)), self-awareness and appreciation (Mirror Board(TM)), and menopause empowerment (Changing with the Change(TM)) focus on a positive, practical, mindset-first approach to empowering health and wellbeing. With a background in IT consulting and group fitness, Tanya blends science and soul, combining evidence-based strategies with humor, heart, and a whole lot of practicality. A self-published author and self-proclaimed vegetablarian®, Tanya believes that training powerfully, nourishing joyfully and recovery peacefully are the three essential components of a balanced wellness approach at every life stage. Learn more about Tanya at: https://embodywell.com and https://changingwiththechange.substack.comSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/changing-the-conversation-around-wellness-with-tanya-leake

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Business Innovators Radio. It's me, Luana Ribeira. I'm with me today. I've got Tanya Leak, the coach, who is here to tell you that everything you know about menopause is wrong. Welcome, Tanya. Thank you, Luana. It is my place. pleasure to be here. It's so good to have you and I am laughing because that was my third take at the intro. I don't know what's wrong with me today, Tanya. Tanya, to start with, tell us more about you and how you got started. Oh, I would love to. So I actually started as an IT consulting, a corporate person and discovered that that was not my passion. It was actually after a series of failed attempts at partnership.

And so I kind of took a leap of absence. And book, I highly recommend to anyone, the artist's way by Julia Cameron, did this 12-week process of just taking myself on dates and journaling and found this real passion that I had for health and well-being. with my own dabbling in the past. So I made plans to change from corporate and making companies maybe a little bit more successful to making people a lot more successful and making impact in that way. So it has been my pleasure to become a board certified health and wellness coach,

get my certification also as a patient advocate. And really, it's a reflection of my own personal wellness journey where I just want to to help people figure out what they can be empowered to do, what they have agency for, so that they can live the richest lives, their best selves, that they can. So going back to, like, when we started talking, you were saying about how people think about menopause and kind of they've got it wrong. What are these things? How are people thinking about the menopause in a way that's wrong. Well, it's interesting because when I go and present, people often ask, well, you're not a doctor. And that's the first thing. It is not a diagnosis.

When you hear someone got a diagnosis, you go, oh my goodness, what happened? It's not a diagnosis. This is a stage of life. It is as if you were to go, if someone were to say that a teenager was diagnosed with puberty, you would never say that. Because, it's a stage of life they go through. So I, one of my presentations is called Puberty, the remix, because it is really a change in who you are, your identity based on hormones. And so it is a natural stage of life. And it can be a beautiful stage of life, which is the other thing. People think that it is a time of suffering and that they have to suffer through this stage. And ultimately, again, if you have a nice long life, you will spend about a third of your life

in menopause, post menopause, as we call it. And there's no reason for you to suffer through the third of your life. I want people to know that, to believe that, and then to live that, right? A thriving, wonderful post-menopause phase. So where does that idea come from, the belief that you have to suffer through it and what do you know to be true? I think that's a very loaded societal belief question. It starts with how we think about aging overall, which is also an area that I tend to focus on, which is that aging is decline ultimately. And that's a shift.

It's a change. And that's how I think about, you know, my coaching program changing with the change is about this concept of being resilient, right? And that's something that, interestingly enough, as we age, the studies have shown that we actually have this improved ability to be resilient, right? Our brains actually remodel to support the changes so that we can see things from that eagle eye view in a broad way that allows us to also discard the unimportant details. So we're actually able to access ways of thinking that we haven't before. And that is, opens up just a number of doors. Anyway, so that's the disconnect, even from a general aging

perspective. But then when you look at women, unfortunately, we tend to get the short end of the stick generally. And so when you look at aging and how it affects us and the perception that we have of a society, as women get older versus how men get older, for women, it is seen as more of a decline. And so it's just kind of the ramped up version of it because of, of the changes and our standard of beauty being around youth or around power. And particularly as we look at our health, the unfortunate sort of pattern that exists within health care around dismissing women's, you know, what we go into, if we do go into the doctor, what we may be telling them and not really being listened to. So I think that's how this whole sort of view that, okay, we just have to

suffer through has come to fruition because that's how we've had to do it because we're not being listened to the doctors. Our partners don't understand it. So they're not, you know, necessarily able to support in ways that help lift us up and build us up. And so we've resolved to suffering through. And I'm just here to say, that's not what you got to do. So for any, like you just touched on partners there, for any partners listening to this, How can they support somebody going through the menopause? Well, my first and easiest, the most accessible thing you have, is to ask questions. Don't assume, don't state, ask questions, in particular.

I'm a coach, so open-ended questions are my jam, right? So a what or a how question. How are you feeling today? What can I do to support you? Those two questions are so powerful. Let me say, don't ask the question and not be open and, you know, receptive to the answer, right? So this has to come from a place of authenticity and heart. And so if you can ask those two questions consistently, it doesn't have to be every day, but every couple.

and really be there for your partner. It can, again, the research has shown that not only can it help with the marital or whatever your partnership is, the quality of that partnership, but also the actual experience that the woman has. So your perceptions as a partner, your way of interacting actually also affects. So if you believe that they're suffering, it has almost sort of collateral damage. So if you believe that there is a way to thrive and that you can be supportive and that you can both lift each other up, that can actually be the case. Yes.

And how strongly does what we believe impact our experience? Does that make sense? It does. There is research. So, you know, cover this many of my presentations. There's a 2021 systematic research. review. And for those of you who don't know what a systematic review is, it's a review of all the sort of literature that's out there. Excuse me. It was actually in 2010. So in 2010. So this long ago,

we knew that people, particularly women, who had negative perceptions of the menopause, had when they scored, they had self-recorded scores of how they were experiencing it. The things they may experiencing, whether it's joint pain or hot flashes or thinning hair or itchy ears or tingling, you know, extremities. So those are all potential things that you may experience. They had more severe versions of those, right? They were experiencing them on a scale of one to 10. They were always higher if they had a negative perception. And those who had a positive perception had a much more positive experience. The other study I was thinking of was actually one that was done around aging, which I kind of want to give you the broad picture of how mindset

affects. And what they saw was that people who had a positive perception of aging lived seven years longer. Wow. So this was a major study that was done. And there were thousands of folks that they kind of looked at the history. And what they determined was your perception of things, whether positive or negative, depending on how far, genuinely. affects what's going on in your body. So. And give us some examples. Like, you know, clients that you've worked with, have you got anybody that you can talk about

who had that experience, like who maybe was thinking about menopause or something to be afraid of, something negative? And then they worked with you and kind of came out the other end feeling differently. Yes. I have two clients that I'm thinking of. The first one is actually. someone that I have also coached them as a couple. And as we did a lot of menopause work and her partner was a part of the education that I was

doing around menopause. And she came to me and she said, you know, things have been just so much better between us. And, you know, you can't chicken or egg, right? It's been better between us. And things have been better for me. So it's not clear how which came first, but obviously the entire people, picture has improved based on understanding what's going on, being able to speak with the health care provider is appropriate. And this person actually is a position.

So, and then being able to, she said one of the things I remember the quote, and I asked her to actually try to put that into a quote, is that it gave them a shared language. So now they have their own way of being able to talk about this and being able to understand what's going on even and what may happen, right? Just to be. prepared. So that's one person thinking of. The other person, again, one of the things that I do is I publish a newsletter, a weekly newsletter, hot flash the newsletter. And the idea there is, again, to provide options that you can take advantage of. So they're very much a lifestyle based around sleep or movement or food or mindset overall, right, what I call my menopause mindset.

And we were working on just a variety of things, kind of looking at. what? Because again, every body will experience menopause differently because of just the differences in all of our bodies. It's a unique experience. There's some overlap, of course, but it's unique. So we were going through what this person was experiencing. And I, you know, shared with this person some of the lifestyle things that they could change. And they really gravitated towards one, which I will share was pomegranate extract. And yes. So that was for the hot flashes. And she actually, it was about, I think it was about two weeks. And I've seen her weekly. So after the second week, she was like radically different. And again, right, this concept of who we are and how we experience it when we get this one is the option. This thing that says, yes, there are things that are available to me. You feel in all honesty, hope. Right? And hope is what strengthens resilience because you know I can meet this challenge. And so, you know, she was just talking about how differently she felt and how that enables her to be in the world, right? When, in all honesty, what she was experiencing, it made her sometimes hesitant to go out. She didn't let out her clothing. So there were certain basically practical implications for her in her life. And it is, it really just changed how she can show up and how she's present. And again, this does not, I'm not against, you know, kind of going to a doctor if you're experiencing, you know, distress or dysfunction in your life to the point that perhaps there's a more intense, excuse me, intense solution, including hormonal therapy or other pharmaceuticals,

there's things that you can bring to the table around movement. I know one of my newsletters was about hatha yoga and balance. balance and osteoporosis. And so there's just so many things that you can be doing. And the last thing that I'll say on that is that the American Medical Association and some of the trainings that I've done there with continuing medical education basically says that the best way to thrive in menopause is to use preventative strategies that focus around lifestyle. So you know the things that you've learned from eat well, move frequently, sleep well, manage what's coming in and out of your environment in terms of stressors. So those are the basics and they're still basics and you need to be more

intentional about them. One thing that I love this metaphor that I've used before that is about the intentionality. I was listening to a podcast but with a gynecologist and the gynecologist was saying that you need to think about your body as a cost. And of course, when you're born, just coming off the, what do you call it? The thing that the car has come out of. It can't come. It's not coming to me right now.

And every year, you put 1,000 miles on the car. Now, this is what she said. I took it to another level because at 50, I said 2,000 miles a year. Because at 50, I want you to think about your body as 100,000 mile car. And when you think about that, you realize you need to be more intentional about those service appointments. You need to be more intentional about those tuneups. You need to be more attentional about those oil changes. So if you analogize all of that, the bottom line is all the things that you need to do,

your car was much more resilient. Your body was much more resilient. And now it just needs a little extra care, a little extra love. And with that, the things open up and have, there is also this concept that vintage cars are beautiful. Yes. Something very, you know, special about them. There's a uniqueness to how they've become vintage and, you know,

what they show in terms of the experience that they've been through. So anyway, that's what I will say about being intentional about all these things. And that's your best, best key to your best self. Completely. And what kind of thinking about business people specifically, how does that translate into them being able to manage their business more effectively? So that is, there's a lot of research around how if you have people in your workforce, which that are going through perimenopause, which some people are not familiar with, right? the transition stage, which can occur as early as your late 30s, for some people earlier. And if you have people in your workplace also that are in postmenopause, if you can support

the education, the awareness, there are performance benefits for you within your business. Because as I mentioned, right, the way in which my client was able to show up, that she was able to show up at all. Yes. as a result of the education, the options presented, the understanding, the support. I mean, it feels a little self-serving, but I will say there are many coaches. There's an article that just came out talking about other coaches that are out there, but you can bring in folks to present to educate.

And just I have a bias, of course, that they come and educate not around it being a diagnosis, but around it being a life stage and opportunity, almost a right of passage, so that there is, there begins to be that positive perception. So you want to make sure that's what you're bringing, not just dry, stale education, but hopefully some excitement and some energy, which is what I try to bring to my thoughts. Yes. I completely get that. And it's not even just just the women, is it? It's men who are also like in relationships with women going through menopause and in relationship or in proximity. Exactly, yes.

I tell people who should come to my presentation. So there's two frequently asked questions, right? One is, why is a doctor not presenting this? And so I have my answer to that, which we talked about earlier. And the second is who should attend? And I'm like everyone. Someone who's in their 20s. Someone who is, whoever is potentially in love with or loves.

or was born to because your mother's going to go through it, your aunt's going to go through it, your sister's going to go through it, your cousin's going to go through it. So your understanding of it and your ability to be there for those people that you love is also important. So I fully endorse opening the doors to other people understanding it. I will get everyone that I had, whether it's been, I had someone at my last presentation, she brought her daughter who was about to go to college.

And her daughter was just like, what? How come I didn't know this? And I said, there's actually no reason why you should not. Yeah. So I recommend that find ways to bring this education to your population so that they can not only show up. Yeah. But also that others can show up for them as colleagues, as leaders, you know, throughout the organization. because I think it sets a, if your organization believes in well-being, which, again, it's not a nice to have.

It's a must-have from a performance perspective, right? This affects your bottom line. And so if you believe in that, I think this is an untapped area where you can increase and enhance your performance. 100%. Tanya, before we finish up, what are your final words to the audience? What do you really want everybody to take from this? I want everyone to take from this that, I want to phrase it in the most positive way,

is that menopause is an opportunity to reconnect with your identity in a new way. And that's for both the woman who might be experiencing it, as well as all of the people that surround her and love her. And so I just want every woman to feel excitement about that. Both before and during when you're in it. And that's the way, again, a third of your life, you deserve to be happy. Nice. So, so powerful.

Where can people find out more about you? Well, you can find me on my website at embody well.com. Also, if you're interested, the newsletter is free. And also paid subscriptions help support the work. But I want it to be accessible to everyone. That's at Changing with thechange.substack.com. It's a substack based newsletter. Amazing. We'll include those links. So head on over there. Thank you, Tanya. You've been absolutely incredible. Thank you, Lelana. Wonderful to be with you. And to everyone listening, we'll catch up next time. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio.

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