Episode Notes
Rebekah Brown is the founder and chief guinea pig of MPowder, the world’s first plant-based supplement powder range crafted to target the three distinct biochemical stages of the menopause.
Rebekah’s personal struggle was the starting point for this entrepreneurial adventure, as she started to suffer in her early forties from varied symptoms that neither she or her doctor could make sense of. As a researcher and planner in the creative industries, she threw herself into a quest which led her to experiment with functional foods, and then into creating her own nutritional supplement, a powder she first ground herself in her own family kitchen – a time she says other family members would rather forget.
She likes to say that MPowder is on a mission to reframe midlife as a superpower. Launched in September 2020, the brand went to market in the UK with their first supplement, called Peri-Boost, a product born from curiosity, co-creation and community.
In this personal and in-depth interview, Rebekah talks through her experience with perimenopause, how she launched in the middle of the pandemic, her funding experience – both as a woman founder and in the femtech space – and how she inadvertently became a spokesperson for menopause. She talks to Anne about how her team is co-creating the products not only with specialist doctors and nutritionists but with the support or feedback of their dedicated community.
The two discuss the biochemical aspects of this life transition, the emotional journey women go through, before touching on how yoga, meditation and movement have helped Rebekah on her mindful journey through this life cycle.
A wonderful, funny and touching interview. Enjoy!
Selected links from Episode
You can find MPowder at https://mpowder.store/
Follow them on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mpowderstore/
and Facebook
Perimenopause – https://www.health.harvard.edu/womens-health/perimenopause-rocky-road-to-menopause
HRT – Hormone Replacement Therapy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormone_replacement_therapy
A menopause questionnaire: Rebekah recommends people use the questionnaire developed by My Menopause Centre – which has a really clever back end algorithm: https://www.mymenopausecentre.com/
She also recommends trying Balance App: https://www.balance-menopause.com/balance-app/
Wetsuit – a song by the Vaccines
Bloody Brilliant People, the book – https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bloody-brilliant-people-the-couples-and-partnerships-that-history-forgot-cathy-newman?variant=39256119115810
Carol Ann Duffy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ann_Duffy
And her book the World’s Wife – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Wife
Full Episode Transcript
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hi, hello, bonjour, and namaste. This is Out Of The Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. And I am your host Anne Muhlethaler. Today, I am delighted to be joined by a wonderful pioneering, even entrepreneur called Rebekah Brown, Rebekah and I share a couple of friends in common in London and Brighton. And so when I first heard about her journey, I immediately knew I had to interview for the podcast because I selfishly really wanted to hear more about how she got to where she is. So Rebekah founded a company in the FemTech space called MPowder. She came to this after living through a difficult time in her early ’40s. And at the time she wasn’t able to reach a clear conclusion about her symptoms. And she was turned away by her GP, by her doctor because she was too young to have menopausal symptoms.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And yet. So Rebekah explored possibilities that she found available to her before turning her findings into a powder, a product that could serve a community. She has become a very eloquent proponent of midlife being a superpower in women’s lives. And so without further ado, I’m going to stop talking and let you listen to her story directly. And by the way, men don’t shy away from listening to this interview. It’s really fascinating. And I think all of us have a lot to learn about. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rebekah Brown. Rebekah, it’s so lovely to meet you. Thank you for getting here today and welcome to Out Of The Clouds.
Rebekah Brown:
Thank you for having me.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I would love to ask you first to maybe tell our listeners who you are and what you do. Tell us your story.
Rebekah Brown:
Wow, that’s a big question. My name’s Rebekah, I’m the founder. I often describe myself actually more accurately as chief Guinea pig, but I’m the founder of a company called MPowder. We are essentially a community of curious minds in midlife that have come together to co-create products with experts, that address specifically the biochemical stages of menopause and the story behind that is a very simple one. Traditionally my role historically has been as a planner and MPowder really came about as a result of my own perimenopause journey, where I got quite sick. I like many women went to the doctors with symptoms I really didn’t understand or associate with menopause because I was young for one, I was 43 and also those symptoms were so board reaching. I wasn’t able to join the dots. I didn’t know enough about what happens to our bodies during menopause, really, to understand.
Rebekah Brown:
So I was suffering from anxiety. I had bone ache. I had hormonal acne. I was bloated. And I think one of the hardest things for me is in the career that I was in at the time, a lot of my job was around presenting and noodling and thinking on really deep topics for companies and then presenting that recommendations that required quite a robust approach to research and also the confidence to land somewhere and present your recommendations back. And I lost all my confidence during perimenopause. So I went from being someone who done this job since they left uni to someone who really felt incapable of presenting and honing stuff down. I know now, obviously that anxiety, brain fog almost like imposter syndrome are very common, early symptoms of perimenopause, but at the time I had no idea. I just thought that something was horribly wrong with me and with my brain and my body.
Rebekah Brown:
So long story cut short, the doctor experience wasn’t a great one and that’s not unusual for women around 75% of our community report going to the doctor and being told that they’re either too young or being misdiagnosed as being perhaps depressed or burnt out. And that happens understandably to a certain extent because doctors are woefully short on time. And they’re also very rarely trained on symptoms associated with menopause in an enough detail to be able to join the dots as well. So I went to my doctor, he took one look at my lifestyle, I think, and this is really tough on women because we strive so many of us. I think we strive with our ambition, with our desire, perhaps to have families with responsibilities around our extended family at this age as well.
Rebekah Brown:
Perhaps our parents are getting older, perhaps loved ones need more support. And quite often we hit this menopause wall without realizing that’s what it is. And we’re told that it’s because we wanted it all. We’ve burnt out, we need some time away from those pressures in order to-
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s lovely.
Rebekah Brown:
And it’s kind of your fault it’s sort of implicit feedback. And that was what happened to me. I think at the doctrine question was my doctor for a long time, and I’ve got a huge amount of respect for their knowledge, but they took one look at my lifestyle and assumed that that was what was happening. I burnt myself out because I dared to have a career that required a lot of focus, as well as having children as well as having aging parents. And that just wasn’t manageable.
Rebekah Brown:
And I’m quite obedient individual. So I probably would’ve just done what he’d asked me to do, which was take some time away, consider antidepressant if you’re really struggling, but just try and rebalance your life a little bit. But I knew inherently there was something else going on. And this was two, maybe three years ago now and perimenopause wasn’t actually a word that was used commonly. I think it’s fantastic that actually, since MPowder has been in business, this awakening has happened, which is going to be incredibly helpful for the next generation of women entering this life stage. But for me, I hadn’t really heard of perimenopause and that was embarrassing. Actually, it was a bit embarrassing that I didn’t know that this very significant life stage would occur to me and all my peers and the more I learned about it, I think because I’m a researcher, the more I wanted to solve it.
Rebekah Brown:
And so I went on a very long convoluted exploration to learn about what perimenopause is, what the implications are for our current and future health and what we can do about it. And it really was a result of that learning and essentially my own recovery that led to MPowder being born.
Anne Muhlethaler:
There are so many things I want to ask you. Maybe the first thing I’d like to ask you is which symptom, brought you to the doctor, was it just one?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah, it’s a really good question because I think often again, for women in midlife, it’s a layering up of symptoms and we are phenomenal at enduring, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. And I’m constantly amazed when I talk to women in our community about how much they endure before they actually seek help from a doctor. Because I think we taught just to deal with pain as women from a very early age. And particularly when it’s stuff to do with hormones or fertility or cycles, really from your first period, you are told that, “Yeah, it might hurt, it might leave you bedridden for a couple of days. It might be really uncomfortable when you are in meetings. It may be really awkward when you’re trying to have social situations.”
Rebekah Brown:
So that’s just what women do. And I think there’s a certain element of that that then carries through, into all psychological conditions that women have where they’re quite often underplayed and dismissed within in the doctor surgery. And so when stuff was happening to me, it all felt relatively incidental in the sense that yes, I was bloated and really uncomfortable, but maybe that was my fault, maybe I wasn’t eating in the way that I should be because I was stressed and yes, I was struggling to sleep, but maybe that was my fault. Because I got lots of… So you tend to hold yourself responsible for your health because you don’t understand that there’s something biochemical occurring that can be better supported if you had the tools and the knowledge to do so. But I think the thing that drove me to the doctor was the anxiety became so crippling that I was struggling to really have conversations.
Rebekah Brown:
Even the lift I was practically scripting, off the cuff conversations I knew I might be having to have as I went up the lift to give a presentation and I was getting up so early to prepare and I felt so bristle as a person. Anything could reduce me to tears. I just felt that I was falling apart. That my body was betraying me, but also that I was going crazy. I couldn’t find the words for things I couldn’t speak naturally. And I have a history of my family of multiple sclerosis as well.
Rebekah Brown:
So there’s a thing in the back of my head that was thinking, “Maybe you’ve got something going on. Maybe there’s an autoimmune condition here that you just need to face up to and go and seek help for.” So I think that’s what drove me in. And ironically, to a certain extent, it was that desire to continue living the life at the pace and the way that I had done, I didn’t really see that there was an option to do anything differently. I just needed to get back, get back to full speed. Yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s very interesting. When I was doing my research for this interview and reading articles on you and on the product and the community, I couldn’t help, but go back to my own experience around this, which was, well, I flirted with burnout for a few years while I was still in my previous job. And I didn’t know what burnout was at the time. So a lot of what you describe feels like I’ve been to through it, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s perimenopausal or actually flirting with burnout. Both were possible?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks. I really put a lot, a lot, a lot of my own energy into self-care in order not to burnout because I could tell there was something wrong, but I also had a diagnosis, autoimmune disease, because I have rheumatoid arthritis. But what I wanted to share here first is a couple of years ago, I noticed that my emotions were becoming more intense.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And I remember going to a new gynecologist and me saying to her, “I think that there’s something strange going on because I’ve never had bad PMS.” And she said to me, “Oh, this may be perimenopause,” but she didn’t give me anything extra. She didn’t offer any support whatsoever. But she looked at me at the corner of her eye and she said, “But don’t do anything crazy, like break up with your boyfriend.” And I was like, “Oops, too late.” And in a very emotional flurry, I always found that there was a reality of circumstances that were feeding into the emotions, but the emotions were just heightened to a level that were uncontrollable. And thankfully, because I am a mindfulness student, a mindfulness teacher, I have been able to observe myself sufficiently to see that there still is this presence of a force of some kind and sign me that takes over sometimes. And I want to say it’s freaking crazy.
Rebekah Brown:
It is crazy. I mean, I think it’s fascinating, isn’t it? And I mean, I read a fascinating ask also I can’t remember the author or the publication, but the person in question was talking about the fact that we are taught to not make big decisions when we’ve had a loss in the family when we’re grieving for something and yet perimenopause, this whole journey is a series of letting go. And there is an element of grief and frustration and anger at our bodies. And obviously our hormones are impacting on our moods as well. And the way that we see things and yet quite fundamental decisions are often made during this period because again, we’re not able to take that step that you’ve been able to do in terms of your mindfulness practice and observe the way that we are responding.
Rebekah Brown:
You look at the amount of relationships that break down, during this period and suicide sadly is at its highest for women during the menopause transition. A lot of stuff happens because women do feel crazy. There’s a huge sense of empowerment for me, when I saw a chart that plotted the hormone fluctuations of perimenopause to post menopause and you look at it at the age of 43, when you’re feeling crazy and it looks basically like the scariest rollercoaster ever. The perimenopause is just like all of these ridiculous wiggles. And you see what’s happening literally before, when you were just having a standard cycle that many of us have from puberty onwards, relatively straight forward.
Rebekah Brown:
And then you look at what happens afterwards in terms of how our hormones behave. You look at that sort of bundle that mess in the middle and you just think, well, of course that’s going to have a play havoc with how you feel and all there’s an element. I think sometimes of liberation almost of burning off some things that need to happen in life. They can be really, really disruptive and very damaging to us. And to those we love.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, it’s interesting that you talk about that. I would love to see that chart by the way.
Rebekah Brown:
I can share that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’d be great. Yeah. Around the same time I was grieving the loss of my dad. I lost both my parents between 2014 and 2019 and a cat and my dad’s ex-wife and my mom’s husband. So lots of loss in our family over a few years. And the thing that I did know about grief is that it’s also a biochemical explosion.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So you never know from one day to the next, how you’re going to feel. And again, you don’t really feel quite in control of yourself, but so for anybody who’s experiencing any kind of grief, it’s an extra overlay that just makes it even harder to get a grip on our lives. Now, one of the things that I loved about what you did is you left the doctors and you went to seek help and you went to look at what was available in terms of health supplements. You weren’t convinced what was in the shops and why did it not work for you?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? That you don’t walk down certain aisles in your supermarket until you have to. So for me, I don’t know what I was expecting when I walked down the menopause aisle, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to presented with a an end of life category, which is how I decided to describe it. And the thing that troubled me was on a number of levels. I mean, my background as I’ve explained is as a researcher planner within the creative industries. And so I’m very attuned to the subliminal messages that we get as humans when we look at stuff because someone very clever from a creative point of view has worked on that packaging to convey a message that they want you to absorb in order to purchase a product. That’s kind of how it works.
Rebekah Brown:
If I was to extrapolate what was being presented to me on those menopause shells, it felt like that they were talking to a very frail, very elderly woman who was mainly worried about bone density and was riding a bicycle, invariably, all standing in a corn field and just everything about it was odds with what I felt I was as a woman, but also all of the individuals I knew who are a similar age and therefore would be going through the same biochemical stage as me, if we hadn’t been talking about it to each other yet. And I couldn’t understand as well because as a researcher, a lot of my work had been focused on the impact that Millennials have had on the way that we consume and with the way that we live. And what’s been fascinating for me is a specialist looking at the way that people think is that millennials are the first generation effectively to influence up.
Rebekah Brown:
So normally you get influenced by your parents and you get the influence pushes down and we rebel against it, or we adopt elements of it. But with Millennials, there was something about the way that they chose to live and engage and innovate that pushed up. And so people of my generation who sit a little bit beyond the Millennial age range, expecting brands to be authentic were expecting an element of honesty and truth. And we are looking for sort of homegrown solutions. We’re looking for a sense of community because all of those things exist in the beauty and wellness space. And so we’ve adopted that way of thinking. And what also struck me about the menopause offerings was that they just felt like there was something out the 1980s. And there are some brilliant brands I had that weren’t on that shelf.
Rebekah Brown:
When you generally go into these stores, particularly if it’s one of the health food chains or it’s your local supermarket, which is where many of us begin looking for supplementation, then it was overly dominated by pharmaceutical companies. And it felt like they hadn’t addressed this space since the 1980s where we were all buying multivitamins. And we were looking at the back of packs and really, we were just looking for a flavor, we were choosing strawberry or orange. We weren’t looking at it and going, “Hmm, is that bioavailable or is that actually a therapeutic dosage it’s going to do anything?” And it felt like the menopause space had been forgotten about, and you could feel it in the way that the brands looked as well. It just felt like it was a dusty corner that had been forgotten.
Rebekah Brown:
And that’s quite damaging because as a woman who potentially has been turned away from the doctor, who’s feeding as you say, almost crazy sometimes, but totally alone, perhaps in their journey, unable to have a conversation, maybe with their peers, with their work colleagues, because it’s still a tricky subject to talk to. And then you go instinctively to your health food to talk to you think, “Well maybe I need some nutritional support. Maybe that’s why I need to begin.” And what you’re presented with is a really bleak picture of what aging is for a woman. And you’re presented with products that basically are going to do very little to help you.
Rebekah Brown:
And that can be like deaths 5,000 cuts. And we often find women in our community, particularly what women who’ve had their menopause. And so a few years further on the journey than I am, that they would’ve cycled through pretty much any product that you could name and has been this catalog of over promise and disappointment. And if you’re not careful that just cements their view, that they’ve just got to push onto and this is basically life now. And that’s awful because there are tools and support and practices that can help. But if you’re not careful, by the time they get to those, they’ve kind of given up and they tired of trying.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sure. And also their body has evolved. They may have lost some of the vitality and other essential qualities that made their life more qualitative beforehand, anyways.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. Joy. I mean, it’s really hard to find joy when you’re feeling rubbish. You’re feeling rubbish pretty much every day.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. Now you describe of yourself as a problem solver. And so you go to super drugs or wherever and it’s not looking good. I’d love to know what was that spark in your mind that got you to get a dehydrator in your kitchen and to start blending your own powders because that’s like a next level step. I completely admire by the way. So fan girl here.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. Well, I think it’s fair to say that I’m quite obsessive. If I can’t unpick the knobs, that’s probably what made me a decent researcher is I would always go deep to find things out. So the dehydration machine was a moment in my family’s life that they’re probably quite bad I’ve moved on from. I was reading all this stuff around functional foods and I managed to hustle my way to a number of conferences that I really shouldn’t have attended. Because I wasn’t a medical practitioner or a functional food practitioner, but there’s some fascinating events obviously that occur in the calendar for medical professionals that are started to look at the potential of food as medicine. So I think what was fascinating about the attendees at these events is that increasingly doctors are looking to find additional tools to support the patients that they see in clinic.
Rebekah Brown:
And there’s a growing recognition of course, that food is the first form of defense actually in dealing with some of the world’s biggest, most chronic diseases as well. And what was fascinating about going along to those sessions was listening to doctors saying that if they could, they prescribe a decent diet if you’re looking at someone who’s pre-diabetic and you look at all of the side effects that can occur with the medication that they would prescribe, it’d be much, much better to be able to convince them to try two months of a more focused meal plan that could actually bring them back from that brink. And you look at that with cardiovascular disease, you look at obesity and the impact that has. And so that spurred me on, I guess, to dig further into how, what we eat could impact the way that we experience menopause.
Rebekah Brown:
And there’s all kinds of research out there about the potential of food for menopause, but it’s also pretty hard to unpack because you can’t discount other cultural factors. So for example, quite a lot’s been written about the potential of soya in our diets, but then when you look at the bio of people living in Asia, it’s not just as simple as suddenly introducing soya to your plate. There’s much more going on there. There’s also much more from a cultural acceptance perspective as to what aging means for women in different parts of the world where that positivity can also impact the way that you experience menopause.
Rebekah Brown:
So I was curious about the food. I was curious about the amount for food you needed to take to achieve the therapeutic dosage. And that’s when my dehydration machine came in because basically quite a lot of the research that you read requires quite a lot of that said food product and it became almost impossible to get on my plate. And so I started looking into blended powders and how you could do that yourself and how I could try to get that food onto my dietary plan for the day without actually having to sit there, eating kilograms of kale. And I noticed this whole world of dehydration, I didn’t know existed.
Rebekah Brown:
And there’s a lot going on in that world from survivalists to healthy practitioners, and I learned a huge, I bought a dehydration machine off Amazon. I started playing with different dosage levels of the foods that I wanted to include and learn about how you dehydrate them. And I ended up with this powder that was absolutely disgusting, but I started to feel better. And I always, when I tell this story, I think a number of things were occurring. I think I had by that almost become, I’d say 90% plant based in the way that I was eating, which was a departure from I used to eat before. I was having a really rich and varied amount of vegetables.
Rebekah Brown:
And because I was being panful about the kind of fruits and vegetables that I was including, it was making a huge difference to how I felt everything felt more mindful and considered and nurturing just because I was caring for myself rather than grabbing something from prep. But it’s obviously not sustainable. And also I was doing other things as well. But what I realized was that there was huge potential in food and botanicals and Richmond’s minerals, if you got them from the right sources. And that really was the beginning of the development of the recipes MPowder is I realized very quickly that obviously I’m not a medical practitioner, I’m not a nutritionist or naturopath. And I needed to find people who had got the infield experience of working women midlife, but also had the robustness that I always like to bring to research so that they would help me understand and whistle down the ingredients that could be a helpful foundation layer. For women at each of these biochemical stages we go through.
Rebekah Brown:
And that’s where the recipe development for our product range began. So from dehydration machine to people who really knew what they were talking about, we evolved along list and that’s what we took into trial with our trial list.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. How long ago did you get a go to market with the first product?
Rebekah Brown:
Oh, it was a year ago last week. So we’re a year old now.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wow. Congratulations.
Rebekah Brown:
Thank you. Yes, it feels a lot longer, but the first year of shipping something, was we really quite an emotional experience because I remember there were two moments of in extreme nervousness for me, the first was the trial and which happened during the pandemic. In fact, our whole life really it’s happened during the pandemic, but sending out your product to people you’ve never met, 50 people you’ve never met to try it and to feedback honestly, I remember sitting in my garden because it was a very early, hot spring, wasn’t it? And this was May time and just thinking, “This could all go horribly wrong. What if they hate it? What if I make them feel ill? What if it doesn’t work? What if I get shamed by this effort?” It’s come from a really private experience as well and suddenly I’m becoming a face of menopause.
Rebekah Brown:
How do I feel about that? And going from that huge sense of fear to within about a week, such a sense of generosity and gratitude, that women were willing to feedback and were willing to share and support me in getting it better was real lesson in human kindness actually. And then when we started shipping the fact that someone would buy it, well, I don’t think I will ever get tired of the excitement that comes from someone else finding our brand. But that first sale, stays in your mind.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s so exciting. One of the things I really enjoyed reading on your website is your mission and it reads, “The mission of MPowder is to reframe midlife as a superpower.” Can you talk to us about that?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. I think there’s two things that we are really focused on as a business. One is co-creating products and services and solutions that enable women to take agency for their health at this life stage. And that is about layering up and working out what works for you because everyone’s menopause is entirely different. And the second thing is destigmatizing what has been historically a really awkward life stage for women to talk to and for society to recognize in the West. And what troubles me most is that at the heart of that lies a discomfort I feel with being female. So with our hormones full stop,. Our generation and our mother’s generation, our grandmother’s generation, would work, taught to hide that femaleness effectively to leave it at the door when you go into work, to hide your tampon up your sleeve, when you go to the toilet to not talk about pain, to not talk about difficulty in doing things at certain times of your month.
Rebekah Brown:
And what I learned quite quickly in researching my own menopause journey was the power of our hormones. If we can harness them. And if from an early age, instead of dreading your monthly bleed, you actually learn when you are most creative in your cycle. When should you be doing endurance sport as opposed to resistance training? When are you most likely to be on that supercharge mode that we all have every month where sudden you could basically be running three countries and still have time for watching Netflix at the end of the day? To the other times in the month where you feel quite depleted and vulnerable, but there’s often quite a lot of creativity and deep thought that can come about.
Rebekah Brown:
And so that’s really what we’re looking to do. We’re looking to encourage women to reframe menopause and midlife as a life stage and see it as a stepping up point. Because a bit like that, but hormone cycle I was describing as you go into menopause itself, obviously your hormone cycle becomes very different and eventually changes.
Rebekah Brown:
And what happens with that change statistically is also incredibly positive. If you’ve got the right support around you, you’ve got the tools that you, you to feel nourished and well, then you’re more likely to start a business in midlife and succeed. Midlife female entrepreneurs are much more successful than the stereotypical vision of a young 21 year old in Flip Flops in San Francisco. We are much more likely to have empathy, which makes us incredibly valuable within the workplace. We’re better at a conflict resolution. We’re happier, we’re more purpose driven. There’s so many positive things that come about as a result of this transition. And that’s really the thing that we want to be, encouraging people to think to, because I think the problem with menopause at the moment is not just that there’s a lack of education, but also who wants to find out about something that sounds truly horrid? So tend to ignore it until it hits us, which isn’t good for anyone.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I’m really excited about you reclaiming this. I’m sure you have been aware in some of the changes that the Millennials and Gen Z, have made already in terms of getting more acceptance around period shaming. Yeah, of course. There’s so little progress given the fact that we’re in 2021, how do men that you’ve come across, how comfortable are they to even engage and discuss and find out about this journey that we get on when they hear about your product?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah, that’s really good question. And I mean, to your point around period, and also fertility, and just the difficulty with fertility, the problem isn’t this dreamy rainbow colored experience for most of us. I think the honesty that’s coming about in terms of significant life stages for women is incredibly positive. And I think that Millennials and Gen Z, they’re not going experience menopause in the way that we have, because they’re just not going to accept that it’s something that is taboo because it happens to 51% of the population. So it’s hardly niche. And in answer to your question around talking to men about menopause, I guess there’s two experiences that I can talk to. One is the experience of trying to raise funds for menopause product, which was incredibly challenging.
Rebekah Brown:
I have a huge amount of empathy actually, because I think what occurs in society around taboo topics is there’s a recognition usually on both that it’s uncomfortable and no one likes to make anyone feel uncomfortable. And so it’s very rarely something that’s a deliberate ignorance. It’s something that people just don’t know how to approach. And so what I found with my conversations with VCs, when invariably I’d be talking to a male, invariably I would be older than him because I was a mature entrepreneur. It was just incredibly uncomfortable for me. No one likes to watch someone’s sort of squirm. And so I used to have to begin my pitch as an entrepreneur and bearing in mind, very rarely get more than 30 minutes with these people. So every minute is precious.
Rebekah Brown:
And I would say about 10 minutes, any pitch time I was allotted was spent educating them on the biochemical stages of menopause because they just didn’t know. So you’d have to go into the meeting and waste pressure slideware telling them, telling them. And the only way I could do in the end without causing extreme discomfort for all parties was actually to use myself as an example, and to pop the discomfort with humor. So I used to start at almost like a confessional, I’d say my name’s Rebekah, I’m perimenopausal. And then I’d go on to describe what that meant. And then actually it was really fascinating again with my research head on, because what invariably would happen is there’d be, is slight discomfort and rigidity at the other side of the table.
Rebekah Brown:
And then after me talking it through and talking through the implications of menopause. When I wasn’t talking about bleeding, I was talking about other things. You could almost see a light bulb moment where whoever I was speaking to go, “Gosh, actually, do you know what? My parents separated when my mom was… When I think about it now, when my mom was probably going through the menopause or my mom left her job, when she was around that age, or I’d never thought about it. But actually the tension in our house was really tough because my sister was a teenager at the same time.” Or you suddenly find these guys joining the dots and going, “Oh my goodness, that probably was what was happening to my mom. I just remember tension. I remember conflict,” and so we all carry those stories, even if we don’t realize that we carry them.
Rebekah Brown:
And so I never found it a negative experience talking to men about it, but I think the discussions we’re having to have as a society is we’ve become more inclusive and we look to address taboos and prejudices. They’re not ever going to be that comfortable. And I think that’s okay. So with the VCs, I didn’t mind in the end being the person that had that conversation with them, that’s absolutely fine. I think the challenge for me was then convincing them that this was something that was significant enough to want to invest in because I think the challenge for any VC and email exchange before this conversation, you flagged the lack of VC funding that goes to female founders, which is woeful at around 2.2% currently.
Rebekah Brown:
But I think it’s very hard when you’re backing a horse, which affects me as what people do when they invest in really early stage businesses to invest in anything that you haven’t got either personal experience of, or you feel totally embedded in as a sector. And I think the biggest challenge with menopause. To certain extent, it’s a challenge with FemTech, but FemTech has managed to do a bridge between tech and females. And so there’s an element of them, if you leave yourself as FemTech, you’re much more likely to get investment than saying you are menopause product.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. Actually I was looking for another article that I read only a couple of weeks ago with a female for founder who’s on her third company, I think. And she gave very, very interesting, very direct feedback as to what her experience was. And there was a piece in crunch base around inclusivity and yeah, I think that it must be very difficult as a woman founder to go and defend something that’s particularly important to women, that women themselves don’t even talk about or know that much about. And then on top layer, the lack of funding that goes to women in general, and these are a lot of stacked problems. So I have to congratulate you even more for the fact that you raised…
Rebekah Brown:
It’s around 500,000.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. Amazing. What has that enabled you to do from your early beginnings to that round of funding, what is the next steps for MPowder?
Rebekah Brown:
I was very lucky in the sense that I feel that the people I got around the business were there for a reason beyond of backing the horses that we were just talking about, that they were really purpose driven individuals with really specific skills that I’ve been able to tap into in the last year. So what the funding allowed me to do was to take the trial to commercial production and sale, and then to instigate another trial for a second product. So I had funded personally, the first trial of the power boost and basically cashed in the profit I’d made from business I running previously, which was a planning consultancy. And just thought, I deserve to give this a go and if nothing happens, then that’s fine, I need to do some with everything I’ve learned.
Rebekah Brown:
And so I felt relatively comfortable about investing in getting it off the ground myself. And I think it’s really interesting, because I think women, as entrepreneurs are often very different in the way that they approach funding and also the due diligence they apply to the way they spend and that can sometimes be a blessing and a curse. And I’m very cautious in terms of the way that I spend. And I was very cautious in the figures of my forecast I went to market with. And when I look now at some of the decks that I see now as an entrepreneur, because it’s a very small world actually, and you give back, you’re constantly seeing docs and helping people with docs and connecting people because that’s how I found the connections I needed was people being kind to me. And I’m always fascinated that when I see a females deck across my table for comments, it is literally down to the last penny in terms of how they’re going to spend, what their five be a planner is going to be, it’s usually very cautious.
Rebekah Brown:
They’ll usually include two scenarios, one that’s bold and one that’s more measured and it’s very different. You could almost guess agenda in terms of the way that men will often present their ideas in much more confident and bullish much less in the detail. And that’s not a criticism because actually at that stage is a business, it’s almost pointless to go too far ahead with the detail.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I completely agree.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. We as women, tend to tie ourselves up in nots in time because we have to validate even the right to have the conversation, which I think is a shame. But yeah, I’m very lucky and that the people that came on board were incredibly helpful. And we’re now in terms of next steps, to answer a question, we’re doing it again. So we’re looking at following a year of what I would describe as proof of concept, really tough year for everyone I think in terms of the e-commerce space with the pandemic in the UK, obviously with Brexit impacting on making stuff, it’s been really, really hard. So we are looking at funding again and then that focus will really be from proof of concept to proof of market and then hopefully international expansion.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was wondering about that. So here’s the thing that I’d like to ask you about because we’ve touched a little bit on your experience as a founder and the difficulties of, of course that we as women have, whether younger or older to actually be able to break the taboos and get the help we want because they is not enough research around women’s reproductive health issues in general. But I read that the menopause market is set to be worth 4.47 billion by 2023. And given the fact that no one talks about it, I mean you and this other natural path I know, talk about it. So basically.
Rebekah Brown:
[inaudible 00:37:40] of us.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, exactly. So what’s the opportunity out there for you and anybody else who’s interested in actually starting to tackle the 51% of the population that need help?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. I think these stats are really fascinating aren’t they? Because it is a topic that is very rarely talked about, even though it feels like I talk about it all the time. But when you step outside this menopause bubble, you still find yourself hip sometimes. I’m often shocked by how this has been absorbed because I see it, it’s a bit like any stage in life, isn’t it? The minute you are in it, you see signs of it everywhere. So I see the columns that have been given to menopause, the fact that one or three editors in the UK now is a woman in midlife, I think is no coincidence that this now getting the media coverage that it didn’t get two years ago. And celebrities similarly have far more agency for their careers than they may have done two or three years ago, even are able to have these conversations and bring them to the open.
Rebekah Brown:
I assume that that’s all hitting women everywhere, but we don’t pick up the messages or the references until we feel that they’re relevant. So most people are still woefully unprepared for what may occur to them. I think the thing about the sizing of the market is interesting because obviously it’s not like we suddenly arrive. There’s suddenly millions of us going through menopause that weren’t going through it previously. And what the analysis is showing is basically how the money is being spent. And I don’t think they’ve even scratched the surface actually in that stat that you referenced, because the thing about menopause, if you look at women in midlife, we’re also the biggest spenders on beauty. We’re not even looking at the topical creams that women are applying to support their skin as it changes. The hair products are buying because their hair’s suddenly thinning or falling out.
Rebekah Brown:
The treatments are buying for their nails. All of these things are actually to do with the menopause transition as well, but we’re not even counting them. So I would draw diagram that had that menopause health, then beauty and then wellness. All of these things are where women are looking for solutions and support for life stage. That is as significant as our puberty. It’s like a reverse puberty. And in terms of what that means for entrepreneurs or people looking to engage in this space. I think the thing that I’m most conscious of is the need to behave really responsibly because I think when you move into a space where people have been not just underserved, but they’ve actually been woefully served, you have a responsibility to involve them in your direction of travel. And that’s really, I guess, why community and co-creations at the heart of MPowder.
Rebekah Brown:
I think there’s something quite worrying about just pushing to market stuff, stuff that hasn’t been researched, stuff that hasn’t had women’s voices at the heart of it, because what women in midlife feel is silenced. All of us feel that we are less relevant, less seen that the brands that we used to engage with suddenly don’t represent us anymore. And so what would worry me about this space with the price tag that’s now been put on it is an influx, almost like a gold rush of stuff. And I think actually, yeah, we need to take agency as individuals in this space. And a lot of businesses in the menopause space are just that, they’re women who have particularly bad experiences themselves or have witnessed loved ones going through a difficult menopause transition, and they’re wanting to do good things. And I think that’s what we should be championing and lifting up is that the solutions that come to market need to have that sense of purpose at the heart of them and to have women’s voice at the heart of them.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yes. I am glad that you mentioned that. What strikes me as we consider this is that most of my friends are in an age group. I mean, a lot of them, maybe not most. A lot of them are in an age group that could qualify them in being perimenopausal. And I don’t recall a single conversation or the word even being uttered. So that in itself is kind of scary. Certainly our conversation today is going to point me to have it. But there is also a very difficult topic because for those of us who haven’t had children, there’s obviously also the weight of what hasn’t happened and could it even, and I’m suddenly in that situation. So that makes it even more tender are and vulnerable to approach with anybody.
Rebekah Brown:
Totally and totally. And to that, I think that’s the other thing we need to remember. I think there’s a benefit to looking at menopause from a biochemical stage because in some ways it takes away the fear that you are doing something wrong in your life that’s resulting in a series of symptoms that feel totally unrelated. But I think the danger of purely describing it as a biochemical stage is to miss the sensitivity around loss, as our bodies transition and change, lost opportunities, a sense that life hasn’t necessarily delivered what you may wish it to deliver.
Rebekah Brown:
And sometimes it’s not even what you wish for, some of us choose not to have children because that’s just not what we want for ourselves, but because we’re so rooted as women in a value being associated with fertility and reproduction, it’s a grief even if it wasn’t something you wanted, you somehow feel that moment has now passed. And I think you’re right, it’s incredibly tender period of time for many women. And that needs to be recognized and be part of the dialogue as well.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’d love for you to tell me a little bit more about your community, because I loved hearing you talk on another podcast about the importance of having all of these voices supporting each other. Tell me, what is it like to build a community around such an important topic?
Rebekah Brown:
I mean, the thing I always say genuinely is I don’t think that we built anything. I think the interesting thing about community, if it’s taken its heart is it’s actually created by others. And so what you do as a business or a business owner really is just hold space. You set the principles, so for us, it was really important that anybody was welcome into our community that we are not for one practice and can another practice. There’s quite a lot of division in the menopause space at the moment as a result of the need to also reframe HRT and ensure that people aren’t scared of it. But I think what’s also happened as a result of that is that there’s a fear that anything that isn’t HRT is there anti HRT.
Rebekah Brown:
And so for example, our rules of engagement within our community are that we encourage anyone to come on board, anyone’s menopause journey is valid, and everybody has a voice within our space. And the community is there to drive our direction of travel as a business. So we use the community to our ask what we should be doing next? What, what workshops are you curious about? One of the great examples I always use is during lockdown, obviously there’s a huge amount versus women suddenly found ourselves wanting to get into cold water, flocking to the beach. And the Lido is one of the few places that opened early in terms of getting back into some form of fitness. And if you go to Lido, which I’ve made part of my regular routine, it is full of midlife women swimming up and down. So one of the brilliant things we did during lockdown was we vote on the topics that we go on research on behalf of our community and someone posted, “Why is the Lido full of women in midlife?”
Rebekah Brown:
And so we got in contact, we found a phenomenal Wim Hof practitioner, and we held a workshop, which is a big ask of her because our workshops were always partly practical. So it’s like Andrew needed to deliver the cold order experience whilst we’re all in our houses because we were during lockdown. And she delivered this brilliant piece for us, which was all around the research that goes into what happens when you expose your body to managed stresses, the impact it has on our ability to regulate temperature, mood, what’s happening to our parasympathetic system when we expose ourselves to cold water. And then she took us to an exercise with an ice bucket that we all took part in. So the community, it allows us to stay current in terms of what women are curious about. It allows us to go off and do the due diligence for them.
Rebekah Brown:
And what we’ve seen is that they friendships happen, but that’s nothing to do with us. I think as a result of having a community with a certain set of rules, you attract people with a certain mindset and from that friendships and support networks go head, but we see ourselves very much as sitting on the outside and obviously we’ll dip in, if someone’s got a specific question about our product or someone’s distressed and we feel we need to put them in contact with someone, but really that community has been an organic thing that the women in their own.
Rebekah Brown:
I also feel that they own the direction of travel for the business, because they have such a fundamental part to play in terms of how our blends are developed, what we focus on next, what is it that troubles them the most? Where are the gaps currently where they’ve tried everything and nothing’s worked. That kind of insight really is what informs what we do next. So, yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s very cool. So in what I read from your journey, you named yoga as one of the first things that you introduced to your routine alongside working on the supplements and the mountains of kale you were attempting to eat. And so I would love for you to tell me about how did that happen and what did yoga do in that journey for you?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. And I’m still learning. And I think that’s one of the biggest lessons for me probably during menopause has been to be okay, being a beginner and try loads of stuff. I was quite a driven individual in the sense that all areas of my life were quite fast paced. So my chosen form of exercise was running, which again, isn’t unusual for women. And I used to run quite long distances and it fatigued me, it got to a point where actually it was counterproductive in terms of, I had to let go of a form of exercise. And I would argue also that running was quite meditative for me in order to invite something else in that was going to nourish me. But I was quite not anti-yoga but quite dismissive of yoga.
Rebekah Brown:
Because I didn’t really understand it. I probably experienced it in the the ’90s at university in some sports hall somewhere. And that was basically, I’d written it off as something that I didn’t like. It’s like, what they just lying around. What are they doing? What was interesting actually is a very good friend of mine. Who’s a yoga teacher and knows me very well, took me through the root of hot yoga. Because I think what she worked out with me as a character is that I needed something that was really initially incredibly painful endurance orientated to get the bug as to go, “Oh, okay, my body feels really, really like it in exercise,” but actually also I’m coming out with this real sense of clarity and calm.
Rebekah Brown:
And so I started in hot yoga and then what’s happened to me over the last two years, particularly during lockdown and particularly being exposed to all these amazing experts that give workshops that I have the privilege of joining is understanding the breadth of offer that yoga has.
Rebekah Brown:
And so yoga nidra, when I’m feeling tired and I’m working at home and I need a 10 minute or 20 minute break, things like that have become tools in my toolkit that I really do turn to. And because of lockdown, I also got introduced to different forms of yoga via Zoom, but also getting curious about how I could develop my own practice. So, yeah, I’ve done a couple of sessions back in a hot yoga studio since we’ve been able to, since the world’s unlocked and I still do love almost, it’s like a cleansing experience for me. Too much of it is depleting for me as well. You have to balance it. And I think also particularly in menopause, the impact of that extreme heats sometimes can be a good thing sometimes not such a good thing for people and you have to work it through.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. Yoga for me is something that I always feel. I feel like it stretches my mind as well as my body. I always come out of it feeling. Yeah. That’s the only way I can describe it really. Everything’s been stretched.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I was reading a book yesterday with a friend and it reminded me that we are mainly made of space, even though we feel dense, but yoga is one of the ways that I find spaciousness in my body and in my mind as well. For people who don’t have a yoga practice, I just want to offer that hot yoga indeed is a very intense cardio depending what the heat levels are in the room, which starts at 30 degrees, but goes up to 38 degrees. Is it Vinyasa? A hot Vinyasa that you do?
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. I actually started with Bikram, which is almost, I mean, within the yoga circles and also in terms of, yeah, just ethical circles now is an area that you see less and less Bikram studios for valid reasons. For me, the static nature of that as joined together practice it was a really easy entry level. Because the flow, I think is sometimes a thing that troubles people and makes them feel lost in a class that moves at pace. Whereas there’s a pragmatism to the way that the Bikram series worked, that almost made me comfortable enough to then explore other things.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sure. Yeah. And also the great advantage, especially when you’re a straight beginner, is that you get to see yourself progress because you do exact same pauses wherever you go, wherever you are in the world, when you step into these classes. And I see that. And I do find that they are incredibly meditative because the truth is, it’s impossible to think about something else after five or 10 minutes.
Rebekah Brown:
Absolutely. Totally agree. And also there’s a meditative nature to repetitiveness of a sequence. It never changes. And yet your body changes every time you go into the room.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sure. But I want to tell you that my first ever Bikram class I was in East London. I was in Old Street. And does it still have the carpet?
Rebekah Brown:
Oh no. Oh, I know some of them. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. But I remember one of my colleagues Fabrizia. Who was very gentle Italian girl, she had told me she was competitive when it came to Bikram, which is hilarious. But thankfully she’d explained to me what it was, because honestly, after a half an hour, I remember lying in a corner of the studio. Because they tell you, you have to stay in the room, whatever you do, don’t leave. Because you have to get used to the heat. And I remember where I was and I was like, “Why am I in hell? This is hell.”
Rebekah Brown:
Oh, it’s horrible.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But of course after three lessons suddenly it was like, oh, it’s actually easy. Though it was hard to catch my foot from it being too slippery.
Rebekah Brown:
Yes. Yes. There’s a lot of sweat. No, I remember taking a gentleman I knew from football who was struggling with arthritis and I took him along because my husband actually found it particularly useful for his own arthritis. And this guy was a complete gym bunny, six foot six, really, really muscly, quite competitive as well. And he was so close with me that it probably took about a month to repair the conversation enough to be able to talk to him again. Because he was just really angry that he’d be exposed to this hideous. Because it is horrible. I mean so much about it’s horrible. You just have to not think about it too much.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m not sure where you sold it for anyone, but yeah.
Rebekah Brown:
No. Yeah. It’s worth a try. I think.
Anne Muhlethaler:
In what I heard you speak about today and in other interviews, I hear that both nutrition and movement are really important. So do you have any advice or thoughts that you’d like to share for women who are in midlife and who feel like they need to change something?
Rebekah Brown:
I think nutrition is always a good place to start just because it’s a foundation layer. And if you can get yourself feeling a little bit more energized, which food has the capacity to do, then everything else becomes possible. And because women are so resilient, we don’t need that much more, we need a percentage or two more in a tank and then you’ve got the energy sometimes to get off the couch and do the other things that you know you should do. So I think nutrition is the best place to start for many of us in perimenopause. Also there’s a simplicity to nutrition that we often forget because we are so bombarded with dietary messages and bad foods and good foods and no sugar, no caffeine, no alcohol, all of this stuff, but it is relatively straightforward in terms of what we should be looking to do.
Rebekah Brown:
And it’s about ensuring that you’re getting enough protein. Many women don’t get enough protein in their diet. And the best way to do that actually is to start by looking at your breakfast. We often say to our community, just start there because breakfast is one of those meals where quite a lot of us rely on, the white carb family. We might be having cereal in the UK or toast or pastry. We that we grab on the way into the office. But if you can actually look to include proteins and complex carbs and some fiber at the beginning of your day is step one. And then just start looking at the way that you are eating and the vegetables and the protein sources that can really deliver more bang their back effectively.
Rebekah Brown:
That’s a great place to start. It doesn’t have to be a ridiculously complex supplementation regime. If you can start with food. That’s great. And then the second thing we would always say to people is, do have the conversation with the doctor. But go to the doctor, armed with a little bit of perspective of where you feel you are because they do only have 10 minutes and quite often they will not have had the training in menopause. So you may find yourself arriving in the surgery almost with a little bit more of a perspective on what you might be with than they will have. But there’s so many sources online now, there’s letters you can print out and take with you. There’s questionnaires you can complete and even track your symptoms for a few weeks so that when you go to the doctor, you’ve captured all of the things.
Rebekah Brown:
If you think back to my story, they’re pretty random disconnected symptoms I had. And that’s why in a way that the doctor wasn’t able to join the dots. But if you are able to go in and present a rounded picture of a month’s worth of symptoms, have the conversation because HRT can often be helpful for women. And it can also act as a layering up in that it can be preventative in terms of other chronic diseases, but also it can give you that burst of energy and feeling good enough to then employ other things. And then you’re absolutely right. The third thing I’d layer on would be movement. And I think, again, we are taught movement is often a punitive thing. I think for women, we know our purpose for moving is often to lose weight, to be slimmer, to be different, to be more like the image we see in magazines.
Rebekah Brown:
So it’s always a bit of a punishment rather than a joy. And I think if you can rediscover the joy and movement, that’s a real asset to take into old age. Because the minute you find something you love, the minute you are likely to do it and do it for sustained and consistent periods of time. And, that’s the other thing that I’ve learned is that I genuinely love going to the Lido, but I don’t stay in the Lido for 40 minutes to get my calorific burn, because it’s really cold. But I love the 10 to 15 minutes of cold water swimming, but I see that as a form of therapy rather than a way to lose weight. And similarly with yoga, I see it as a way to stretch or your lovely description of finding space rather than to work on muscle tone.
Rebekah Brown:
But then what’s fascinating is because you’re being consistent. All of these things come as a byproduct of doing something you love. One of the things I say to everyone entering perimenopause is if you can nurture that beginner’s attitude and a curious mind tries stuff, because there’s so much stuff to do with movement out there that’s genuinely joyful. It’s really hard to dance in a room and not smile, for example. So discovering those things often lead you to be more active and then that’s great for your hormones, but also feel safe mind.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you. I think that’s very helpful and I appreciate you layering these different pieces of advice. That’s making me think about my breakfast and as for movement. One of the things that I find very important in your story, but that I feel like is my also my course of exploration and the reason why, even though I’m a consultant, I’m also a meditation teacher. I’ve become a certified yoga teacher and now I’m becoming a coach. I’m very curious about the mind body, soul, heart connection. And the truth is when our bodies show and scream of discomfort, we have to listen because they’re really trying to give us some signal that something is going on. And most of the time I find that we don’t pay attention.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So yes, one of the ways to make them feel better, our bodies is to follow their own instinct. Like you were saying, as to finding the joy in movement. I have recently, I think it was in July, June, July. I started doing bar with an amazing French ballet dancer. Oh my she’s so much fun. So much fun. And she’s so silly and her workout is so hard and it makes my legs look so good. Oh, my God.
Rebekah Brown:
Perfect, win-win, I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? We are talking the cold water expert that we had for this workshop, she had gone for her own personal journey of extreme illness. Actually, she had extreme set of allergies that made living basically being inside all outside, almost impossible. And she got so sick that it was one of those things where her doctor was just looking at and going, “I don’t know what to prescribe next.” And she signed up to do the Wim Hof training at a really, really low point where she was on another round of antibiotics. She’d been off work for like four months. Every time she went back in, she caught whatever was going out in the office. She was so depleted, she just thought, “This seemed absolutely ridiculous. I’ll give it a go.”
Rebekah Brown:
She puts it down to go that’s whole page you get when you’re sometimes ill where you’re looking through, “If go various cough mixtures,” and you’ve been probably over medicating on. One of the things that really stated me from that tour was she said, I learned that if I listened to my body when it whispered, I wouldn’t have to hear it scream, which I just think is a brilliant lesson for all of us.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. I used to say, so my ex-boss is quite famous. Christian Louboutin the one who makes shoes with red soles.
Rebekah Brown:
Yes. I’ve heard of him. Yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And for a really, really long time, I used to say to people that he had a better inner voice than other people, because sometimes he would maybe uncomfortably put me or somebody else in a position where we’d need to cancel a project or change something that I personally felt a way of changing, but there was always a very, very good reason. And so I really came to admire how he was able to follow through even in great discomfort in social circumstances. I think the worst one is when we had to postpone the opening of an exhibition at the London Design Museum.
Rebekah Brown:
Wow.
Anne Muhlethaler:
When the posters were already up on the buses and the anyway. But he was right. We weren’t ready. And everybody else including me, was plotting along pretending it was going to be fine. And so for years I said, he has a better in a voice than other people, but then it turns out he doesn’t, he just listens to it.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. That’s amazing. Isn’t it? Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And we don’t. And I mean, I’m trying to, but. So I think that that ties in nicely with, I think one of the last questions I want to ask you. You talked about how the course of this change in your life and what you discovered in this journey of perimenopause and entrepreneurship was a marker that drove you to being more honest and more in integrity with your life. I’d love for you to talk to us about that.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah. I mean, it is a really interesting segue actually from your reflections on your boss. I think, well, for me, an element of me throughout my adulthood, really, when I think back on it, where it was performative, there was a desire that I was expected to achieve certain things. I was expected to follow certain paths. And I was often in environments where they were very male dominated. So I had to perform in a certain way to fit. And I think to your point about in a voice, you lose sense of your voice when you are constantly trying to make it sound like someone else’s basically, or to fit into a culture where you are not necessarily recognized for being you and I had quite early career success by a series of happy accidents rather than design.
Rebekah Brown:
But I was a very young MD of a company. I was 28 when I had my first managerial directorship. And I was often responsible for people, older me more experience than me. So I built up this armor and this way of being that was almost like an extreme version of me. And I think what I’ve learned through my own menopause journey is that vulnerability is actually what draws us to each other. It shortcuts all kinds of very beautiful, valuable connections. And I’d held myself quite tight and being a certain character. And I was actually quite hard to get to know as a person. And there’s something about having to talk about menopause that’s best for your own journey all the time.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay, yeah.
Rebekah Brown:
That brings you up. And I think what I learned as well is I’ve learned over the last two years from the community. I think what I found fascinating, the thing about being a researcher is it gives you permission to always be on the side, because you’re always listening. So you’re always absorbing. And so you couple that with my need to be performative as a leader, at very young age in a very male dominated industry, I think I’d always been on the edges in quite hard to read and get to know. And I quite liked that I didn’t really want anyone to get to know me particularly well. So I was quite reserved as a person. And then it was almost like an unfairly for me, the fact that very few women talk about menopause, but the minute you do start talking about it, our experience is shared and collectively there’s so much value that comes from having the conversation.
Rebekah Brown:
I’ve always learned to be more honest and open and vulnerable and to let go, because again, the person that I was heading into menopause was incredibly brittle because that was my only way of coping with the symptoms. I just got tired of being that brittle and it hasn’t been easy to let go. And really the business is an extreme letting go, it’s a much more fluid, risky operation to give so much over to the community to decide what to do with it and how it evolves. But I’m actually enjoying that because it’s so different to how I was before, where I had to micromanage everything, including the way that I was perceived that I think it’s a good thing. And I actually think that maybe that’s the liberation that can come with menopause.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That sounds very honest. It’s interesting how we get to know ourselves over the years. It’s beautiful to witness, to see someone embracing as it seems to me that you are who you are without judging her. Either you seem very accepting and letting go of that old identity and being with the flow, so.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah, thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s very inspiring.
Rebekah Brown:
Well, and I think there’s this huge amount of gratitude I have because the weird thing about what I’ve ended up doing is being exposed to all these amazing practitioners, coaches, career coaches, life coaches, yogis, nutritionists, acupuncturists. And it’s almost like I’ve done a degree course on how to be with yourself. So every time I go into these workshops, I learn something, I’ve been in fact incredibly lucky in a weird way as well.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s great. Now out of the clouds, as you may remember from our first chat is a podcast that is like me at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. And I know that meditation has also become part of your life. And you spoke a little bit in another podcast as to how you were also confused about what it was supposed to be when you first started, which I think is most people.
Rebekah Brown:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Would you like to share about this and what practices you do?
Rebekah Brown:
Yes. I think you are leading to my innate desire to make everything vaguely competitive that I have to get good at and win. So I think for me with meditation, the thing that I hadn’t really appreciated was the word practice in it. And also the fact that you don’t pass and you don’t win at meditation. You just spend time doing it. And actually the rewards come for me anyway, when you least expect them, it’s not like I necessarily go into my meditation practice expecting anything of it other than just some time, some time and some space on a daily basis. And again, I try not to dig it too deep into my preconceptions, my prejudices around any of the practices that I’ve tried, this idea of a curious mind of like, I’m just going to give something a go, so many of the things that we find in midlife or in times of need, are practices that have been handed down by generations.
Rebekah Brown:
So I really should didn’t judge, I should just try and with meditation, I found that if I could squeeze 10 minutes in the morning and I think again, I’ve talked about this quite honestly, like many women in my house is absolute chaos. So the only way I could do that was to actually just look the toilet door and do my meditation on the toilet floor. And no one bothers me when I’m in the toilet. So I do that in the morning and I started off with head space doing five to 10 minutes every morning. Again, not really expecting anything of it, just saying well that other people, I respect and love have this as part of their practice. What is it about it that means that they’ve made it a habit and over time, what I found was I could tell when I didn’t do it.
Rebekah Brown:
So it’s quite interesting. I couldn’t tell when necessary when I do it, but I could tell when I didn’t do it. And then as I’ve become, I guess, more adept at learning about meditation through my own community and exposure to experts in meditation, I’ve learned to use it at points in my day when I need a little bit of space where I can feel my heart going because I’m anxious. So I’ve done an interview, not this one, because this has been very lovely, but I maybe I’ve been really nervous and I’ve gone into a conversation, a journalist. I can feel when you’re breathing here at the top of your body and you’ve been very energized, but it’s actually a really, really draining experience and you come out of it and you need a way to ground yourself again, in order to get through the rest of the day.
Rebekah Brown:
And I found myself turning increasing to meditation and moving from head space, which I still think is a brilliant entry point for people to working with practitioners on a one-on-one basis. And also almost, I guess, slightly freer tools like insight time and where you can start exploring perhaps practitioners that you like or certain disciplines that you like to do with different meditation approaches. So yeah, for me, it’s something I’m really glad I’ve found and it something I really advocate for as well, especially with younger people, I think it’s an area that’s really interesting on the back of the pandemic. And again, there’s a really interesting body of research increasing around the impact that meditation can have.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s huge. Actually the research is everywhere, which is fascinating and also different types of meditations yield very different benefits, which is fascinating. Before we get on to my quick round of earned questions. Is there anything else that you’d like to add that you haven’t mentioned for our listeners?
Rebekah Brown:
I think the key thing that I always say about menopause is that it is a biochemical life stage that we should be informed, encouraged to explore as early as possible because if you do, there’s absolutely no reason why, midlife and beyond can’t be everything you hope and want it to be. And I think if we can have these discussions with optimism and with faith, that there are tools and solutions and there’s Western practices, there’s ancient practices, there’s all kinds of things that you can do then you should be flourishing. And I think that’s probably the key message whenever I talk about menopause as I want to leave people with is it can be really tough. And a lot of the time we end up talking about the tough stuff, because it’s important to do that, to ensure that it’s less tough for others. But the thing to keep front of mind, I think is the more informed you have, the more agency we have as women over our health and our wellness, the better our aging process would be.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much. Now I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I’m not going to ask every question because otherwise you’ll be here for an extra half an hour, but let me maybe ask you this. Tell me about an act of kindness that has touched your life.
Rebekah Brown:
I actually find acts of kindness all the time. I get incredibly moved from a commercial and business perspective from reviews. I always find it fascinating that people take the time to feedback and I’m always incredibly grateful for that. And I think one of the early indicators for me of just the general spirit that’s inherent, I think when women come together was when we first started the business, we did a survey to try and find out what people’s experience with menopause was, was mine unique and particularly tough or was this common? What kind of tools and practices had women found that worked and what hadn’t? And one of the questions I always asked in the survey was what do you wish your younger self had known about the stage of life?
Rebekah Brown:
And what we found with that research was that the majority of people filling it in were women post-menopause, so women much, much older, so not just recently post-menopause, but maybe in their ’60s and ’70s. And what I just thought at the time was how generous and kind is that? That you have women who are going to get nothing from the work and the search that I’m doing because they’ve had their menopause and they’re driven to take 10 minutes out of their day to their own experiences so that others can learn from it and hopefully not have the same, but that for me was just so kind and so generous. I’m often struck actually by how older women will look back at younger women to help them find the way. And if you ask people what motivates them now in the menopause space, it’s often about their daughters or their sisters, or the younger peers they see coming up, maybe in the classroom that they’re wanting to change for. We can be incredibly selfless, generous group when we come together. I like that, always warms my heart.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s so lovely. Very different line of question. What is your favorite word? And I should explain a word that you would tattoo on yourself.
Rebekah Brown:
Really funny actually because I’ve been thinking about tattoo. I’ve been tattoo curious for a long time. I think actually if I was tattooing something, because I have been given this a lot of thought, it wouldn’t be a single word actually it probably a phrase, there’s a couple phrases I have front of mind. One is if not for you, which is a line from my wedding song by Bob Dylan and the other one is the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs, which would be really long for the tattoo. So probably not very practical, but again, there’s another line from a song I love, which is just about how small things can make a massive impact and bring joy to, good luck to life.
Rebekah Brown:
But my favorite word and I will shut up in a minute. My favorite word is concur. I just think we should use it more when someone says they concur. For me, it’s one of the most joyful things because it’s just so life-affirming to have someone believe in something so much, even though only say to me, but when someone says to me, “I concur,” it just makes me very happy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So it’s a really good, I love all of that. Great answer. What song best represents you?
Rebekah Brown:
Oh my goodness. That’s a really tough one. What song best represents me? Well, there’s quite a few that I love for the way that they represent midlife enjoying. One of my favorites is by The Vaccines, which is, I don’t know what the title is, but it’s put a Wetsuit on. If you Google that one. And it’s really about the shock of suddenly realizing that you’ve aged and the lyrics, something like put a wet suit on, let your hair go long, and just get out into the way and just enjoy yourself and live a little. So that’s probably that song I would use.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, that’s amazing. What did you want to be when you were a little girl?
Rebekah Brown:
I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. And to your point earlier about the honesty I’ve learned to maybe live with a little bit, I think I probably took a path that was expected of me rather than really learning what I wanted to be. But I also think that the path of life is so different for most of us, from what we expect that it really is about saying yes to things you’re curious about. So I think I probably wanted to be an actress, but I’m not sure whether that was really a genuine desire or whether that was put in my head. And I definitely wasn’t good enough to be an actress. I did go to university and do drama and English, but there was no way that I was going to end up on the stage. I was much more comfortable again, analyzing behavior and being behind the scenes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Interesting. Yes, but there was a creative aspect to it though, and you understand the performance as well, and you’re pretty eloquent as an entrepreneur. So I’d say this served you in some way.
Rebekah Brown:
Maybe.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What would you say to your younger self, if you could send yourself a message?
Rebekah Brown:
It probably, and I don’t know if you’d listen in youth, but I think I felt very uncomfortable in my own skin, really until I was a mother interestingly and I was a mother relatively young and outside the the peer group that I was in. It was young and it was unusual and it was tricky, but I think I always wanted to be and look different, and it was such a waste of energy and time. And I wish that my younger self had known that actually the interesting thing about people is their character. And I think that’s a really hard lesson to learn. I wish I learned that one sooner.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Rebekah Brown:
It probably is advice around learning. I think one of the benefits of working in research is that you become a master of something for about two months usually if you’re working in a industry where you’re being given briefs to have an opinion on something. So you go very, very deep into an area and then you move on. And actually for me, as a dyslexic, I’ve forgotten about it about two months later, but I used to love going read deep into things. And I think, one of the best bits of advice I was given by my grandparents who are lifelong learners, was to keep learning, to stay curious, to keep exploring stuff and to keep challenging preconceptions and finding stuff out. And I think that’s a huge benefit to us as we age as well to stay curious.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Beautiful. What book is next to your bed or on your desk?
Rebekah Brown:
Next to my bed actually is when I’ve been reading with the mind to understand a little bit about how some of the more famous characters in our world operate. And I think it’s called because I knew that you were going to ask me this question, it’s called something like, excuse the language because this is the title of the book, Bloody Brilliant Partnerships. It’s all about the relationships that sometimes occur behind the scenes that we know less about. So for example, one of my favorite chapters in it talks to the relationship between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez not their romantic relationship, but actually how Baez was instrumental in Dylan’s success. And just those moments where people meet and something happens as spark happens. It changes the trajectory of someone else’s life and often they’re not giving credit for it. So that’s the book that’s by my bed at the moment.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wonderful. Who is one person that you think we should all know about, but don’t?
Rebekah Brown:
The person I thought to when you shared this is a question in advance the call was actually poet called Carol Ann Duffy, which some people may be familiar with depending on what schooling system they went through and whether they were in the UK, because occasionally her books are on the syllabus. She’s brilliant in that she’s a feminist who just tells stories from the female point of view. One of her anthologies, which is one of my favorites is called The World’s Wife. And it retells all of those stories, whether it’s about Midas for example, but she tells it from the wife’s point of view, the frustration of this man suddenly touching everything and it turns to gold and so in a very humorous way. She also writes beautiful poetry about life. That’s just cuts through all of the false metaphors around love and relationships. So I’ve always really enjoyed the way that she uses language. So yeah, if you haven’t discovered her, she’s definitely worth a read.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I will go and check her out right now. And my last question you is what brings you happiness?
Rebekah Brown:
I think happiness is interesting, is it? I’ve learned not to try and manifest it. I think that’s probably my other learnings of menopause and I think what I’ve found is that it’s often time, tight time brings me happiness, time to actually pause and just be in the moment is as simple as that. And that can be any type of moment. It can be standing on the edge of a football pitch, talking to football mums. It can be grabbing a coffee with my husband. It’s just that opportunity to just be in those conversations rather than with your mind halfway somewhere else. I think that’s what really makes me happy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mindfulness.
Rebekah Brown:
Mindfulness indeed. Yeah, maybe you’re right. You’re absolutely right.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much for your time. It was such an enlighting conversation. I hope we get to talk again soon. I wanted to ask where can people find you and find out more about MPowder?
Rebekah Brown:
Thank you. So probably the easiest route into our community actually is Instagram because it’s a collection of almost micro blogs that we post there. We use the platform quite differently to a lot of companies. I think it’s just where we go to share stuff that we find interesting to feedback on stories, to tell you about events and things that are happening, but it’s just a little window into the community itself. And then if you are more curious, you can head to our website, which is www.mpowder.store. And that’s really where you can find out about our products.
Rebekah Brown:
And then the final environment that we have is a closed space where everyone’s welcomes. You just have to knock on the door and that’s on Facebook and it’s the powder room. So if you search MPowder, the powder room, you’ll find that community which you just need to request to join. And that’s where all of the workshop videos sit, where the conversations amongst our community take place, where we ask your advice in terms of what we want to be doing next as a group of women. So that’s the heart and soul of the business, is on Facebook.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. Well, thank you again. I hope you have a fantastic rest of the day and I’ll be looking forward to seeing you and your company continue to break new ground.
Rebekah Brown:
Thank you so much for having on, it’s been really lovely having a chat.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks. Take care.
Rebekah Brown:
You too. Bye.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks again to Rebekah for being my guest on the show, you can find everything about MPowder online mpowder.store and on Instagram or Facebook @mpowderstore. Hey, friends and listeners, thanks again for joining me today. And as usual you’ll find links from today’s topics in the show notes, you can also find all of the episodes from Out Of The Clouds at outoftheclouds.com, where you can also sign up to receive bimonthly emails on hot topics, books, podcasts and other things I enjoy. And that I think you will too.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And of course, all of them with a touch of mindfulness. If you want to hear more from Out Of The Clouds, go to your favorite podcast app and click on the subscribe button or even leave a review. It’s always great to hear from you. If you’d like to connect, you can get in touch with me @annvi on Twitter, Anne Muhlethaler on LinkedIn and @_outoftheclouds on Instagram. So that’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you’ll join again next time. And until then, be well, be safe. Take care.