where you live, six to seven hours of sunlight
during the winter in the French Alps where you live.
But how far is the other location
that you're talking about that has zero sunlight
for a couple of months?
It's not far actually, it's across the other side
of the valley, which is why it gets,
it doesn't get the direct sunlight.
So yeah, two or three months,
the village doesn't actually get the direct sunlight.
Now is that like an hour drive or like a 30 minute?
20 minutes, you have to go down to the valley.
So it's 20 minutes, yeah, from here.
You can see it from our village
across the other side of the valley,
but you have to go down and then back up.
Wow, that's crazy.
Like I'm fascinated by the idea
of what a culture would be like
where you have two cities that live so close together
that have completely different realities
for three months at a time.
That's, I mean, I'm in Texas and in New Braunfels,
Austin is right in between Austin and San Antonio
and Austin is called Sunnyside USA
because we never really lose any sunlight.
Kind of feels like it, but we never really do.
We have however many hours, like my days are full.
I like it that way.
But man, that's fascinating.
What do you think that has an effect on health?
Oh, sure, definitely I noticed it.
If we have a couple of weeks
where we don't have much sun
because we've got so much cloud cover, it's snowing.
I definitely notice a difference in mood.
So yeah, I definitely think it has an impact on health.
I've heard this and I'm not a doctor
so I don't pretend to know everything.
I think you can once you're a doctor.
But I've definitely, and I've seen it myself,
I think all of us when we're in darkness for a long time,
we put blackout curtains up,
they can have a big effect on you.
And as we're gonna be talking about Hashimoto's disease
or what do you call Hashimoto's disorder?
What's the proper term for it?
Yeah, disease disorder, yeah.
Any of the above, all the above?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
We're gonna be talking about your recovery path
and what you found as a resource to yourself
and how to sort through information.
This applies to all industries, visionaries.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about business or law
or how to get advice from doctors and your health,
getting great advice and knowing the source
you're getting it from is a constant challenge of life.
And there are principles that can help you with that.
We'll be talking about it today.
First step though on that, what are three resources, Helen,
that you recommend to visionaries, leaders,
entrepreneurs out there?
Okay, they're all probably related to my industry.
So all health side of things.
The first one that I would recommend that any woman
should be reading is the Hormone Repair Manual
by Lisa Brydon.
Very good.
Yeah, it's something that I've read recently.
It's all about basically balancing your hormones
coming into perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause.
And just the lack of education that we get on this area.
Obviously half of the population experience this
in their life, but we have no education
and we're just left to deal with it in the dark basically.
So yeah.
That's difficult.
Dr. Seth Yates as a business partner of mine
for ablehealth.us and his primary focus is on helping women
with, I'm just gonna say such matters again,
I'm not a doctor, but he's definitely a wealth of information
and a great resource, great guy.
So I would love to make sure that he gets that book
to see if he's read it, see what his thoughts are
would be, I always like to pull things together,
pull resources together.
So what else you got?
What are two more?
Okay, so I've got another one that I found really helpful
when I was probably going through my recovery phase.
It was actually one of his podcasts I was listening to
that really opened my eyes on what was going on
with my health.
He has a book, it's Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
and his book is Feel Better in Five.
He has various books, but this one talks about habit stacking
and like five minute habits that you can add to your diet
and lifestyle that can make huge impacts
to your health basically.
And when you struggle with chronic illness,
trying to make big changes can be far too much initially
when you're really chronic ill.
So those kinds of small habits can be the difference
whether somebody succeeds or not.
And it's something I recommend quite often to my clients.
I love that it's hard enough to make big changes as it is
when we're motivated, when we're healthy,
when we don't have the burden of a massive health problem.
So that sounds like again, a phenomenal book
because if you can add that to your repertoire,
whether you're healthy or unhealthy,
like that's gonna make big impacts for your life.
Good one.
What else?
What's another one?
I'm sorry.
Okay, the last one, I'm only part way through at the moment
so I haven't completed it.
It's a book by Dr. Lisa Moscone called The XX Brain.
And again, this is looking at the female brain basically
and how it differs from the male brain
and especially in relation to how our hormones impact it
and how research really hasn't been done in this area
until basically she started doing this research.
We were pretty much assumed just to be small men
and that kind of our physiology works exactly the same
and that is showing all those structurally,
it looks the same how the male and female hormones impact
your brain and the rest of your body
can make a big difference on kind of your health.
And one of the areas she's looking at
is looking at dementia,
which increases substantially for women
when they hit menopause,
whereas men don't have that same increase in risk
unlike women.
Wow, that's a hot topic right now.
I mean, especially, I don't know if I should say especially,
in the United States, it's an extremely hot topic,
the whole gender aspect and men, women equality
and where people are going with that.
So, you know, reading of somebody,
if you're in that dog fight, all right,
and you're listening in and you wanna be well prepared
to stand your ground on what you believe
and how you feel, then a book like that would be one
that I would highly recommend diving into
because there's not many experts
that are studying the brain.
And I've heard of one who's studying it
with that intent of understanding the difference
of the female and the male anatomy.
So that's exciting.
Prior to the research,
it was just assumed that that increased dementia risk
was because women live longer than men,
although it's only by a couple of years.
That was just the theory that, well, women live longer,
so they have an increased risk of dementia.
That is actually showing not to be the case.
It's down to the play of the hormones
with the brain chemistry.
Wow, fascinating.
All right, well, we're gonna be diving in deep
to Helen Maliburn's vision right after we come back
and we'll be diving into the challenge
of seeking expert guidance into deceptive world as well.
We'll see you on the other side.
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm Jackson Kellum, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome into the episode of Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Kellum,
founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I'm excited to have Helen Maliburn on the show today.
She's a recovery specialist for people who suffer
with Hashimoto's disease.
And that is, you know, it was an interesting pre-show
because I was like, you know, is this gonna tie in
to everything that the audience is going to want to hear
and are we gonna learn?
Yes, always.
In fact, I never really have that full doubt.
It's just kind of like a back voice far in the distance
because every single person who is out there
building a vision to serve others
and trying to help establish a path for others
to have an easier life, to have, I didn't say an easy life,
an easier life or more direct access to education
and principles of leadership and beyond
is somebody who really could qualify for this show.
And, you know, as I got to know her story
and really I drill these guests, by the way, beforehand,
I asked them very, very hard, uncomfortable questions
and to see if they're leader enough to hang
in an environment like this
and to hang after the fact when they're hopefully
sharing more wisdom with you
as you decide to connect with them.
So with that said, I'll bring Helen on in just a minute.
There's a couple more resources we wanna point out
for those of you who are new to the show.
We've always got these sponsors up here.
One of them is The Law Spot with Melissa Gray.
She came on the show and I actually kind of wanted
to block her from coming on the show
because I don't like most attorneys.
I find them kind of deceptive.
Mainly I find them disinterested in what I'm doing
or what their customers are doing.
And I find them to also be very condescending.
They don't know how to explain what they do.
So I almost canceled it.
I'm glad I didn't.
I found the one attorney I've met
who is an absolute nurturer at heart
and who loves to help explain things in simple capacity.
And when it comes to legal, that's super important.
Too many entrepreneurs out there
do not have legal protection.
And those who do are often overpaying for it
and they don't really know what they're paying for.
And I think that's disturbing.
And it's not surprising that when our legal departments
are weak, that 96% of business owners
are losing within 10 years.
My hope is that you take my advice
from my personal standpoint of go interview Melissa Gray.
Go interview other attorneys too,
but get yourself some legal counsel that can protect you.
Maybe you can avoid the $20,000 trademark lawsuit
we had at Restaurant Connect.
We already own the brand name
and we still had to pay $20,000 for that legal suit
because we didn't really know what we were doing
in terms of protecting ourself legally speaking.
Save yourself from those experiences before they happen.
Then there's Recovery Unplugged.
This is not a client, but Andrew Sosin,
the founder, did come on the show.
And I was so impressed with what he's built
for addiction treatment and recovery.
And I know how widespread the need is for this
because so many people aren't happy in their life
without the external distractions around them.
I mean, they'll be happy if they're at a football game
or they'll be happy if they have alcohol
or they'll be happier or at least centered and tolerate life.
But that's not a way to live long-term, even short-term.
They have a program where you can get help 24 seven
on their hotline.
You can call their hotline, get advice,
maybe advice for a friend or family member.
There's somebody in your life
who is going through a hard time
and suffering from internal turmoil.
My hope is that you use this resource to help them.
Andrew, by the way, I'm gonna actually disqualify this
for some people out there,
but super qualify it for those who get this.
I'm a big fan of Tony Robbins personally.
And Andrew's been to the Tony Robbins program
22 years in a row to the live event.
And that also just kind of exposes for me
the types of leadership that you can anticipate.
His 400 plus team members that he guides,
he cares about tremendously.
That was also evident in his pre-show interviews.
So I can't say enough about it
because if any of you are hesitant about receiving help,
but you kind of know you might need it
or might have the, you know, might want to explore it,
it might change your life.
And that's my hope for you.
Then there's the water project.
The water project is something
that I can't personally relate to,
but that's because I've had access to this water
my entire life.
I've been thirsty, but I've never been without.
These individuals, millions of individuals
go without clean drinking water every day.
And they have to walk sometimes three to five miles
to a source that is far less than clean.
It's not something that we would ever touch
probably personally for our own water needs.
And that breaks my heart, but it also reminds me
we have an opportunity to step up.
You can see the map on the screen shows some locations
where they're actually building water projects.
And you get to see the outcome of the particular project
that you commit to.
So if you give $5 to a specific outcome,
they'll actually send you an email
of the proof of what was done.
And you get to understand that behind that $5 you gave,
you just made a generational impact to this community
that's probably going to affect them for 10, 15 years,
maybe beyond.
And usually it's in the range of 230 to 600 people
that you've helped provide that water source to.
So if you're in a position to financially give to that,
please consider the value of making that impact
for our world.
And if you're not in a position to give back,
if my words inspired you to think of somebody
who would say, man, that's cool,
or, oh, I bet they'd really like this,
do us a favor, do us all a favor and tag that individual
so they can take a look at the water project as well,
or send them the link for that initiative.
If you have another initiative
you'd rather see us talk about,
there's another need out there that you feel
is more important, more pressing, or more aligned with you,
please drop that in the comments,
because it's not a competition.
We are able to do a lot of different things to help people.
Maybe I'll talk about that initiative on the show.
I love your advice for what it looks like.
Maybe I'll even contribute to it myself.
For me, that's a matter of meditation and prayer.
And we're always happy though to try to spread the word
and make sure that the 8 billion people in the world,
most of them needing an extreme amount of help,
we gotta do more to step up and do that.
And that starts right here for me with this microphone.
So thanks for hearing us out on that.
Without further ado, let's dive into
Helen Maliburn's initiative for helping women
and others overcome their health challenges and beyond.
Helen, thank you so much for joining me
on Vision Pros Live today.
You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
So diving into the first question,
what is your vision for those that you serve?
Basically health.
I want those who are struggling to recover their health.
I want them to be able to live the life
that they want to be able to live
and not the one that they've been forced to live
because of their illness.
And obviously I've personally experienced that.
I want to empower those women out there
to show them that they can turn their health around.
It is possible and that a lot of it they can do themselves.
Awesome. Let's dive into that.
So dive into your story, Helen.
You didn't have the health that you wanted
and where did that start?
Feel free to walk us through that five minute cap, let's say.
Okay.
So between there though,
I'd love to know everything we can about your story,
what that was like, how it felt, and I'll shut up.
Okay.
I would say my health started to decline
initially at university.
So I'd be 21 and I had glandular fever.
I think it's referred to as mono in the US.
Were you healthy up to that point, like normal life?
Yep. Healthy fit.
I played a lot of sport.
I was very competitive.
I was always on the go.
I worked, I studied, kind of obviously
typical student lifestyle.
I went out plenty as well.
So there was lots of exam stress,
lots of lifestyle stress, maybe not eating very well
because I was on my own for the first time.
So there was a lot of contributions.
There was grief from previous family members
and friends who passed away.
There was a lot of contributing factors,
but the tipping point would have been
the glandular fever.
And at the same time, I had a vaccination for hepatitis B.
And obviously I'm not saying that that was what triggered it,
but I was saying the whole picture, all of it together,
tipped my health over the edge.
And I had several months where I really struggled
with my, with fatigue, with digestive issues.
And then I started to get back on top of it
and just went back to life as normal.
However, my health was never quite the same.
And I would say that it just started to gradually creep up
on me that the digestive problems became more and more
often and lasted for long periods of time.
The fatigue came in, mood regulation issues
started to show up.
And I was eventually diagnosed with celiac disease.
That took about six years to get up to that point
of constantly going back and forth to the doctors,
not getting the answers.
My results looked fine.
And I was just sent away and basically told
there was nothing wrong.
I had abnormal thyroid tests at that point.
They were retested six weeks later and they were fine.
However, what I know now is that the tests that were tested
really weren't sufficient and my antibodies
should have been checked for Hashimoto's,
they weren't checked.
So I had another eight years of completely declining health
and really, really struggling at the end of chronic fatigue,
chronic pain, brain fog that left me slurring when I spoke,
that I struggled to find my way around places that I knew.
So I stopped driving, plus I just found
I'd turn up at a junction.
I'd know where I needed to be,
but couldn't work out how to get there,
even though I'd been doing it for years.
I'd forget whole conversations had happened.
It would be like they'd never existed.
It wasn't bits and pieces that had disappeared.
The whole conversation would be gone.
My mood was really badly affected.
Obviously I could feel, I felt different.
I knew I was not myself.
I wasn't able to do any of the things that I'd been doing.
So any of the sports were off the table.
I'd moved to the French Alps for the skiing
and the snowboarding.
I couldn't do any of that.
My social life went out the window.
Work was extremely, extremely difficult.
And the only reason that I managed to stay working
was because I worked with my husband
and he was able to pick up a lot of the slack for me
when I really struggled.
So I was finally diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
It didn't really make much difference, the medication.
Two years later, I was diagnosed
with autoimmune B12 deficiency.
And then two years after that,
I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
And I was just feeling worse and worse.
And I couldn't work out obviously
why none of the medication that was being given
seemed to make any difference.
And a friend actually brought me a nutritional therapy session
for my 40th birthday.
And that is where my health started to turn around.
19 years.
Yeah.
And how many doctors in 19 years?
Oh gosh.
I would say over a dozen different doctors
I've probably seen in specialists.
And I imagine there was research beyond that,
in all sorts of efforts to try to figure out
what else you could do.
Yeah.
19 years of illness struggles and no reprieve.
And I would say 10 of that were quite severe.
Were quite debilitating.
I didn't have a normal life at all.
And the challenge with that is doctors,
they're hoping for a solution, right?
They're supposed to instill hope too.
We don't want doctors to not do that.
But the challenge of that is, hey, you'll be okay.
Or hey, you can make the most of this.
And that discourages looking for new advice and progress.
So before I go on to the next question,
how do you inspire somebody in that situation
to gain hope and to keep looking for an answer?
How did you find the ability to keep going
for that next solution?
I studied biomedical sciences at university.
So I have a background in science and that biomedical side.
So I was not willing to kind of be put off
that I just had to get used to it.
And this was my new normal.
I just couldn't deal with that.
I've always been quite curious.
I'm quite stubborn.
And I wanted to find ways of improving it.
I didn't think I could recover my health
to the extent that I have done,
but I knew that I could improve it.
And so I was reading and researching a lot.
Obviously once I did the nutritional therapy sessions
for a couple of months,
I started to see a lot of improvements.
And that then pushed me down that pathway of,
okay, what else can I learn?
And that's when I started to study
the actual nutrition myself.
Okay, so a huge factor that I see in there
that some people can oversimplify is the education.
The education factor.
You had educated yourself.
You were already on that path
where you'd understood the scientific method.
And you had understood that
if you keep making adjustments and changes,
and you may find a solution to the process,
you call it stubborn, I call it persistence.
And there's a value and a virtue
tied in and associated with that resilience,
as well as an element that I caught.
That's awesome.
We might return to the story a little bit.
I'm gonna, for the sake of the show and the general themes,
what's your vision for yourself moving forward?
At the moment, it's just me in my business.
So it's obviously very small,
but my vision is to reach as many people,
as many women struggling with chronic health issues,
particularly Hashimoto's as possible,
spread the words that there is things
that you can do yourself,
that you can recover your health.
And that with a little bit of help,
you can get back to feeling like yourself again,
and not having to compromise
on basically the quality of your life
and what that consists of.
That's amazing.
Well, that's my goal with Dr. Seth Yates, by the way.
That's what we're building at Able Health.
We wanna build the same type of,
we wanna build the ability for anybody
who needs a naturopath in the world
to be able to have access to that for free online.
And that's a massive undertaking and vision,
and we're excited about it.
We gotta find people like you,
as well in the puzzle to pull that type of a vision off.
So no matter how small it is right now with where it's at,
the opportunity for where we're going is clear,
and I can see why yours would be as clear as it is too.
So I'm excited for you.
Whether we work together or not on that,
I am so excited for you.
Let's make that happen.
So diving into some leadership aspects,
what's the worst leadership experience
that you've ever had in life?
That probably would be back when I was working
for a large pharmaceutical company.
I was one of the supervisors
for a materials testing laboratory
that supplied all the basically material for manufacturing.
And the management decided that we could switch
to lean manufacturing.
So we didn't have as much stock in kind of standing,
waiting for being tested.
However, they hadn't kind of taken into account
that the testing lab ran five days a week,
and manufacturing ran seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
Not having a reserve of materials meant
that manufacturing would then wait
into the batch of materials we were testing.
The amount of pressure that put on the testing lab
that was very small, the amount of kind of disagreements
we had and the lack of listening to,
those who were directly impacted
and how it was gonna actually all work.
Yes, it was a great idea,
but actually the practicalities of it were not amazing,
hadn't been thought through.
Right.
So how long were you working with the individuals
in that testing department prior
to that change taking place?
So those who made the decisions were outside
of the testing lab.
So that was kind of the upper management.
No, no, no, I just mean,
how long had you been working as a team?
Like prior to you.
Okay, a couple of years,
we'd been working together a couple of years.
So you had relationships established.
You guys, you know, you had your status quo, so to speak,
of how things ran.
Then this initiative gets introduced
that was completely independent,
and again, it disrupted everything.
What happened to those relationships
over the coming months and years?
What was the byproduct and the effect of that
on y'all as a team?
Or was the team relationship unaffected by the change?
It did affect it to some extent.
They switched us from kind of Monday to Friday
to seven days a week.
They split the team in two,
and we basically went to shift work.
So we did 12 hour shifts.
So it did directly affect the team
because we were now more or less two teams rather than one.
Did it, I mean, did anybody quit because of it,
or did everybody stay strong?
Did it hurt your relationships internally?
Was there more fighting?
I'm just, again, I'm not trying to plant a seed
one way or the other.
Maybe you guys were all happier, you know,
but it is good to see how change affects teams.
And that, yeah, go ahead.
I think it actually unified us more than anything,
more than kind of,
because obviously we were the ones under the pressure.
We were the ones getting the,
well, why can't we have this product?
Why can't we have this material?
You're gonna stop manufacturing.
It's gonna cost us millions.
We're not gonna be able to get the product out the door.
And we generally found we had to stick together
to withstand that pressure.
Okay, so there's a value to pressure at times.
And did that, did you all end up,
did the company end up making the adjustment necessary
to realize the mistake that had been made or no?
I don't know, I left before that.
I moved over to France and started working
in the French Alps and working seasonally.
That was probably one of the contributing factors
to leaving that stress, that pressure.
It was certainly not helping my health at that point.
So yeah, it contributed to my decision to leave.
So it basically caused a divorce
between you and your team members.
Yeah.
So yeah, I would say it had a big effect.
Now it would be different if you just left because, right,
if you were just, but if that was truly
a contributing factor, and again, I'm not trying to,
for visionary's sake, I'm not trying to lead the witness here
and say that this is what happened.
No, if it turned into the best experience ever,
then maybe it wasn't the worst leadership.
But when your team implodes,
like because of a decision that was made,
yeah, that's not good leadership.
It's not great to put people in a high pressure cooker
when people have dynamics of life that matter
and it disrupts your supply chain, all that.
It's important to include your team on decisions like that
is what I'm gathering as the motto,
or what's that called?
The moral of the story.
So moving into the opposite,
what's the best leadership experience that you've ever had?
Ooh, I can't, off the top of my head.
So that's a really difficult one, actually.
I've worked on my own so long now that it's, yeah,
having to kind of throw my memory back to,
it probably comes down to the same issue of
the opposite side of the impact
that the change in manufacturing had.
It actually made our team stronger
and our leadership within the department
actually was stronger.
They were so supportive throughout the whole process.
Yes, we had a huge amount of pressure on us
to approve materials, but they always had our back.
No matter what, they kind of didn't kind of leave us
hung out to dry with any of it.
Whose day?
That was our, the department's managers.
Nice, the department managers.
That is often the case
with these best leadership experiences.
It's in the middle of some of the worst experiences, right?
Where you get to see the best leaders rise up
and hold the fort down and make sure everybody's good.
So thank you for that.
If you're that person in a company,
if you're that leader right now
and your team's going through incredibly difficult realities,
even if it's your fault,
point is you have the opportunity to step up,
maybe own that, be vulnerable about it,
help the team understand you're gonna rally with them
to make the improvements necessary.
That's the name of the game in the startup world often is,
are you going to rally as a leader
and create the success necessary
for people to appreciate working with you
knowing that you always have their back?
So it's a great point.
All right, the hardest question we'll go over.
If this was the last chance
that you had to share a powerful lesson
and you never had another chance to influence the world,
what powerful lesson can other visionaries learn
from your experience?
From my personal experience with my health
or working in the industry that I worked in
was from my health side.
What powerful lesson that you feel will help
the leaders listening and maybe the health oriented,
I mean, you might focus in on just,
I know this is only gonna help one person,
but this is that advice that needs to be said.
That's your vision, not mine.
Okay, so my advice would be,
you need to be your own health advocate.
Nobody else is gonna stand up and fight for you.
Nobody understands the depth
of what you're going through other than you.
Don't be fobbed off with, well, your results look normal.
If you feel that something is wrong, pursue it.
Do not kind of be kind of brushed to one side
and told that maybe it's because you're anxious,
maybe it's because you're stressed or depressed,
or maybe there's nothing wrong with you at all,
all of which I've experienced.
And in each and every case,
there was something wrong with me.
And pursuing it helped me get the diagnosis
and then pursuing the research and the reading
helped me recover my health.
So you do have to stand up for yourself
as uncomfortable as that is at times.
You sometimes have to do that.
I think this leads to an important psychological lesson,
psychology lesson on gaslighting
and how not everybody means to do it.
And we all will have a tendency to gravitate to it.
We can look at that and say, okay, where in my life
am I accidentally gaslighting people?
And what does that mean?
I'm driving somebody to doubt themselves,
their own intuition.
That could be like, you're never gonna get that test
for right, you always fail it.
Selling that to your kids or, gosh, why don't you just
listen to everybody else for once?
Why do you always have to be so stubborn?
You never listen, right?
Those are all forms of gaslighting or manipulation at least
and in ways that prevent people from trusting
and knowledge like truth, what's within.
That often is a guiding compass.
So thank you for that.
You need to be your own health advocate.
I could have learned that before my back surgery.
Serious, I wouldn't have had a back surgery
I had the strength to be my own health advocate.
So the double-edged sword on that,
for those of you who haven't been through back surgery
or you haven't had a health trauma in your life,
the greatest wisdom for your health
probably is gonna come out right now
between the two of our advice.
I was very fortunate to know the head neurosurgeon
of the United States, so to speak.
He was, if Bush, when President Bush was in office,
if he had had a problem with his brain or his spine,
this doctor would have performed the surgery and operation.
So I knew I was in good hands and I was in great hands.
I'm not taking anything away from the doctor.
But when I went and asked that doctor,
should I do the surgery or not?
And he was concerned for me with his understanding
and his understanding was,
I wanna be the best at these surgeries,
I wanna find every alternative solution that I can.
If that had been his focus,
he would have been the worst surgeon in the world.
So I put my decision in his hands
and that was not a good idea.
I should not have done that.
I should have looked at all of my other alternatives
before going into that surgery
because the reparation that was provided
for my spine and back is one that can't be undone.
At least not until new medicine
or new means of inventions come out.
Maybe we'll have super spines in the next 10 years.
That would be cool.
But that said, I love what you shared.
In fact, I'll pull the quote up just for a minute longer.
You need to be your own health advocate.
So as we dive into the challenge of seeking expert guidance
in a deceptive world,
there are people who are truly deceptive
and are out to get you.
And then there are those who just may not have the answer
that's right for you.
I love for your thoughts on that, Alan.
What else can one do to make sure
that they're getting truly expert guidance
and how do you recognize the difference
between guidance that's expert
and maybe somebody who's close,
but what are the red flags that they're not on point?
Okay, I think this is where some of maybe
the social media comes into play these days
and the benefits of that side of things,
especially in the area now of like the Hashimoto's,
the hypothyroidism, there's a lot of support groups.
There's a lot of women who were struggling like I struggled
and are maybe being dismissed
and not getting the treatment they need
because their results look fine at the moment.
So asking in those groups
and finding out people's personal experiences
with other doctors, personal recommendations,
that I find is a huge, huge help.
If somebody's been and had a positive experience
that they've been listened to,
they've been open to not only medication,
different medications for optimizing test results
and also looking at diet and lifestyle,
then sharing those resources with other people
that are struggling, helping those behind you,
kind of pulling them up
so that they can help themselves in future.
So that recommendation is really powerful.
In the UK, I think the thyroid-
I'm gonna use that opportunity
to play devil's advocate on this.
Yeah, okay.
Right, because 100%, you're right.
I love the power of recommendations
and listen to the communication patterns of said individual
and consider as well the person who's recommending this,
how qualified are they to recognize the variables
that are actually working and not.
So what do I mean by that?
Look at the multi-level marketing world
as an instance of that.
If they're recommending essential oils as a solution,
but they also sell essential oils,
then it doesn't mean they're bad,
but you may wanna take that with a grain of salt.
If they're the type of person
who's constantly pushing things on you
or they're like, let's go out to eat,
this is the best place, you've gotta order that,
and they have that controlling personality type
where they don't really care what you think,
once again, consider the wisdom
and checking out a secondary recommendation
and a third as well, validating it with other sources
before just diving in unless it's emergency,
life or death truly, and you have to react now.
Go ahead, Helen, what else you got?
Yeah, definitely, I would agree with that.
You definitely need to do your own research.
So once you've got that recommendation,
do your own research into that person,
into that doctor, that specialist.
Are they right for you?
And do they have the knowledge,
the experience that you're looking for?
And in the area that you're looking for,
what is it that you're personally looking for?
It may be different to what the person
who recommended is looking for.
They may have been great for thyroid removal,
for a surgery, but that's not what you want.
So yeah, definitely do your own research
on the back of those recommendations.
Absolutely, so another element on that
or a story that reminds me of is,
I have a nephew named Caleb.
He's very, very good at rodeo.
He tackles bulls, steers in his rodeo events,
and he rides bulls.
Well, a few years ago, Caleb was bucked off of a bull
and broke his neck in the process.
And certainly it was horrific,
it was terrifying for all of us.
We didn't know if he was gonna die or what.
Well, his dad is a animal chiropractic specialist,
which means he's a chiropractor and then some.
His mom is a health nut to the nth degree.
And they were being told by their local doctor
and specialists that they went to
that he needed surgery immediately,
or he was likely going to die.
It was the absolute extreme of a health risk,
yet they decided to take the time to find the right person.
Caleb's bull riding again.
He is strong, he's buff, he went viral on TikTok
for his win, and he was in the running
for junior MVP of the rodeo nationally.
I don't know if he actually won that or got,
in my eyes, he is the MVP of the world.
But that, I am so grateful, we all are,
that his parents had the foresight
to not succumb to the pressure of the situation,
and that they were in a position financially too,
they've built themselves a life
where they could be there for their son
and provide top quality medical care
for what their son needed,
even though it went against
what most of the professionals were saying.
You have further thoughts on that, Helen?
Yeah, definitely.
I think even if you turn up in a specialist office
and it doesn't feel right for you,
then trust your instincts, definitely.
I love it.
Awesome, we did bring up your website,
and I was too busy talking about my own story,
but I'd love for you to talk to us a little bit
about what you do, how you help people,
and the programs you offer.
Okay, so I'm a qualified nutritional therapist,
and a nutritional health coach.
I work predominantly with Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism,
and the aim is to look at diet and lifestyle
to improve quality of life,
to help them basically get rid of those symptoms,
to improve those symptoms they're struggling with,
so that they can get back to living the life
that they want to be living.
Awesome, and if people want to connect with you,
then what's the best way to go about doing that?
You can do that through my website,
which is hellamalaburn.com.
You can also find me on Instagram,
and again, my Instagram handle is hellamalaburn.
I have a Facebook group,
which I share a lot of my tips, advice,
my personal experience, expertise.
I run free challenges in there and master classes,
basically with the aim to help people move forward
with their recovery.
It's a private group, so it's only for those
who are struggling with those conditions
with Hashimoto's and thyroid issues.
Awesome, those of you who are listening,
we're gonna put these links in the show notes
as action steps so that it's easy for you
to be able to take action and get connected.
I'm a big fan of leaders who understand the value
and take on the risk as well
of actually creating a community environment.
It's not easy to do, not easy to lead,
yet it's one of the greatest ways to help people
know that they're in the right place
and get the type of support that is needed.
So if you are struggling with Hashimoto's,
then you might as well go in there
and see if you're inspired.
If the office environment, right,
if the community feels right and aligned,
then you might be in the right place.
And if you don't, then as Helen said,
continue on your way looking for what you need
and we both wish you well in your recovery efforts.
For those of you who are interested
in sharing your visions,
if you've got something big that you've overcome
and you're on a mission to change the world
because of it, or you're on a mission to,
you have a vision to help your local community,
whatever your vision is, if it's holistic
and it's helping others and do it,
do ourselves, do both of us a favor,
click on the button in the top right corner
that says be our guest.
That's my invitation to you.
Come on the show, come share your vision.
We'd be excited to get to know what you're up to
and talk about it on here.
You never know how many people you'll be able to help,
whether they directly or indirectly benefit
from the conversation at hand.
So everybody have a fantastic rest of your day
and we will see you on the next episode.
Helen, thank you so much for joining us.
This was fantastic.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision.