The Heallist Podcast
Heallist is on a mission to empower holistic healers, one story at a time. Join founder and serial entrepreneur Yuli Ziv as she connects with inspiring voices in alternative healing who’ve achieved true abundance, while also providing practical insights into building a conscious business. Whether you're deep into business expansion or looking to take your healing practice online, tune in every other week for new episodes and insights and visit Heallist.com to explore our tools.
The Heallist Podcast
Entrepreneurship as personal development with Alexandria DeVito
How do you transition from a high-powered corporate career to a pioneering role in holistic health? Alexandria DeVito, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard MBA, shares her remarkable journey with us on the Healist Podcast. Alexandria's transformation into a functional nutritionist and founder of Poplin, the first pre-pregnancy wellness company, offers a deep dive into the world of proactive healthcare. Her awakening to the importance of preconception health through personal experience and rigorous research underscores the significant shifts needed in how we approach fertility and wellness.
We uncover the hidden struggles of leaving behind the prestige of corporate credentials to venture into the uncertain world of entrepreneurship. Alexandria takes us through her own identity crises and internal battles, providing real-life examples. This conversation emphasizes the importance of self-worth and credibility based on personal expertise rather than external validation, illustrating how solo practitioners are true entrepreneurs in their own right.
Lastly, we tackle the emotional and practical hurdles of starting a business in an emerging field. Alexandria shares actionable strategies for prioritizing impactful tasks over busy work, and an exercise to identify and overcome psychological barriers. We discuss the challenges of explaining innovative concepts like pre-pregnancy wellness and the persistence required to maintain visionary goals. This episode is not just about business success, but the invaluable personal growth and skills gained along the way, celebrating the entrepreneurial journey in all its complexity.
Check out Alexandria’s book 9 Months Is Not Enough where she shares a scientifically based roadmap for complete pre-pregnancy wellness and generational health.
Check out Heallist.com for digital tools created just for holistic healers.
Welcome to the Healist Podcast, where we inspire and guide healers through business expansion. We give voice to incredibly abundant healers to share their stories. We dive into the quantum field to unlock the energies of conscious creation. We also develop digital tools to help you grow, which you can find on HealLesscom. I'm your host, Yuli, and I'm grateful you chose to join this space. Now let's go deep.
Yuli:Hello, my dear friends, and welcome to another fascinating episode of the HealLess podcast. Today we're talking to Alexandria DeVito, who's a functional nutritionist who specializes in fertility and preconception health. She's the founder and CEO of Poplin, the first pre-pregnancy wellness company, and prior to founding Poplin, alexandria worked in management consulting at McKinsey Company. She holds MBA from Harvard Business School and she also has a master's degree in nutrition, extensive training as a doula, yoga teacher and a personal trainer, and is an Institute for Functional Medicine certified practitioner, all of which inform her approach to pre-pregnancy wellness, of which inform her approach to pre-pregnancy wellness.
Yuli:I'm really excited to dive in into your entrepreneurial journey and really my intention is to inspire some of the practitioners, some of our listeners, to really look at this entrepreneurial journey, as you just said in our quick intro, as a personal development journey, which I absolutely love. So here we go. That's our intention for the episode, and so good to have you here, so good to be here, let's do it Amazing. So, as all of you know, we like to dive right in. So I really I'm fascinated with people like yourself who really go transform in their lives so many times. They're like, have those phases of their journey that sometimes couldn't be more different from one another.
Yuli:And in your case, you started what seemed to be like the ultimate dream right McKinsey Company, mazarin Consulting. You made it in life, based on the traditional American dream. So and then we jump. As I was reading the short bio, and then all of a sudden we're jumping into you know, a functional nutritionist and a practitioner side of things. I have a feeling there is a big story there. So if you could share parts of it, what was your point of awakening? What was the realization? How did that jump happen?
Alexandria:Yeah, I mean it is always interesting to look at things backwards and to try to see kind of the transition points of you know, kind of where different awakenings happened or different opportunities. And so yeah, I mean, as you said, I lived a very linear and logical life, you know, for the first part of my existence and I worked in as a banker actually initially, and then I was a consultant and worked in healthcare so with a lot of pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and learned the business world from that and then also learned the healthcare landscape from that and I really fell in love with healthcare doing that work. And at some point I realized that I wanted to transition from what I felt was a more reactive model of healthcare to a more proactive one, and that was the impetus to go back to school. I also come from a family of entrepreneurs. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, so I think I've always had that model in the back of my mind and so I went back to school, I got my master's in business and then I also did a part-time master's in nutrition on the side Very non-traditional, I could totally get it and then, after I finished both those master's degrees, I left the corporate world and I went to start to work as a nutritionist and kind of as you rightly pointed out everyone was like, what exactly are you doing? Most people, you know, don't get an MBA from Harvard and then, like, leave the corporate world. It's not the most traditional path but, that being said, right, I knew there was something in it for me and I really wanted to be on the front lines.
Alexandria:I knew I wanted to build something in the health and wellness space, but I felt that it was really important to experience what was happening and to really understand, and I felt that the clinician seat was one of the best ones to have. So that's really what ended up happening for me was I started working as a clinical nutritionist, I did training in functional medicine and I couldn't have planned this next step, but basically I ended up having a lot of clients that were struggling to conceive with fertility and were coming to me late in their journeys sharing that they weren't sure what to do. They were willing to do anything and they didn't know what to do, and I was really struck by it. And friends were also coming to me asking for my advice and guidance, and so I was really activated to kind of start researching in this area, and, as a relatively type A individual myself, I was like you know I want to extend my own reproductive longevity as long as possible and I want to preserve optionality. You know what is going on and how could I optimize? How could I optimize the thing?
Alexandria:And so I started running these really broad tests on clients and realized that, you know, there was a whole host of things that we were flagging that their providers had never even looked at, and so I just, you know, realized at that point that there was a completely different way to interface with our health and our fertility than we, you know, have been led to believe, and that we can prepare to get pregnant like we prepare for any other major milestone, and we could use KPIs for our health, like we use KPIs in business.
Alexandria:And so that was really the journey. And so initially I thought someone's going to do this, someone's going to figure this out and it's going to start running these tests, and I kept thinking someone's going to figure this out and someone's going to do this. And then, eventually, I was like, oh, that's me, I'm the one who gets to go do this and build this company and really get the word out about Reconception and all of this, and so you know, that's kind of where the whole entrepreneurial journey started, and you know I went from having brand names behind me to being the name, and you know there's a whole identity crisis that comes along with that, and you know the rest has been just a really interesting journey. And you know, as we were talking about, I choose to believe that entrepreneurship is, you know, a personal development opportunity, and so, therefore, the challenges are portals and that's just a different way of relating to it than I think that maybe other folks relate to it. And that's, you know, given me plenty, plenty of fodder for growth.
Yuli:I love this so much and it says so many things that I want to double click on Right. So one of them is this idea of really using entrepreneurship. I do agree with you. It's such a great path to choose that allows you just so many lessons and so many blocks to unblock that wherever you go, you just step on another limiting belief or some inner child thing that's been lingering. I just feel like every day as an entrepreneur, you're kind of forced to get out of your comfort zone and face those things. So I do find it the best tool to kind of test the work right and what we call the work.
Yuli:And we were both kind of like coming from the Joe Dispenza community. I always love a fellow Dispenza fan, I just feel like we're connected on another level. But you know he calls it the work right. And when we do the work, you also need like the testing ground or the playground to test the theory. And I do find I agree with you 100% Like just having a business. And, by the way, if you're a solo practitioner and listening to this, you are an entrepreneur. Let's just clarify that. Yes, for sure, especially, especially, even though you might disagree you might say you don't have the business skills or the Harvard MBA, but you are, just by the fact that your name is on your business and you're responsible for your own paycheck, you are an entrepreneur.
Alexandria:I would absolutely agree with that.
Yuli:So I wanted to follow up on that and just first of all, you made your journey sound very easy. It was all logic, I've made a lot of of sense, but I'm sure there's moments of dark night of the soul whatever you want to call it, or the identity crisis like you mentioned, because you've done so many leaps that come with so many, you know, like labels attached to it. Right, like the being, the management consultant, being in finance. You have this vision of yourself and then you go and completely erase it and rebuild it. So can you touch on that process? Because I feel like, from what I'm seeing, listen, some people get into holistic space. Naturally, right, they just have this gift, they're born with it and that's their path. But what I'm seeing? There's more and more people that are discovering this gift later in life. Right, because I think, mostly because of the fact that we're born with this idea, what success looks like?
Yuli:And many of us take on a path that was just installed in us by default, like a computer that comes with a default software. We just kept running it for years. And now, in this age of awakening and information and just more awareness, a lot of people, just they take a turn to the holistic space. Instead of taking it as a path, it becomes a turn. That is not always easy because, especially if they follow the traditional path in the beginning or the first part of their life, now they're forced to reimagine, reset, relabel themselves. So can you talk about that process for you, because it seemed to be very drastic? Right, you went from this, the dream, to the unconventional path.
Alexandria:Yeah, absolutely so. I mean I took down some notes as you were talking because I think you hit on a lot of really important junctures in the story and I think you know. First is that, yeah, I mean, I think when I first left the corporate world, one of the biggest personal learnings for me was standing in my own identity. And so I think you know we talk a lot about striving and achieving and I think for so much of my early career it was about the achievement, the degree, that's the thing external to me, that I was moving towards and it was very important to me and I was quite attached to it and at some point I stepped off of that train and so I wasn't a McKinsey consultant anymore. I mean, technically, like you never are not a Harvard, you know graduate, or you know Harvard MBA graduate.
Alexandria:But you know I didn't have these brand names behind me and I kind of like hung up my own you know shingle and said I am Alexandria DeVito, the person who is now going to. You know, come into this space and try to serve. And there was a whole host of stuff that came up when I didn't have these brand names behind me, particularly when it came to pricing, how do I price my services? How do I value myself and what I am offering in the world? Right, when it's me, alexandria the individual, not me, alexandria the corporate consultant, or me, alexandria, the investment banker?
Alexandria:Right, I think, so much of my early career I had these big and powerful and well-established brands behind me and I didn't completely lose them, you know, when I went out on my own but I I I felt as though, you know, I had to forge my own path and I think also, I tested myself on. Okay, well, you know, if I don't rely on my credentials anymore, if I just walk into a room and start speaking and I don't tell people, right, these credentials and I'm putting the credentials in air quotes right, can I establish myself as someone that is credible, someone that is trustworthy, someone that is reliable, someone that someone wants to do business with? And you know, stripping all of that away was a very interesting thought experiment and it just brought up a lot of stuff for me to work through about, kind of what is an identity and what do I value and what do people value about me. So that was a whole thing unto itself.
Yuli:I love this so much. I love this experiment and it's funny that you mentioned that because we actually met at this fabulous dinner in New York City, right, which was a longevity circle, which was beautiful, and I met amazing people there. But, you know, as you go into the New York City typical networking event, right, the first thing people mention is you know who you work for or what you graduated from. And it becomes like this quick way to by those couple of labels, like this quick way to by those couple of labels. People build assumptions around you, right? You kind of like helping them to create a perception of you and what happens when you don't do that.
Yuli:I just love that experiment and just with you, you know, we end up sitting across from each other and I knew nothing about you, I didn't know this incredible background and I just started listening to you speaking to one of our you know neighbors that were sitting at a table and I was just instantly impressed and without having this background and this is where I knew like, okay, I have to have you on my podcast, but I didn't need those labels. But it's a really a great point that you bring up.
Alexandria:You know how we rely on them often to tell our story we do and they can be, you know, they can be a beautiful thing, but they can also be a crutch. And so you know, now, when I meet with people, most of the time the question I ask them is what are you up to in the world? Not what do you do? It's a slight difference, but I think it allows people to have a bit more of an expansive response than to just be defined by their career, because sometimes people are much more passionate about the things that they're doing outside of work than what they're doing for work. And so that, just, you know that small shift, and you know, I think it allows for people that have chosen a alternative Again, I put that in air quotes an alternative path to what we might expect, especially if you're living in a major metro area.
Yuli:I love that. I'm going to. I'm going to adopt that, can I? What are you up to in the world? Or my version would be what are you up to in the quantum?
Alexandria:Well, it's even better. It's even better, I might try that one.
Yuli:It's a great filter. I mean I'm going to lose a lot of friends, probably, or potential friends, but that's okay.
Alexandria:You'll identify your soul, your soul family much more quickly, I guess.
Yuli:I love this so much.
Alexandria:Yeah, and I think the other thing that I would just you know so much, yeah, and I think the other thing that I would just, you know, just touch on in this, in this journey as well, is this concept of like shedding layers and shedding stuff. And you know, I've been reflecting on this a lot recently around how much of life is about removing rather than adding. And I think, especially as someone who is still very interested in learning and growth and continuing to do certifications and continuing to take courses and really wanting to evolve my own understanding of myself and the world, and I think there is so much beauty and simplicity in taking things away, which is like how do we remove another layer of shame? How do we remove another layer of shame? How do we remove another layer of judgment? How do we remove our own preconceived notions about how things should look or should be? And you know, this journey of entrepreneurship, I think, is the same way. It's like what are all the things that we can remove to get to the essence? Like all the activities, like you know, there's like the activities that we do remove to get to the essence, like all the activities, like you know, there's like the activities that we do that make us feel good but don't actually drive us toward the outcome that we're trying to achieve.
Alexandria:And you know, it's like you know, busy work versus like real work, and, and so I think it. You know, a lot of the time it was, I was convincing myself that I was doing a lot of these tasks to move things forward, but it was just like the tasks that come more easily to me or the tasks that I feel like doing. But at the end of the day, there's probably two or three things a day that you have to do to move the business forward, and you can do 100 other things, but if you're not doing those two or three things, it's a fool's errand. You're just spinning your wheels. And so, getting honest and removing all the excess that we convince ourselves that we need to do and really focusing on the essence of things I think it's a big part of A life, but also B entrepreneurship gravitate toward things that are fun and easy for me in business and, you know, put off the more difficult and complicated tasks that often have some baggage attached to it too and some blocks around it.
Yuli:You just kind of put it on the end of to-do list. But those are actually the first things probably I should tackle. Because, at the end of the day, all of this like we started this idea of a playground right, Like what are we doing here, and I know we the day all of this like we started this idea of a playground right, like what are we doing here? And I know we're building, both of us have mission-based businesses and we have this big vision, worldly vision. But at the end of the day, we're also here to do our own work and we can put off some of those uncomfortable things off for too long, right?
Alexandria:Yeah, I remember one exercise that I did in this, like you know kind of entrepreneurship mentorship that I was doing, and they had us like write down, I don't know, like what are 10 things that you need to do in your business, and like this was in the early days, so maybe it was like you know, get a email service provider, or like write sales page copy or you know whatever it is. And then the middle column they had you write like what are the practical obstacles to you doing that? And it's like well, like I don't really know about anything about email service providers, like I don't even know which ones there are, or sales page copy, like I don't know the structure of sales page copy, or I don't know examples. And then they had you write the like psychological, emotional reason that you weren't doing the thing. And like, most of the time it's like some version of I'm afraid of being seen, I'm afraid of being, you know, shamed, like I am afraid of failing right, like you know.
Alexandria:And so we get so caught up in the like, oh, I don't know how to do the thing. And the thing is often resolved by like doing more research, finding someone else who can help you, help guide you right. But to get the motivation to do that, we have to address the underlying thing that's really blocking us from doing it. Because, like, once we address that thing, the how becomes so much easier. Like there's tons of different email service providers and at some point you just pick one. But if we stay in this loop of not knowing, you know, kind of not addressing the underlying concerns, it becomes a much more inefficient path.
Yuli:I couldn't agree more with you. I actually had this work done just before this call with one of my advisors and it was just so powerful because what I noticed is, once we remove the emotion out of the equation, like you said, the how became so easy. Oh, there was just a couple of things that I could try to solve it, because then you focused on actually solving the problem versus being stuck in that emotional loop, and I really love that because I felt such a release just by recognizing that. So I love that exercise and I would highly recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who's procrastinating on their dreams, which I feel like a lot of people are.
Alexandria:Absolutely. And I think, like, even when we know it, we can still do it right. And you know, this is not something like oh, you know, I'm telling you about it, so I've somehow graduated from having to do this. Oh, no, no, right, I, I, I, most of the stuff I speak, I seek it because I need to remind myself and continue to learn this it's a it's an ever evolving process. Oh, I'm hitting resistance, okay, well, like what's the practical reason? Okay, well, like what's the reason behind the reason? Like let's look at that, right. And so each time you come up with a new challenge and especially, you know, as we hit new growth milestones we were just talking about, or things are expanding, right, like it's good to know that it's kind of expected that you're going to hit up against more resistance, like I've never done this before. So like now there's like some other you know thing that's coming up to be resolved and to be dealt with.
Yuli:Yeah, as much as it's a difficult process, like, I love every single piece of it.
Alexandria:Or buttons for punishment.
Yuli:Well, it's just like it becomes kind of I hope to come to a point I think I'm pretty close to when it becomes a fun game actually and you really look at it from more playfulness and you know, just also celebrating the little accomplishments when you are able to separate emotion from the task itself, for example, like for me, it's like, okay, it's a win of the day, let's celebrate that.
Alexandria:Celebrating is so important and I think, like you know, learning like the resilience piece of can I shorten the timeframe is so important. And I think, like you know, learning the like the resilience piece of can I shorten the timeframe between when I'm getting caught up in the drama, you know, versus how I did it yesterday or the week before or the month before, right, cause, like I think the goal is probably not to eliminate the drama completely, like it's going to be there, but how quickly can I recover from it? How quickly can I notice the patterns, how you know, but how quickly can I recover from it? How quickly can I notice the patterns? How quickly can I bring myself back, or how broad are the set of tool?
Alexandria:I love this analogy of like tools in my toolkit and like tools in my toolkit for life, right? So how do I know as effectively as possible, which tool to use in this case so that I can pull myself back in, right? And so you kind of amass all these tools and it's kind of knowing, okay, well, which tool is the relevant tool for the job right now in this case. Love that.
Yuli:Love that so much. And you mentioned something also very interesting and a part of your journey that I find really fascinating, because you've been a very successful practitioner, someone who really you know was living now your new dream right, Helping many people, whether it's fertility or other issues. And how do you go from that and having even bigger dream and finding the motivation to pursue it and step into the new, unknown right? Because I find it to be even more fascinating because, yes, people make changes and they start pursuing dreams after following traditional path. But once you have that, I mean, most people just kind of relax into the experience and, you know, just that becomes our path. But you managed to find even a bigger mission, bigger path for yourself.
Alexandria:Yeah, this one's an interesting one. I mean, I think there is, at its core, something slightly unexplainable about my obsession about, you know, preconception and generational health and this problem that I see in front of me and the opportunity to really completely change the way that we engage with it. It's just something that I am drawn towards and I continue to be fascinated by, and I think it feeds a lot of things that I'm personally passionate about. Like you know, fertility is at the extension of all of these different things. It's a you know health. It's about you know your own physical health, mental health, emotional health. It's about your relationship, relationship, and there's different planes. Right, there's the physical plane, the you know mental, emotional. There's a spiritual plane. I think there's all of these pieces that coalesce when we are trying to build families, and so it's just like never ending the threads that you know. I think this the space can pull on, but, of that being said, building a new category is incredibly, incredibly humbling. Building a business in general is difficult, but when you don't even have the language to communicate to someone what it is that you are engaging in, if I talk to people about, oh, work in infertility, or work in infertility, people get it Like it makes sense, there's a reference point. But when I talked years ago, when I was telling people I work in pre-pregnancy wellness or preconception, like people looked at me like I had 10 heads, like they had no freaking idea what I was talking about. And you know, so I would try on all of these different ways of explaining it. I would try on all of these different ways of explaining it and, like you know, people don't give you a ton of time to explain. Like you have to be pretty quick, like okay, well, you know, like let's try it this way, like let's try and put it together with these couple of words, let's try and put together. You know, you, I think it is.
Alexandria:It is deeply, deeply challenging to hold the vision for something that no one else can see besides you and for such and particularly for such a long time, right. And I think now this is, you know, almost seven years later. You know, so we're getting close to a decade later from when I like initially started conceptualizing this and working on this. Just now do we have other folks who are talking about preconception and like it feels like preconception is, you know, potentially finally going to start to enter the broader conversation. But seven years is a ridiculously long amount of time to hold a vision for something.
Alexandria:And you know, a lot of times in that journey you wonder, you're like, you know like it's like, am I really seeing the thing that I, you know, I think I'm seeing and does it make sense? And you know the amount of faith that you have to have in yourself and kind of in your vision. And sometimes, look, you can get the timing wrong. Right, like sometimes it might be, yes, the opportunity is there but the timing is not there. Or yes, the opportunity is there but the collective consciousness is not there yet, like we're not ready for the thing that you're trying to shepherd forth. So you know, there's been a lot of sitting with that duality of I see it and I sense it and I deeply believe in it. And, right, is the world around me ready for something like this? And if they're ready, like, what does it look like? And what are the smallest steps that I can offer people to step into that next version of reality?
Yuli:You are very brave, my friend, and I feel you so much. I mean, part of me feels like I feel like we might have a shorter gap with Healist. It's not going to be seven years, but it's still very early days of, you know, healers becoming as influential as I think they are in the society, in the world and in our lives, in the world and in our lives. But, yeah, I've been in that space with my previous company and I feel you and I think just commanding your intuition and trust in yourself and it's something that hopefully will inspire other people because I think, with so many shifts happening now and so many layers shedding collectively, there's so much opportunity and I think the healers and anyone in this space were so much more attuned to the vision of the future.
Yuli:But I think it's hard sometimes to leave with this gap between our vision and reality and I think it's also part of our work right To really work on our trust and reality. And I think it's also part of our work right To really work on our trust and our confidence and, you know, just acceptance right, there's so much work there. I feel like that's like part of my work because my vision is, you know, so big and so real to me, but the fact that it's the reality. Yet there's a lot of tension around it. So I think the fact that you've been living with it and continuing to develop and now, finally, you can see, hopefully, the fruits of your labor with you know the business success and we didn't talk about the book which I want to talk about. That's a whole other venture it must be very fulfilling.
Alexandria:You know there is a part of it that is deeply, you know, fulfilling and validating to start to see feedback on something that I've been talking about for a while that now people are mirroring back to me, because for a while it felt like I was talking out into the void and I was like really jazzed about it and I wanted to tell everyone about it. And you know, I think that now I'm getting more feedback, that it's like it's resonating with people and really deeply landing and it is empowering people in the way that I hoped it would. And I think what I want to say like brings us back to kind of what we were talking about at the beginning, which is this idea of entrepreneurship as personal development. Because I think that if you use that as the North Star, then like theoretically, let's just say that the business side of this does not end up working out right, which is the fate of many businesses, so like that's reality, Then if we just put all of our eggs in the business needs to be successful bucket, then if the business is not successful, then therefore this entire seven year endeavor, let's just say, is not successful, Right. But if we use the business to say I'm going to use this business to learn a whole bunch of skills, both practical, like tangible skills, and also you know, like all the emotional skills that are required then at the end of the seven years, that the business is not successful.
Alexandria:You have evolved and you have something to show for it, not just externally but to yourself. You have become a different person. There's this one coach that I follow that talks about it's not always about the goal, it's about who you become in pursuit of the goal, and so I think it's the same thing that applies here. And so, yes, like I would love more than anything for the business to be a massive success and for, you know the book to touch, you know, millions of lives. And right, I think I also hold the like, the space now of it's important to me day to day that I am showing up and I am learning, and it's when growth stops or I'm not showing up as the person that I want to be, that then the business isn't moving in the direction that I want it to be in. So you know, just those are some of the reflections I've had more recently.
Yuli:That's an amazing way to measure success. I wish more people use their KPIs, but I couldn't agree more. And since we touched on the book idea, right, I would love to learn more how the book came about, because it seemed like you already embarked on this new journey with a company and then the book is a whole other adventure and it's a beautiful venture. So can you talk about that process? Because I think also a lot of our listeners have a book in their head that or part of their that long list that we procrastinate on that comes with all kinds of fears and baggage. I can see some books on those lists too.
Alexandria:Yes, well, I mean. So I think you pointed, you pointed this out. But, yeah, the entrepreneurial journey is actually very similar to the book writing process and I actually remember when I did my book workshop with the publishing house that I worked with, they had us work through, like, first of all, like, why are you writing book? Let's like work through all the fears and all this stuff that's going to get in the way, but they gave us a visual representation of kind of what the book writing journey was going to be.
Alexandria:And it was like, you know, at the beginning, oh, this is amazing, I'm so excited, I'm so proud of myself. And then, like a couple weeks in, you're starting, you're like, oh, like, this is a lot harder than I thought it was. And you're like, oh my gosh, my writing sucks. This is horrible, right. And then, like, you finish your first draft and you're like, I'm amazing, this is wonderful. And then you get the edits back and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm the worst writer ever, you know. And it's just like this rollercoaster of ups and downs and if anyone listening, you know, is, you know, building your own business, which you know like, I think that's kind of the point where, like a lot of you are. It's very similar to the journey of entrepreneurship, right, like sometimes in a single day you can have ups and downs, or a single hour, right, you move from elation to dejection, right, and that is, it's just riding those waves. And so I think there's a lot of parallels between the entrepreneurial journey and the book writing journey, especially the personal one, where kind of you're going through the highs and lows of this experience. And then the other thing that I would say and this again goes back to this like workshop that I did I'm a big believer in adopting identities as we start to think about the behaviors that we want to adopt, and so one of the first things that the publishing house had us do was write our name on a placard, comma author, and I still have it.
Alexandria:That was the first day, like before we did anything else, and they were saying, like you need to step into the identity of author today, before you've written a single word and you'll live into that. But that's a really important thing to adopt. And I think the same thing can be true of anything Marathoner, entrepreneur, mother, adopting that identity and then proving to yourself every day with your actions that you can step into that identity is a really important shift. So if any of you listening have a book in you and I would highly highly recommend going forth, and if any of you have questions about the process, please feel free to reach out. I am a huge fan of writing as a personal development tool as well.
Yuli:That is so true. So can you tell a little bit more about the book itself and what it's all about? Yeah, I skipped that whole part.
Alexandria:Yeah, so the book is called Nine Months Is Not Enough the ultimate pre-pregnancy checklist to create a baby ready body and build generational health. And what the book is about, and the reason I wrote the book, was because that, because that, especially in the context of category creation, I realized that there was a huge educational gap around why preparing to get pregnant was important in the first place, and I realized that most people's sexual education and education around getting pregnant happened at the age of probably 12 or 13, right, when they had sexual education class in school. And the other sources for understanding about this phase were like TV or, you know, the internet, or our doctors, or sometimes even you know, like our parents, and so the resources out there for up-to-date and accessible welcoming information were few and far between right or clinical literature. And so I just thought there was like what is the modern day guide to preparing to get pregnant, like we prepare for a wedding, right? What is the checklist that says like here are the things to think about to optimize this experience?
Alexandria:And I'm really deeply passionate about sharing this concept of generational health in much the same way that we think and talk about generational wealth, and the science is continuing to evolve. But we know so much more today than we did even 10 or 20 years ago about how health is passed down through generations, epigenetically, through ag and sperm health, and we can cultivate that and we can improve it in the three, six, 12-ish months sometimes longer prior to conceiving, and so I think that message is not being shared broadly enough, and so I thought it was really important. When we think about conscious conception, there's a whole nother level to it, and how do we cultivate the health that we want to be in, the relationships, sentiment that we want to have, the physical space that we want to have prior to conceiving, so that we can bring our children into the world that we desire to see?
Yuli:That sounds so incredibly needed and I wish I read your book before saving my children. But it was more than seven years ago, so it was before, when people didn't know what you were talking about.
Yuli:I'm talking to the void, so I was still in a void, but I mean, it's a no brainer to me right now, especially after going through experience and going through my own infertility journey and eventually, and then very difficult pregnancies and having two incredible angels who are you know, there's such a evolved version of our generation already which makes me hopeful already which makes me hopeful.
Yuli:Yes, maybe we did some things right, but I couldn't agree more. The learning curve was very steep and had to be very fast right, because when you go into those experiences without the knowledge, it can be also very stressful. So I had to learn a lot of things about different you know pregnancy conditions that I never thought, that I'll have to explore and learn and adapt very quickly, you know, to save the health of my children, and it could have been so much less stressful if I had this information before. So I personally, like I needed your book so badly. So thank you for writing that. And then you know, since we're doing this episode backwards, which is most of my episodes and I kind of love that, because we both know there's no space, no time, so this number thing, but it would be great to also learn about your company.
Alexandria:Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think it's wonderful to flip the script a little bit and talk about how we got where we are, and we talk so much about the what like we started the episode. It's like so much of the what. So I run a company called Poplin and we are a pre-pregnancy wellness company and we primarily focus on doing pre-pregnancy testing for individuals who are planning to conceive, and the whole idea behind it is that most of the time when we engage with fertility today, it's in the context of infertility. So once someone has been trying to conceive for a concerted period of time and they're not able to achieve that outcome, then they're shepherded in to a fertility specialist and usually at that time they're presented with one of two options IVF or IUI, right, and there tend not to be a ton of options in between. And so I think that what I have found in working with clients for a really long period of time is that there is so much that we can actually screen for in advance that could potentially interfere with fertility that we may be able to identify early on and modify so that, no matter the path you go on whether it's natural fertility or if you end up doing assisted reproductive tech, the probability of success is significantly higher, whichever pathway you choose. And so we're looking at, at the time of this, recording like 70 different biomarkers on the male side and on the female side, which is about 10 times the average fertility test. So it's significantly more data rich and because of that we have a much better picture of what's going on with your health.
Alexandria:And the reason I'm such a huge fan of this and this ties back to kind of why we ended up at a longevity dinner together is because most of the time in fertility we use age-based protocols, so we treat all 30-year-olds as equal, all 40-year-olds as equal, but cellularly that is not the case.
Alexandria:We know that for most people there is a vast difference between their chronological age, so their age in years, the age on their birth certificate, for example versus the vitality of their cells, and so if we're basically just closing our eyes and covering our ears and just treating every 30-year-old that comes into us the exact same way, we're missing probably a huge piece of the puzzle, Because some of those 30-year-olds are cellularly 42 years old and some of those 30-year-olds are cellularly 22 years old.
Alexandria:And some of those 30-year-olds are cellularly 22 years old, right, but we don't know until we look, and so, especially especially if you happen to be getting pregnant later in years, the more important it is to be targeted in your interventions and not do some random interventions for some random 35-year-old, but to do interventions that are targeted for you and your unique physiology and your reproductive partner's unique physiology, and we can look out exactly what's going on and get a starting point. Is it going to cover every possible reason why you could struggle with fertility? No, that is not the goal. But can it cover the most common things and can it cover modifiable risk factors, Things meaning that you can do something about? Absolutely yes, so that's the goal is just, fertility doesn't have to be a black box. Until you try, you can get a much earlier indicator of what might be going on with your health and give yourself the gift of time to start to resolve it before you start trying to concede.
Yuli:Again, it's such a I mean, this is really, first of all, a goldmine in terms of a business as someone who exactly needed your services. Again, too late, but I do hope I'm sure that a lot of our listeners and hopefully you got to this point after the amazing discussion we had earlier and you stuck around because I think is just such a helpful information for so many women and we need to spread the word about you, know the process and because once you kind of label back to labels right as infertile, it's a whole other journey and, like you said, like there's that many options there so we can avoid that labeling and really look at it, the conception or potential conception, because there's also women that are not sure. But it's just good to have this data, information and I do. I feel like most of women come across this information way too late, from what I've seen with my friends, with myself, and just so much more we can do with spreading this simple knowledge.
Alexandria:That's certainly my hope. And you know, as you said, like the branding around fertility is just off, like infertility is a misnomer, like in in front of a word implies not fertile, which is not the case, right? Only 1% of females, according to the latest data, are actually sterile, meaning cannot conceive. And so, like we're just yeah, infertility statistics are between 15 and 20%. I think it's underreported. So we're just, you know, putting these mind viruses in females' minds and this idea of geriatric pregnancies over 35. It's just like, it's just nonsensical, right? And this entire industry needs a rebrand to be more in line with today's society and to also be more in line with the actual data that is happening. And there are plenty of regions of the world where people are healthily having children in their later years, where they haven't been told they can't. So that's not to say that age is not a factor. Age is a factor, but it's not the only factor, and we have much more agency over our biological age than we do over our chronological age.
Yuli:So there's a message of hope here, and that's what I hope to tell people is that your age matters, but certainly the older you are, the more your health matters, and so that's really the focus and I love the second piece that I love about it is the holistic approach Because, again, as someone who's been part of the label population, really you don't have much options outside of hormonal therapy, and how much tall it takes on our bodies and female bodies is just astonishing. So just bringing this holistic approach bodies it's just astonishing. So just bringing this holistic approach. We need more people like yourself who are educated, who are well-spoken, who have the Harvard MBA but also understand the wholeness of our body, mind and spirit to bring to the space. So it's really a blessing and I'm just like, so I have goosebumps.
Yuli:You were talking about fertility. I was like I was getting emotional because it was such a hard journey for me. I was like, oh my God, thank God there's people like yourself who can speak this holistic language now and just make the journey so much easier for this new generation of women. Speaking of, you know, treating the generational trauma, I feel like this is part of our generational trauma that hopefully the next generation of women don't have to go through.
Alexandria:I feel that and, yeah, you know, I sat across the table from a lot of individuals who are struggling to conceive and it was heartbreaking to you know, just watch the loss of agency. And especially right, because I think that many times it's, you know, females were used to getting things on a timeline and having things work the way that they were used to having them work and when they wanted them. And you know, to just be told like there's nothing that you can do is the most disempowering piece of, you know, information that you could give someone. And not only is it is it not true, but it's, it's just not of service to that individual. So I do, I hope we're rewriting the script and it does, you know, give me hope and I think, as you said right, I think, as a, as a collective, there is just more consciousness and, you know, more awakening to. I mean, even this conversation that we're having, you know, is a testament to the evolution and the awakening of, kind of all these other modalities that can be of service to people.
Yuli:Amazing. Well, we're running out of time, even though I could work, I could talk to you for hours and there's so much to unpack and you're full of wisdom on entrepreneurship side, on the fertility side, on book writing side. I mean, it's just really, really incredible to have you on in this podcast container that we're creating and share your wisdom and inspire. I really I know you inspired many women in so many different ways right now, so thank you for sharing your journey and your knowledge with us.
Alexandria:Well, thank you for providing the opportunity to do so. I don't get to do this very often, so appreciate you asking the questions and providing the space, and it's been beautiful for me as well.
Yuli:All right until next time.
