057 Holistic Wellness with Lauren Lepley

In this week's episode, I am joined by Laura Lepley who is a Transformational Performance Coach aiming to help others experiencing internal confidence, impostor syndrome and burnout to pause, develop a positive mindset and become the change they need to move ahead.

Join us as we discuss the importance of a holistic approach to health, wellness, fitness, and nutrition:

• Holistic wellness, exercise, nutrition, and preventative measures for better health outcomes.
• The importance of mental stimulation and exercise for brain health.
• Self-awareness, and sustainable lifestyle changes.

About Lauren Lepley:

Lauren Lepley is a powerhouse in the health and wellness industry, uniquely blending her expertise as a personal trainer, nutritionist, EFT and Timeline Therapy practitioner, Master NLP practitioner, breath work and somatic practitioner to help others achieve a balanced and resilient life.

Lauren’s journey is about more than just titles; it's a testament to resilience, understanding, and passion. She has navigated her way through personal traumas and climbed the ranks in global operations for eight-figure businesses and startups, acquiring a deep appreciation for the synergy of mind and body in both business and leisure.

Email Lauren on hello@laurenlepley.com or find her on Instagram @laurenlepley_

About Sarah Bolitho:

Sarah Bolitho helps fitness and health professionals develop their careers and grow their businesses by providing specialist training in teaching, assessing, and internal quality assurance, together with qualifications in exercise referral and disability.   

With over 30 years in the health-related fitness and physical activity fields, Sarah has a wealth of experience and knowledge.  She has worked in most roles in the industry from group exercise to personal training but specialised in working with specialist populations.  

For over 25 years Sarah has trained fitness and health professionals to work with clients with long-term conditions, mental health issues, disabilities, older adults and pre/post-natal women.  She has a post-graduate diploma in exercise and health behaviour and extensive training in supporting behaviour change.  She has worked with awarding organisations to develop qualifications and training and with accreditation bodies to endorse high-quality non-regulated training. 

For more about the training and support Sarah offers, visit www.sarahbolitho.com or contact her at admin@sarahbolitho.com.

Follow her on social media
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fabnewlous_active_lives
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fitnesscareer mentor
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbolitho

Transcript

Sarah (00:02.862)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Creating Active Lies with me, Sarah Belitho, and my guest this week, Lauren Lepley. We're talking about wellness, but holistically, so sit tight. Lauren is a powerhouse in the health and wellness industry, and she uniquely blends her expertise as a personal trainer, a nutritionist. She works in EFT, timeline therapy, Master NLP practitioner, breath work, and she's also a somatic practitioner. So she really works holistically to support and enhance every aspect of her client's life. And I think this is something we're going to be seeing a lot more within wellness is this much more holistic approach. So welcome Lauren and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you, how you ended up with this real holistic wellness approach.

Lauren (00:57.605)

Hello, nice to be here. Thanks ever so much for having me. Well, it comes from need and necessity, if I'm honest. And so I haven't always been in the health and wellness space on the practitioner side. I used to be global operations director for different companies within luxury fashion PR, music, industrial design, executive search and but I actually started out in advertising in television and radio on the production side and after many many years I found myself getting quite tired but more than tired suffering very badly with mental health and I had complete an usher burnout and breakdown and so I decided to take a little bit of time and I took myself to Morocco for 16 months. And whilst I was, yeah, it was really lovely. But whilst I was there, I decided I'm not going to let myself get back into that position. And I knew that more people needed to be aware of the things that I had personally come across.

Sarah (02:02.734)

Oh, lovely.

Lauren (02:24.517)

So I returned to the UK to train as a personal trainer. Now I'd always been into fitness and I think I managed to last as long as I did because I did the things I did. You know, I was going to the gym, I was training, you know, I grew up dancing. So I was always used to moving my body. It didn't ever go anywhere. But doing that at the same time as the amount of work that I was doing in the industries that I was doing it in I think that was the only thing that enabled me with the information I have now, the knowledge I have now. I know actually that was the only thing that enabled me to do what I was doing for so long. And when I trained as a personal trainer, I realized that it wasn't enough. I needed more than just that for myself. So I was training CEOs of businesses around London and they needed more than the personal training. So I studied into the nutrition further and.

I was then diagnosed with cancer and so then I dived into even more things and more things and more things and they all just became my way of being. It was the way that I could survive. And so the position I'm in now is it's not necessarily a privilege or luck. It's a place of responsibility that I feel that I have and I am able to use my resilience that has been built for purpose and that purpose is to share the 360 of complete wellness. It's not inside, it's not outside, it's so many moving parts and we can never be truly ourselves in our optimal condition unless all of those moving parts are working. So that's how I got here.

Sarah (04:20.494)

And that's it, isn't it? It's, yeah, it's, you know, losing a car is an analogy. It's, you know, if your tires are rubbish, then the car's not going to function as well. Fuel efficiency won't be as good if the windscreen wipers don't work. And sometimes it's the smaller and less obvious aspects of our lives that actually can make quite a substantial difference to whether we feel good or whether we feel not so good, isn't it? And this is where I think people like, there's a lot of people now are going into a much more holistic approach towards health, wellness, fitness, everything, because we're recognizing that actually there's no point in saying, let's go and do resistance training because it's good for X, Y and Z. You've got to have the nutrition to back it up. You've got to have the balance, you've got it's there's so much more to it than just saying, I'm going to take you running and that's enough. It's not, is it?

Lauren (05:20.805)

It's not and I'm really big on people having a wider scope of awareness and knowledge before they even look at delivering one aspect of the spectrum because everything has a knock -on effect. So yes resistance training is amazing and there are so few people it's not the best thing for but there are people it's not best things for. So you know and I think that sometimes if you are only aware of one part of the cog, you really miss out and it can be quite detrimental for people. So as I was, I found this out in so many different situations that there was more to know. And as we know, the more you know, the more you realize there's more to know. So it becomes a bigger and bigger pot that we're swimming in, which I personally love. And I just, but yeah, it's It's that understanding for me to keep it holistic, you know, holistic, not being woo woo as it sometimes is associated with now. It's like, Oh, it's holistic. It's holistic. So hang on. Holistic just means we're looking at something from every single angle to make sure that we have all the information that we need to prescribe what you need. Um, it's the same with nutrition. It's the same with yoga. It's the same with, you know, yoga can be very dynamic or it can be very restorative. There are so many variations of every single thing. It really does take somebody to have such a wide knowledge to be able to correctly do that prescription service for someone. When we think of the NHS for example, you see this specialist, that specialist, this specialist, that one and that one and that one and if they don't talk, it's not helping anybody.

Sarah (07:16.366)

Yeah, that's it, isn't it? And I think this is something that, you know, we talk about specialists like yourself, like myself, but actually I think the general public are starting to tune in a lot more to think that it not just being one element of their lifestyles or whatever that needs to be fixed, that needs to be changed, that needs to be improved. Whereas it would be, right, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to get stronger. They're now thinking, right, yes, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to get stronger.

But I also need my my cardio fitness to be better. I need more. I need to be more flexible. I need better balance. I need better nutrition. I need better stress management. I need better rest time. I need better quality sleep. And I'm a huge believer. You know, this podcast is all about creating active lives, but activity isn't always harder, faster, stronger, more. Sometimes it's it's positive stillness. Sometimes it's rest. Sometimes it is what you're doing to fuel your active life. There's so much more to it. And I do think that this is, we're starting to wake up to that is, is it's health is holistic, wellness is holistic. It's not just if I go to the gym and run on a treadmill three times a week, I'll be healthy and fit. We're waking up to the fact that it's a lot more than that. Don't you think?

Lauren (08:41.839)

Absolutely. So I have a health and wellness center, so 360 health and wellness center. So, you know, I see it so often people come in and think, oh, you know, they would set goals and they go, so this is what I need to do. And within about six weeks of being there, they are doing all the things because they see and learn and understand it within the community that we have how much more beneficial it is when everything is supported. So they come in to do like, oh yeah, I really like work out really hard. And then, you know, six, eight, 12 weeks later, I find them in meditation and breath work sessions and doing restorative yoga, or people come in on the, on to say, you know, I like yoga and I want to do as many of the yoga sessions, maybe some of the Pilates sessions. And then we find them in women's weightlifting. And I love that.

Sarah (09:09.23)

Yeah. But it's so important, isn't it? And I think there's so much choice available to us now that it's kind of having the opportunity to try things, to see what you like. And to be honest, some people don't like certain forms of activity. They like others. And that's fine, because for me, the more you enjoy something, the more you like doing it, the more you'll do it. But also the more it will open your mind up to what else is out there.

that you might want to do. And I think sometimes people just say, I don't like the gym. And it's, but it's like, there's so much more to the gym than just treadmills or weights. There's a lot more you can do that. And, you know, we, we talk about holistic, we talk about wellness and sometimes our bodies need rest. Sometimes our brains need rest. Sometimes they need to work hard. It, it's having, it's understanding that our body doesn't just need to exercise. It needs to rest.

But the same with our brains, you talk about breath work, about meditation. You know, for a lot of people, that's an element that's missing from true rest. They think, oh, well, I sleep or I watch television, I'm resting. But you're not really. It's that absence of stimuli.

Lauren (10:43.973)

Yeah, there's a big difference. 100%. I often refer to it as the difference between, you know, turning yourself onto standby or switching yourself off. So a lot of the time people are like, Oh, you know, I'm totally switched off. I'm like, no, you're on standby. That little light is still flickering and you're still buzzing. You're still operating. So you haven't yet reached an opportunity for complete restoration. And they're like, what do you mean? So rest is actually quite difficult. If you don't know how to actually rest, it takes some time to get yourself into a space that you enable yourself to fully rest. It's that understanding that actually for full rest, I need my metabolism not to be working. I need for my eyes to be able to be restful. I need, you know, it's the same thing with sleep when you talk to people about lowering your body temperature and having complete darkness so that there's no stimulation going on. People say, oh, wow. And it's a lot of the time there are, it's, it's the basics would be so plentiful for so many people if they understood the basics across the spectrum.

Sarah (11:57.678)

And it's, I'm going to show my age now, but let's go back a few decades. You didn't have the choice of technology, the choice of viewing opportunities and things like that. So you kind of, you know, the TV went off at a certain time of night, not because you decided I don't want to watch TV anymore, because the broadcasting companies shut down. So it wasn't like, yeah, I'm going to stop watching. 

Lauren (12:20.381)

Yes, there's nothing on.

Sarah (12:26.062)

Those of you who are young and listening to this, it literally, it went, the screen just went black and then you had this little, this white dot that got smaller and smaller and smaller and just vanished. And it would be, that's the end of the night. Quite often they used to play the national anthem as well. But that was it. There was no more TV. So it wasn't a question of what else should I watch? I'll change channels. A, there were only one or two channels. B, they shut down at a certain time. But now we've got so much choice. We've got access to everything 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365, 66 days a year. And like you say, it's, we're always on standby. We never switch off. And I think this, it's such an important part of, of that wholeness, isn't it? That whole health approach is recognizing that just because you're not doing anything, doesn't mean you're powered down. It just means you're still on standby. You're still part of, you're still on alert somewhere. And that's, yeah. And this is it.

Lauren (13:19.685)

Yes, exactly that.

Sarah (13:23.31)

So coming back to activity and we know activity is just so important and by activity I don't mean running, I don't necessarily mean lifting weights, I just mean being more active, using your body, moving your body more, getting into different things. Certainly initially it's just learn to enjoy moving before you maybe start doing the more structured stuff. What sort of impact has physical activity had on you and on your clients as part of this wellness?

Lauren (13:51.269)

Wow, such a huge effect. And one of the ways that I've noticed how much of an effect movement has on me was when it was taken away from me. So if we reverse that round, someone who's always active and the detriment that occurs when you take it away. So when I had so many surgeries back to back, so 15 surgeries in 18 months, that was 18 months of doing nothing. And for somebody that was very active, understanding, like finding all the things that became a struggle because I couldn't move. And that was couldn't move. That's not, I couldn't do some heavy, heavy deadlifts. I wasn't doing, I couldn't do much at all. Walking and sitting were my things. And that the stiffness of the body and just the change in mindset and the desires for nutrition and everything else goes with it. We work as like a one system, we forget that we are just one. Everything is just with one working system. So when one bit starts to fall away, everything else does. So when we have to then think that, so when we start building up one thing,

And to be honest, movement is the easiest thing to start with. Waking up in the morning and doing some stretches when you get out of bed. So I do somatic movement every single morning when I get out of bed. Stretch, and I do my things, and then I go for a walk every day before I come in to my building. And my days are more productive. I have more clarity in my mind.

I feel better, I want to eat better things. And I see it with my clients as well. So I see it with the people within Aleafya at the Wellness Centre, the way, you know, one of our members, one member of the month, not because of an aesthetic change that she had made, but because the work that she was doing became so apparent in her everyday life that she won an award at work for her improved quality of work and focus and hitting targets.

Sarah (16:18.04)

It's a knock -on effect, isn't it? When your body's in good shape, and by good shape I don't mean perfect, I mean it's, you know, because a lot of people live with long -term conditions, with all sorts of different things, but it's being in the best condition under the circumstances. It is, it's that knock -on effect to your mind, your mindset, your attitude, your everything really, isn't it? But equally if you're not fueling yourself properly with good nutrition, with rest and things like that, then the physical side of it isn't going to be in good form because it that back up. So it is. It's that it's that holistic. It's that whole person approach that's so important, isn't it? So important.

Lauren (17:01.925)

It really is. So if you were to think about like exercises that people do like the Wheel of Life and you know, or it looks like a pie and you give yourself some numbers one to 10 in each area. If you can concentrate to try and get things as even as possible, that is your Wheel of Life. If you're riding on that Wheel of Life, you want it as least bumpy as possible. 

Sarah (17:09.698)

Yes, yeah, mine looks like an umbrella some of the time. It's just not a circle. Yeah, it's literally just a point. But this is it, isn't it? Do you? So how do you see the wellness industry moving forward? Because, you know, people talk about like the fitness industry, the nutrition industry, the medical fields as if they're separate entities. But how do you see wellness moving forward?

Lauren (17:49.977)

Wellness as a whole moving forward, I think we've got a couple more years yet before it comes as one. I think people are still pushing things in their own direction and thinking that their way is the best way. It's not, I mean, being in the industry, people around me do have that understanding that all the parts are needed to the puzzle, but the people they're supporting don't. So they don't have to widen their knowledge at the moment because people are still working with them.

And I think it's going to take a few more years yet until everyone really understands that how much more they can support their people by widening the spectrum of their knowledge. And I really, I think it's going to carry on growing the way it has been over the past five years. I think we've got that to repeat and I think it will, you know, stay on the trajectory it's on. And I think at that point then, like before we hit 2030, just before then, I think that it's going to be far more collaborative, far more universal, far more intricate studies across the fields as a collective.

Sarah (19:09.838)

Yeah, and if you think within talking about sort of clinical exercise, clinical specialisms and things within fitness, cardiac rehabilitation is well known now. I mean, it's very established. It's a really clear pathway. And it's something that people have some sort of cardiac event or intervention and they will be very quickly seen by medical teams. But they'll also be seen by exercise specialists, nutrition specialists, stress management specialist and things like that, there'll be a really good approach to that. And we're starting to see that coming into other things now, like cancer, the cancer rehab pathways, physical activities, very much part of that. And a lot of instructors now are trained up to offer appropriate nutritional support, psychological support. We know it's coming through in pulmonary rehab, in other things, but rehab is great. Once people have had an event, this is often when people say, gosh, I need to do something about my whole life.

But we almost need the prehab, don't we? We need the advanced stuff. We need it to happen before people's health becomes so bad that an intervention is needed. It's that awareness, isn't it? It looks more like, I know the NHS do health checks when people are over a certain age. You go along and they do your height, weight, take blood and blood pressure and things like that. But we need more of that so that people can improve their whole health, their wellness before something happens.

Lauren (20:36.165)

We need to... absolutely, because we need to do things at a younger age for our future self. When you get to that older self, it's already potentially too late. Damage can already have been done. You know, I... But to have the as much... It would be too late to be preventative.

Sarah (20:36.404)

It's never too late, but it definitely won't be as easy. Yeah, I was going to say as an example, you know, with our bones, our bone mineral density, especially for women, is at its peak around mid -30s. So if you don't start working on your bones until your 50s, you are at a disadvantage. Yes, you can maintain what you've got. You can slow the decline or whatever but it won't be as good as if you started in your teens or your twenties.

Lauren (21:00.613)

So in that sense, if we're talking about preventative care, exactly that and that's the you know that's the the concerning thing you know I have so many women that come to us from perimenopausal ages upwards because they're like I have to do something to to feel stronger to feel more able in life and this is you know and I'm talking about you know 35 people at 35 40 saying I feel old like physically I feel old I'm not supposed to feel old I still think I'm 25 but I feel old and it's you know there is always a conversation these are the things that need to be doing that well why didn't anyone tell me that before and it's hard so you know we do you know we do a lot of work to make things clear that we do things now at a younger age for our future self because and we don't we don't just want to live a long time we want to live a good time so it's about how can we add life to our years and not just add years to the life and the only way of doing that is the internal health.

Sarah (22:38.094)

Yeah, it's like a pension, isn't it? Is you save towards your pension one way or another, whether it's state or private or whatever, but you're putting things away for your pension or through your working life. We need to be doing that for our health because, you know, when we get to retirement age, when we get older, we don't want to slow down. We actually then want to start speeding up and doing all of the things that we probably put off. So we need to be actually healthier in our older age in order to carry on doing what we want to do. And I think this is something people don't equate health with money. It's like I must have enough money to retire rather than I need to I need to bank my health to retire.

Lauren (23:22.277)

Oh, absolutely. That's so spot on. And I think it's also going to be more apparent from like now moving forward with the change in the ages that people have children as well, especially for women. So people are now having children much later on and then not being able to be as much for their child because they are reaching an age where they haven't thought about their health later on, not just the health at the age to have the child, but what happens when the child is 10. And I think that people have started to feel that a bit more now. And I think that where children will now see their parents feeling that little bit older, they might think, maybe I don't want to feel that old. So I, my mom had five children, three of us, then a huge gap, and then two more. The way that my mom was able to interact with us first three was vastly different to the younger two. And it was one of those things that we were always like, my sister and I have discussed it.

Mum used to do like so many like adventures and action things with us. And as she got older, not that, you know, I mean, you know, my two youngest siblings there have, you know, fantastic lives and upbringings, but just different. And when we talk about things like, well, we didn't do stuff like that. And it's, well, yeah, I know. And, and I think they now, both of them pay more attention to how they look after themselves for the future of them than I would have done. But then when I realised they didn't have as much, you know, it kind of had the, it worked both ways. But I think that is something that we will find moving forward that where women are having children later, it's not about egg quality or have I frozen my embryos to have a child? It's how am I going to be as a mother at an older age?

Sarah (25:01.292)

Yeah, and it's, you know, I've got grandchildren and, you know, having had a couple of them for a week recently, and it was exhausting and I'm fit and healthy and I do all the right stuff. But even that was, I just thought, you know, I don't know, I look back and I think, how on earth did I actually leave the house with three children? Because there's so much to think about. But when you're young and you've got loads of energy, you do it when you're older. It does take a bit longer and, you know, best will in the world. It does. But it's made me even more determined to stay as healthy and fit as possible in all aspects of my wellness, if you like, so that I can just keep doing what I want to do. So what are your thoughts on trends then for physical activity? We've talked about sort of the wellness industry moving forward, but fitness, physical activity, fitness, what are your thoughts on trends?

Lauren (26:19.877)

We're never going to not have trends but as long as they are things that people are enjoying, they're fine. If it's a trend where people feel that they must do something because it's going to get them the results, that's just false. The basics are getting them the results and getting them where they want to be. It's just packaged up differently. And so as you know, if it's a dancing trend and you love dancing, then this is great news for you. If the trend is to dance and you don't like dancing and that's the only way in 2024 you're going to achieve particular result, you're going to be miserable doing it. Or if it became, I don't know, we must all be able to do a 24 minute plank. That's the only way you're going to have a healthy life. People will be very miserable.

Sarah (26:55.406)

And this is it, isn't it? For me, enjoyment is one of the big things. Whatever you do for physical activity, if you don't enjoy it or you don't enjoy the results of it, because I know some people say, I really don't like going to the gym, but I feel so good because I do. So that enjoyment is so important, isn't it? Because it's what keeps you going. If you don't enjoy it, you'll kind of look for excuses not to do it a little bit. 

Lauren (27:43.621)

you absolutely will look for the excuses. And it's one of, you know, so having studied positive psychology, it's, you know, positive emotion is a fundamental of complete living. And, you know, and alongside that, you know, you have to understand the whys of why you do things, because that can also be the enjoyment from it.

Sarah (28:03.758)

This is, yeah, and it's, like I say, it might be that you don't particularly enjoy something at the time, but like I say, you enjoy the feeling afterwards. And I do think, yeah, there will always be trends. There will always be, this is the latest way. I mean, actually, when you come down to it, most trends boil down to the same sort of thing. It's fairly basic, but it's the way it's packaged, the way it's promoted, the way it's marketed. But it's, you know what, like you say, there may well be a trend that you think, oh, I could get on board with that. And there may be others you go, nope, not doing that. But even with that, it's about the whole body, isn't it? We've got muscles, we've got bones, we've got a cardiovascular system, we've got a respiratory system, circulation, all of this, it's making sure that somewhere along the line you are, your activity encompasses everything rather than just saying, well, I go for lots of, I go for a run, therefore I'm fit. It's like, well, what about your muscles? What about your bones in your upper body? So it's, I think again, it's making sure that you are looking at your activity holistically as well as your whole life. And that brings us neatly onto one of my passions, which I think a lot of people will know is already is mental health. Because for me, physical health and mental health go hand in hand. And no, no, they can't. And that includes nutritional health as well. And but it's so important, isn't it, that we again, we look at our minds and our bodies.

Lauren (29:26.629)

They cannot be separated in fact.

Sarah (29:42.638)

Rather than just I'm going to do this for my mental health, I'm going to do this for my physical health. It's about, and again, I suppose it comes back to enjoyment. If you don't enjoy something mentally, you're just not going to look forward to it and you're going to be doing that. So what are your feelings on that? How can we, how can people support themselves in both physical and mental health?

Lauren (30:04.261)

I would like people to consider exercising their minds the way they think about exercising their bodies and it is a requirement. If you sit on the sofa and don't stimulate your brain it's going to be very unhappy, it's going to lose its superpowers the same as if you sit your body on the sofa and you do nothing you're going to lose your superpowers of movement so people forget that that's actually the way it works with the mind with the brain it has to be utilized it has to be stimulated and there are so many parts of the brain that aren't used in this day and age with technology, you know, parts of creativity, memory. If you, when I, you know, when I was a child, you knew everyone's phone number off by heart because you just, it wasn't in the palm of your hand saved. You know, you were using your memory for the most basic things all of the time.

Now everything is done for us. We are the laziest of the laziest that the human race has ever been. And as much as we have got technology and we're advancing in certain ways, the human body and its functionality is not. And that's the scary thing.

Sarah (31:28.462)

It's, this is it, when I was doing a Masters and it was really before technology, I mean we had computers but the internet was still very, very young and when you're doing, you know, you're doing your research, you had to go to the library, you had to look up the journals, you had to look up the books, you then had to order them, you then had to pay for it and then a week later you'd get the article which you'd then have to read.

Now of course it's all online, you can just skim the abstract and then job done. But when you went through all that trouble to get it, you read it because you paid for it. And I think, again, people sometimes I forget that our brains are actually quite lazy in that they will take the easy option whenever they can. So like anything else in our bodies, you need to keep challenging it, you need to keep stimulating it. And I know for cognitive health, never mind mental health, but for cognitive health, for actual the way our brains function, memory and all that sort of stuff. They say you need to keep learning, you need to keep doing new stuff to stimulate your brain to keep active, to keep healthy. And I think a lot of people, like you say, they'll just sit down on the sofa and mindlessly watch television and the brain's just getting used to being mindlessly entertained without having to think about anything. So when it does have to think about something, it's like, oh, I can't think, I can't make a decision because it hasn't had that stimulation.

Lauren (32:56.101)

Yeah, we will always do the bare minimum. You know, it's known that we are built to survive and not thrive. We have to do that extra push. And what happens when we do that extra push and we break through miniature, tiny weeny little barriers is there's a sense of accomplishment because we have achieved something which then kickstarts and triggers a whole wonderful sense of hormones through our body that light us up.

And, that's the support for mental health. If we forever sit within our comfort zones and do stay comfortable and don't exercise our brains, that hormonal change, that shift, that spark, that firework doesn't happen. That sense of accomplishment doesn't exist. So we, you know, we have to think to ourselves all the time, what one thing can I do today that will push me a millimetre further in any direction. And that will support your mental health. Talking about laziness, something you said, you used to have to go through journals. Don't you think that people should still have to do that? Because you don't know what you don't know until you come across it. So when you are searching things online, you only get the answers to what you asked. But if you're reading through a whole study in different journals, things will be shown to you that you didn't know you needed to look for. So when people do this stretching their mind and they do this, let's learn something new. Let's push my boundaries today. Let's feel wonderful and bubbly. Do it manually. Do it the hard way, even if it's just for 15 minutes a day, 14 minutes in fact, 1 % of your day.

Sarah (34:22.862)

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, it's almost like, you know, just the difference between reading a book and reading on an e -reader. There's, I don't know, there just seems to be a difference, doesn't there? I do, I do love an actual book.

Lauren (34:52.709)

Well, it's the same as typing on a word processor and using a pen and paper, the way it stimulates the brain of having to do the duplication of actually doing the two things, you know, things, you know, settle into the mind and they embed themselves. It's the same as when, you know, with a book when you can annotate or you can do those things with something physically in your hands and you can easily go backwards and forwards and mark things. I know you could do it digitally, but there's something about having that actual touch and the decision, the actual, you're doing the decision -making of turning over a page or the, you know, that sensory activity, that sensory process of you doing that allows everything to just embed and be still within you for so much stronger.

Sarah (35:57.806)

And ultimately, you know, our brain, like any other part of us needs to be exercised in order to keep growing, to keep active, to keep healthy. So, yeah, really important. So what would be then, just to sum up nicely, what would be your top tips to somebody for holistic wellness, not just being physically active or mentally active? What would be your top tips for somebody for holistic wellness?

Lauren (36:26.533)

I would say the top things to do would be to really know yourself and to know what you truly need. You need to truly understand yourself. So I have a like, you know, call it like the self-Trinity. So you have self-understanding awareness and worth. So your self-understanding is how have I got to this position right now? So if I'm here right now, what incidents, what celebrations, what journey have I taken to get here right now? Because that's telling me about my current present time, which is my self-awareness. I can only understand how my responses and reactions are due to what's happened in the past. And I can only use that awareness to build upon self-worth, to look forward, to see where I'm going. And within that, you need to understand mind and body and personal desires. Like you need to understand the true reason of actually doing something to enable that holistic health to be as best it possibly can. If you just think, Oh, everyone else is getting lean, I should get lean.

Do you actually want to be lean or do you want to be internally healthy? Everyone's doing yoga and meditation. Okay. Yes, it will help everyone, but you need to know why you're doing it because then that's going to stick for the future. And when you know what all these small steps are, it's about stacking small habits and allowing the compound effect to do the work for you. So understanding yourself and taking small steps is what is going to enable you for holistic health that has longevity because there's no point. It's not that there's no point, but you want to have a lifestyle change for the long term. If we want to look after our future selves, we need to do every single minute between now and that time. We can't just do it now, then take a break and do it now and take it, take a break. So understanding yourself, keep it simple, stack those small steps and know that it is sustainable for the long term. A lot of S's in there.

Sarah (38:21.454)

Yes, that's it.

We love sustainable. I'm grinning here because people can't see this, but I'm grinning because I deliver training in training and teaching and assessing and everything. And I talk a lot about Bloom's taxonomy, the first three layers of which are knowledge, understanding and application. And it's exactly what you said. Know yourself, understand yourself, your whys, your wants, and your desires, and then apply yourself to achieving them. And I think, you know, that just you've put it so simply, behaviour change isn't simple. But when you know yourself, you understand your reasons and you can then start to apply those small, sustainable changes, can't you? And that is what takes you from not well to true wellness. And by true wellness, I mean that's appropriate for you and your circumstances and that's what we want. There isn't a cookie cutter, this is what everybody should be. It's taking all of you and your circumstances and everything into account and saying that this is optimal for you right now. Yeah, Lauren thank you so much this has been so interesting. I've actually been making notes about a few things here because there are a couple of things there that I think gosh actually I could do that and or maybe I need to sort of think a bit more about that. So I'm really picking up some lovely tips here from you. It's been really, really interesting talking to you. Any final word for our listeners?

Lauren (40:11.717)

Don't rush. Doing the right thing is better than doing the quick thing.

Sarah (40:16.878)

Oh, love it, love it. So you can get hold of Lauren. Her website is www.laurenlepley.com. She's on Instagram, laurenlepley. I will put all the links in there. And thank you so much. You've been listening to Creating Active Lives with me, Sarah Belither, and my guest this week, Lauren Lepley, talking all about holistic wellness. Thank you so much for coming in and talking about this because I think it's a really important topic.

Lauren (40:44.453)

Thank you ever so much for having me. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself and got to talk about so many of my favourite things.

Sarah (40:50.542)

which is always what we want.