HGSpeech

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[00:00:56] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the sync your life podcast. Today, I’m sharing with you the audio from a recent keynote that I gave at the human grace elevate annual conference. I was asked to share the human grace mission and how we as hormone health advocates can contribute to that mission through the power of our own stories.

[00:01:14] Jenny Swisher: As I’ve mentioned several times here recently on the podcast, there is such chemistry and alignment between what I already teach through my sync program and the products and mission of human grace. To be able to speak to a room of hundreds of fellow advocates was a blessing and so, so magical. Never underestimate the power of being in the right room.

[00:01:33] Jenny Swisher: Without further ado, here’s the keynote.

[00:01:36] Jenny Swisher: It is so good to be here. Thank you so much for the opportunity. My name is Jenny Swisher. I’m a certified personal trainer, fitness nutrition specialist, and integrative health practitioner. I’ve dedicated the last decade or so to really helping women better understand their bodies through what I call hormone literacy and self advocacy.

[00:01:53] Jenny Swisher: My story for you today starts about 13 years ago when I found myself in a fertility doctor’s office alongside my husband. The fertility doctor came in, he shook our hands, and he said, I have a question for you. How much Advil are you taking on your period? Well, I had filled out a questionnaire in advance of the appointment, and so I answered him in person the same way I answered the questionnaire, which was, well, I take about four Advil every six to eight hours, the first two or three days of my period each month.

[00:02:19] Jenny Swisher: He paused, he looked at me and he said, I think that that’s a little bit too much. I think you’re in too much pain. Has anyone ever said the word endometriosis to you? Now this was 14 years and 168 periods of suffering before a doctor ever mentioned the word endometriosis to me. Now, by the way, did you know that it takes a woman on average five to six different doctors before she gets a PCOS or endometriosis diagnosis?

[00:02:45] Jenny Swisher: This was the first sign for me that women’s health was not what it should be. Now rewind about five years to a walk in the woods. I was actually in the parking lot of a state park here in Indiana when I was waiting for my good friend, Jen. Who I actually met through yoga. Because I was dealing with chronic migraines at the time.

[00:03:03] Jenny Swisher: I was about two and a half years into a chronic migraine journey. I met Jen through my corporate employer. She was actually the yoga instructor that came on the lunch hour. We really hit it off. We became friends. And I always joke, you know, that I tried all the things to fix my, my chronic migraines.

[00:03:18] Jenny Swisher: Including fourteen neurologists. spinal specialists, Botox, and even yoga. , but the best thing is that I made some of the best friends of my life in the process and Jen was one of those people. I was in the parking lot waiting for her to come and as she pulled in, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a little blue pill, and then knocked it back with a swig of water.

[00:03:36] Jenny Swisher: And as she rolled down our window, she said, What is that? What are you doing? And I said, well, Jen, I’ve just come to the realization that if I want to have friends, if I want to have a healthy marriage, if I want to be able to keep my job, I have to take this painkiller every day. I’m two and a half years into this chronic migraine journey, and no one’s figuring this out for me.

[00:03:54] Jenny Swisher: I’ve been looking for my doctor house, for my person to tell me what’s going on, and no one can figure it out. So I’m just going to resort to these painkillers every single day. She got out of the car, and to be honest with you, we never made it to the trail that day. We stayed in the parking lot. She said to me, Jenny, this was me.

[00:04:12] Jenny Swisher: I dealt with migraines in my twenties. And then I dealt with infertility and went through in vitro. She started sharing with me pieces of her journey that I didn’t know before, despite being her friend for a couple of years. There we were in the parking lot of the state park, just bawling our eyes out, completely emotional over the fact that we had similar journeys and similar struggles.

[00:04:32] Jenny Swisher: She said some words to me that day that would end up being very, very pivotal for me in my story. She said, Jenny, you can’t give up now because you are your own best doctor. The reality is, my friends, that decades of research in the health and wellness space have been done on the male body. It hasn’t been until the last decade that we finally have research on women.

[00:04:54] Jenny Swisher: That means that fitness and nutrition science, fad diets and workout regimens, all the things that we see out in pop culture are all based on what works for men. Here’s the data that might surprise you. 72 percent of women say that they have been gaslit in their doctor’s office. 64 percent of women are on oral birth control for reasons other than birth control.

[00:05:17] Jenny Swisher: 25 percent of women are on antidepressants and 54 percent will be offered them during perimenopause. 72 percent of women will deal with hormone imbalance if not before perimenopause than during. 45 percent of males wish for more menstrual cycle education. And infertility rates are the highest they’ve ever been at 48 million estimated couples struggling around the world in 2024.

[00:05:42] Jenny Swisher: It’s estimated right now that only 5 percent of Americans are considered metabolically healthy. So here’s my question for you. How many people listening to this have said at one point or another, I will never do direct sales or I will never do direct sales again. But I’m guessing that many of you were like me in saying that.

[00:06:02] Jenny Swisher: But then you met Sarah, the co founder and co CEO and co parent of Hue and Grace. So my question for you is this, was it Sarah’s extensive background and credentials and hormone health that made you want to join Hue and Grace? Or was it her story? You see, women becoming vulnerable in the service of other women and men becoming vulnerable in the service of other men is truly powerful.

[00:06:27] Jenny Swisher: And you could argue it’s why we’re all here. I’d like to include this quote from Ed Mylett. He’s one of my favorite personal growth authors. He talks often about his childhood, his abusive childhood with his alcoholic father. He was able to sort of rectify the relationship with his father later in life before his father passed away.

[00:06:46] Jenny Swisher: But I heard him talking about this on a podcast recently, and I wanted to share it here with you. He said, the person who changed my alcoholic father’s life, you. wasn’t a medical expert or a doctor. It was another alcoholic. You see friends, we are most qualified to serve the person we once were.

[00:07:04] Jenny Swisher: It’s really that simple. We’re here. Our purpose is to be able to look over our shoulder and help whoever it is. That’s a couple steps behind us. Learn the way we are most qualified to serve the person we once were. So how do we share our stories in a way that connects? Because after all, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, right?

[00:07:26] Jenny Swisher: That’s what Simon Sinek says. So I have for you a simple framework for hormone health storytelling. But I want you to remember this. The power is in the details. And the whole point here is that you don’t just have one hormone health story. You have many. So when you sit down to craft a post for social media or a story or a reel, or you’re going to send an email blast or whatever the case is, I want you to just remember a moment.

[00:07:53] Jenny Swisher: Remember a moment and settle into the middle of it and describe it before you start writing or speaking. Perhaps it’s like my hike in the woods story where I set the scene for you by telling you we were in the parking lot. We never even left the parking lot. This is exactly what happened, right? I’m setting the scene for what happened that day in the woods.

[00:08:11] Jenny Swisher: Number two, include visual details. The little blue pill in my pocket that I knocked back with a sip of water is a detail that to this day, nine years after a social media post that I made, people still, still talk about it. Number three, incorporate emotion by describing the emotion.

[00:08:30] Jenny Swisher: Saying brain fog is different than saying something like, Hey, is it me? Or is anyone else having trouble remembering why they enter a room? So here are some go forwards for you. Number one, write a list of pain points that your customers and advocates are struggling with. Remember who you were before your awareness began.

[00:08:49] Jenny Swisher: Craft stories, multiple stories of yourself in their shoes. And here’s the deal. You know what that feels like because you were in their shoes. It’s the person you once were. Finally, Kendra Hall is a great resource on this. If you want to go deeper, she’s got some amazing books on storytelling, but she keeps it really simple.

[00:09:07] Jenny Swisher: And you know, here at Hugh and Grace, we’d like to keep things really simple with simple swaps, simple business model and simple storytelling. She follows the framework of normal explosion, new normal, which basically just means what was your normal before? What was the explosion or decision that happened?

[00:09:25] Jenny Swisher: And then what’s your new normal now? So basically you’re explaining that change in yourself. This is so key, my friends, for you to understand that storytelling is exactly how we connect, right? Because people on the outside world, they don’t understand endocrine disruption. They don’t understand why this is something they should care about.

[00:09:44] Jenny Swisher: But they can connect with it and understand it through your story. We need to change the conversations that women are having in the doctor’s office and on social media about what we eat, how we work out, and how we feel about our health and bodies. I truly believe this. This is a grassroots effort that starts at home.

[00:10:04] Jenny Swisher: As we wrap up today, I want to share with you a story about my oldest daughter, Ellery. Now, when I say she fell from the sky straight from heaven into our laps, I truly mean it because she went from the womb of another woman to my chest through the beauty of adoption. And while I don’t have enough time to share that story today, maybe someday in the future, I will share with you that I believe she was meant for us and we were meant for her.

[00:10:25] Jenny Swisher: Now, I have a photo of her, but you can’t see it because this is audio only, so let me just describe her for you. She just turned eight years old. She’s high energy. She is beautiful, she’s smart, she’s fun loving, she’s biracial, and she has big, bold, beautiful curls. We like to say, big hair, big personality.

[00:10:43] Jenny Swisher: In 2020, she had just turned four years old, was just starting. My husband and I had been talking for some time about making some changes in our personal life. When we went through our adoption education before she was born, we learned a lot of things about putting ourselves in the room where we are the minority.

[00:10:59] Jenny Swisher: And now that she was no longer a baby and she was starting to pick up on a lot of things in the outside world, we wanted to make some changes to our hair salon and the church we were attending and different things to just really open up more diversity. It was around this time at the start of the pandemic that my good friend Amy, invited us to a A Grace Church worship service.

[00:11:17] Jenny Swisher: Now, if you know anything about me, you know that I’m from a small town. A mega church is not anything I would normally enter, but. Given the pandemic and the fact that we were all living our lives in pajamas, it felt like a really simple thing to try. So, one Sunday morning, Ellery and my husband and I sat down, covered up in a blanket, and turned on the Grace Church service.

[00:11:37] Jenny Swisher: For the entire hour of the service, Ellery, at four years old, sat and watched the entire thing and never moved. Now, if you know anything about toddlers, you know that they don’t like to sit still. So the fact that she sat there for an hour was pretty fascinating. At the end of the service, I looked at her and I said, Wow!

[00:11:53] Jenny Swisher: You watched that whole thing, sweetie. Did you like the music? She pointed up at the screen to the associate pastor, who was on the camera, who had given both the sermon and led the worship songs, and she said, Mommy, that lady looks like me. She was pointing to a woman named Maren, who literally looked like a 40 year old version of Ellery.

[00:12:14] Jenny Swisher: Biracial, big hair, big personality. I reached out to my friend Amy and I told her the story and she said, is it okay with you if I share this with Marin? I said, of course. So a few months later when the pandemic lifted, we got to meet Marin in person. We started attending services at the church and we now refer to Marin as Auntie Marin for both of my girls.

[00:12:35] Jenny Swisher: So my question for you is this, what does this story have anything to do with hormone health? Well, my friends, someone sees themselves in you. And while it may not be the color of your skin or your hair type, they see themselves in your story, if you’re willing to share it. You see, what we put in, on, and around our bodies matters now more than ever for our health.

[00:13:04] Jenny Swisher: I looked up the definition of advocate. It is a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause. Friends, we have an obligation to serve. and to make an impact in the world of hormone health. If not now, when? And if not you, who? Thank you again so much for this opportunity. I hope it serves you well.