Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself

Show Transcript: Approx 25 Min Total Episode.

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Lissette Holland Hey, hey, hey, Dr. Lisa here. So excited. After a two-year hiatus, for those of you who are new to owning her health, thank you very much for being here. Those of you who are not new and carrying over and watching this again, it's been two years, actually two and a half years.

for this owning, you know, for my Owning Her Health podcast. And I wanted to come out today. This is a very intentional day, March 25th, 2026. I wanted to record it live because that's always when my energy, that's the best way for me to record these podcasts, the interactions, the conversations. So why are we returning now? Well,

I wanted to one, reintroduce myself in this and explain that. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm a former clinician and I kind of came on the scene as the belly guru, but really through my mentoring, the belly guru was fairly local. It was a radical at the time 2005 coming in with a direct access boutique practice by by I wasn't even a doctor of physical therapy at that point. It was just a regular licensed physical therapist because the doctor didn't even come in till about 2000. We did not bring up the profession to a doctorate I think till about 2010 nine somewhere in there and then I did, I upgraded and went back to school and filled in all the gaps. But prior to that I came into the world of allied health through athletic training.

(02:17.998) BLue Ocean Markets

My undergrad was in that I have a bachelor's in that sports medicine was working with Division one athletes, semi professional high performance work, a good 10 years in New York City orthopedics worked for top hospitals Mount Sinai, Saint Luke's Roosevelt. I did the gamut of you know, pediatric, through geriatric, through my career. And when I saw what was going on with the economics up in New York, I decided to move out. And my intention was to move to a direct access state, which means that I did not need a doctor's prescription before I could do my practice, before I could use my licensure, which is how it should be.

Which is how community health should be. And so I was very intent in finding a direct access state and North Carolina was one of them. And so we moved down to the Charlotte Metro area in 2004, we opened up the Belly Guru in 2005. It was meant to take a 180 degree pivot into women's health because of my own experience despite all I knew and all my awards and my top recommendations of by everybody I worked with and all of my good accolades and you know I went through maternity very naive and I realized the stuff my mother had been going through at the time.

I didn't know this, but by the time I actually opened up a radical ( for the Charlotte Market of 2005) integrative community-based, physical therapy office, under a theme of yoga therapy. I knew I was in the Bible, but I did not realize that the second top banking town in America was so behind the number one banking town in terms of thinking of yoga as like a demonic kind of thing.

So that was an interesting know your audience moment, but I was naive and I'm glad I was because I didn't realize how revolutionary I was. It ended up me being 10 years in direct access cash-based wellness practice, integrative, making myself the gatekeeper, really flattening the hierarchy of medicine and taking it into a horizontal with the other professions that I brought into my center.

(04:42.504) I did not know that I couldn't do it. And therefore I could. And so I became a mentor, a peer mentor, quite organically when everyone else started waking up to the fact that you could just say the heck with what the insurance company was doing in terms of gatekeeping, the heck with the fact that doctors might have found you competitive and been owning your clinics and orthopedics, physician-owned practices, where you didn't have the control over your profession. And I just did it, naively and therefore first and fast. And that's a lot of what I feel now with the AI movement.

There were no rules against certain things. So therefore I could do it until someone would stop me.

If I Had Had AI Back Then

Unfortunately, AI right now is very, very dangerous to take that same mentality as entrepreneurship. So there's a lot to say. I opened up a My Body Brand Academy. It was a brand academy for my peers. I was focused from the women's health aspect to a women's empowerment aspect, which was what the core work of my center was. It was lifestyle, it was coaching. was all the things that I didn't realize were in 10 years gonna be the way the rest of my peers would finally welcome. I didn't know how long it was gonna take. I knew it was a trend, that's why I went on it. I just didn't know that they were gonna do such a radical thing and it was gonna end up being economics. so economics, health policy, health politics, economics, the academia, all of that is very intertwined.

And I'm gonna be bringing that into my show now. We're gonna move a lot more from the symptoms and the place that I was working at when I introduced this show back in 2016. We were hopeful the US was gonna, it was October of 2016. We were very hopeful the US was gonna finally catch up to the rest of the world and the reorganizing world order and vote in our first woman president.

(07:04.906) It served a purpose to connect me and connect my audience with other women who had also flipped their pain and turned into a passion project and a career they loved, particularly in healthcare, initially in healthcare. then I brought in towards the pandemic, I was already starting to bring in the other medicine women that I was seeing leaving corporate, leaving finance, leaving academics to basically do what I did, which was make sure that I was gonna be the mom I wanted to be, along with being the, you know, have the career ladder, have the leadership support, because once you leave the system, everyone knows once you have kids, you have a mommy tax, a huge mommy tax here in America. I had gone through my own health stuff, and that's what got me into women's health, like I said, particularly around the pregnancy and maternity care, which I believe is a two-year window.

Why To Push The Next Era of Centering Moms Again

Because my philosophy was if mommy's happy, then everyone else can get the care and the support and everything she learns for herself. But I needed to catch her before she was busy being distracted again. And as much as I wanted to speak to the women and talk to the women in terms of their health and owning their health, a lot of them didn't listen to me.

Third wave feminism, we have a lot to say. We have so much to say. And they wouldn't come to me. They wouldn't end up on my treatment tables and on my yoga mats and working with my mommy coaches and anybody like that until they broke. And at that point we're already downstream to the point that they're so overwhelmed. And again, I see the parallel now with AI and I see it with flooding the zone with what's happening politically in the U S but I see it from a symptoms model, but also from the systems model. Luckily I am not normal neuro normative. And so I have always seen things from the big system, which is why I could connect the dots a decade plus ahead of my peers and just go into direct primary care, physical therapy and allied health. Meaning if I could have gotten a nurse, I would have gotten a nurse on board. I hadn't grown big enough yet to do that. I tried to get an OB-GYN to think about it, but she just couldn't, although she was one of my clients.

(09:26.838) She couldn't fathom in her head because of the way the system worked. And she was so indebted to the insurance companies for how she was gonna get paid. And now we see all the mass exodus 13 years later with direct primary care physicians, right? They finally realized what PTs were doing, what OTs were doing, what speech pathologists were doing. And we're seeing it go down the rabbit hole. So there's a lot bigger audience to hear this conversation in terms of where we are now outside of just the entrepreneurial and opening up our own little utopias, we can't do that anymore. We need to start networking the little utopias that we did opened up in our little clinics and centers. And in 2023, I thought we were kind of like past that. The clinical in me was being phased out. I was done with that, especially post pandemic.

And I really wanted to work on leadership support because a lot of the branding and the positioning and the opening up of markets that I had done with the, you know, close to 300 women at that point, I didn't see that carry over because I realized we really hadn't worked out some of the power dynamics. And it wasn't a matter of confidence and imposter syndrome and everything else getting shoved down these women's throats. It was honestly being able to

Neuro-regulate and keep your momentum while the chaos is happening. And so a lot of them reverted back into their cocoons and their little utopias. if they did, they didn't utilize a lot of the things I had told them, which would have positioned them through the pandemic a lot stronger. And we've seen a big drop off of yoga studios. We've seen a big drop off of just yoga therapists in general.

(11:30.472)

The New Day for Yoga Therapists...and other Allied Health Pros

There's been a big...reshuffle on there and it's really pulling us all up. You know, like it looks bad, but it's really pulling us all to really step into our authority. And so, you know, the 2025 version of the U.S. began calling me really big and strong. Back to that maternal intent, meaning that if if mama can get this, if she could figure this out.

And when I'm talking about owning her health righ