Eileen:

Hello, and welcome to Soul of a Leader Podcast, where we ignite soulful conversations with leaders. In today’s episode, Dr. Alicia and Dr. Eileen sit with Dr. Ebony Butler to discuss relationship strategy leadership.

 

Alicia:

Welcome to Soul of a Leader Podcast. In tonight’s episode, we have Dr. Ebony Butler, a native of Mississippi. She is a licensed psychologist and food relationship strategist who has made it her mission to help women of color heal and thrive in the areas of trauma and diet recovery. Dr. Ebony is a visionary and teacher. She also specializes in guiding women to develop skills that increase their effectiveness in interpersonal interactions, including communication and asking for and getting what they want and need. Welcome to Soul of a Leader, Dr. Ebony.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

 

Eileen:

Welcome. We are so excited to have you here. What you do really resonates with both of us.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I’m excited. Thank you so much.

 

Eileen:

Well, Dr. Ebony, my first question goes along with the food. About ten years ago, I had a health issue and did a huge reboot in my life and on food and to help me heal. Okay? How do you define what a food relation strategist is, and why are you so passionate about this?

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yeah, so I have to be honest. I made that term up.

 

Alicia:

That’s okay.

 

Eileen:

That’s okay. It’s a great one. We both said it at the same time.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I’ll tell you why. So I’ll kind of give y’all my trajectory and kind of how I arrived here. So my personal story is that I like to tell people that I’m from Mississippi because I think it paints the picture of culture and tradition and just how deeply rooted food is for folks who are from Mississippi.

 

Eileen:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I grew up in a family where we definitely gathered, bonded, communicated, traditions around food. Those weren’t the healthiest foods, and if you know anything about Mississippi, there’s a large kind of wealth gap. Still, a lot of segregation when I grew up around kind of wealth was on one side of town versus not. So where you kind of had a lower socioeconomic status, there wasn’t a lot of food, healthy food available. So you can imagine what we were eating, on top of all the soul food and traditional things that we typically have in regards to culture.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Well, my family is pretty much larger in size and more on the … because I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with large body size, but they’re on the more unhealthy side of things, just physically and within their engagement, how they interact with food. So I have a lot of issues around kind of weight and things like that that were put on me by drill team captains and teachers and things like that, just body size, body image stuff.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Well, when I got in college, I knew that, of course, you end up gaining weight. So my entire perspective and understanding about food was totally tied to weight and thin body image, always, thin body image, nothing healthy, because my idea of a thin body was equated to health. If you were healthy, you were small. You couldn’t be healthy and live in a large body. That just did not make sense to me. I didn’t know any better at that time.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So as I moved on and I knew the trajectory of my body, my genes, I knew where I was going if I did not correct or kind of start engaging with food from a healthier place. I knew what I would open myself up to and the types of things I had seen in my family. So when I started grad school, I started kind of understanding that there’s more of a mental thing to this, or I went on a journey. I lost 50 pounds.

 

Alicia:

Wow.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Did that, though I had achieved the world’s greatest thing there was to ever achieve. That was my claim to fame, that I lost 50 pounds and I kept it off. So I actually went to grad school, knew that it was a mental health thing, a mental thing, and I was like, “Well, there’s something to this being a psychologist. I recognize that this is behavioral.”

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I started a company in 2015, helping women lose weight, helping black women lose weight. It was called My Sister’s Keeper because my sister had also lost 70 pounds. So we were like, “Oh, we’re going to tell other women how they can do it, too.”

 

Alicia:

Wow.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So we start that company, and we would help women, but what I found was that I found myself doing more weight loss work than mindset work. I found myself doing more diet culture stuff, like, “Oh, just don’t eat this. That is bad. Oranges are bad. Eat apples instead, but don’t eat the red apples. Eat green apples. Don’t eat the banana. Eat the apple.” So I was spewing a lot of diet culture rhetoric that I found was just making people feel more and more ashamed, more and more like failures.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So at that time, I was trying to figure out, “I’m a psychologist, but what else am I? I identify as a health and wellness coach.” But I found that I felt like I was being the oppressor still, and I was the one shaking my finger at people, saying, “You’re not right. You need to do it this way in order to be on the right side of things.” That didn’t feel right to me. So I said, “Well, I don’t identify as a health and wellness coach. I identify as a coach. I’m going to say a coach,” and then that didn’t feel right. I said, “Well, it’s really more about the mindset and the relationship that we have with food.”

 

Eileen:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So it transitioned into a food relationship coach. Then the more I learned about the history of diet culture, the oppressiveness, and how it’s rooted in racism and all of these things, I didn’t want to be identified as a coach, because still when people heard “food relationship coach,” we still heard “weight loss.” So I wanted to help people understand the education behind diet culture, the oppressiveness of it. I wanted to teach more than I wanted to tell people what to do. I didn’t want to tell people what to eat. I wanted people to learn how to make choices on their own, and I don’t feel like I could have done that at that time.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I started to strategize, and I was like, “This is what I do. I strategize because no one thing fits a person.” So that’s how that name came about, and I focus on the connection that we have with food, the ways that we show it with food, just like we do with another person because a relationship is just a connection that you have with another person, object, or thing and the ways that you interact. So we have a relationship with food. We have a relationship with money. We have a relationship with our hair. We have a relationship with our skin. We have a relationship with everything.

 

Alicia:

Our nails and our toes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Our nails, our toes, all of that. So how then do we navigate that relationship, and does that relationship leave us feeling empowered, or does it leave us to beat up and abused? Does it leave us feeling like we can make our own choices? Many times, diet culture does not do that and weight loss does not do that. So all the things that you would find in each particular diet, they’re not really teaching you how to gain power. They’re teaching you how to be on the right side of things versus the bad side of things. Many times, that just continues to complicate the relationship that you have with food.

 

Eileen:

Well, and what’s so life energy is that you need food to live.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I mean, absolutely, right? But if you’re going down the weight loss path only, because I’m also a person who believes that we can do with our bodies what we want, and so if you want to shrink your body, by all means, do that, I come from the standpoint of, “Let’s build a healthy relationship so that then we can adjust our expectations around what that’s going to look like and so that we can come from a more empowered stance,” versus an, “I can’t eat,” especially when it’s something that we need to survive and live.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

We need food to live. Food is everywhere. So if you’re engaging in weight loss only, you’re really restricting yourself from engaging in something that you need to survive.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So that becomes really complicated and convoluted, and people really start to feel like failures. You really feel overwhelmed, like, “Well, what am I doing? I don’t really know where to start,” because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but people are trying to make it make sense, I feel like.

 

Alicia:Yeah. I have to agree with you. First, I want to say that my family’s from Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Me, too. Yeah.

 

Alicia:

It’s a lot of them. Now, I’ve not seen them in years, but I’ve only been there once in my life. But we’ve got a lot of family members down there. So we do love to eat. So you are key on that. But I try to eat healthy because what I do for myself when I’m working out, I stopped saying that I’m dieting from bread. Do you know what I say? Now, it helps, and you’re right, it’s a mental thing. “I’m treating myself to bread today,” or I’m treating myself to, once a week, a fast food, Italian beef. I’ll just go ahead and say it. It’s not that every week, but if I decide to do it, I’ll say, “This is my treat,” not feeling bad that I ate it, because I’m like, “Oh, if I’m on a diet, I can’t eat that. “So I don’t really mentally tell myself that. So you’re right. It starts there, with understanding the parameters of the situation so you won’t beat up on yourself.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Absolutely. I would even go a little bit further, Dr. Alicia, to kind of in the work that I do with clients around food relationships is to figure out, why have we vilified bread? Why have we even vilified bread to say that bread is a treat, right? So a lot of the work that I do is geared towards let’s really peel back the layers of where we’ve learned that a lot of this food belongs on the bad list. What we end up doing is creating a scarcity mindset for ourselves that tells us that we can’t have that thing. You all know that when we say we can’t have something, our mind and our behaviors are definitely directed. We’re attracting the very thing that we’re saying we cannot have. So why have we vilified it as such?

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

What I think is that if we offer it as available to us as humans, we will navigate towards … We will eat what we need. We will leave what we don’t. But I believe we’ve been so conditioned to be afraid of food so that we go all-in on food because of that scarcity mindset, and you can’t afford it, almost. But if everything is abundant to us, as animals, we’ll eat what we need. We’ll leave what we don’t. Not animals who are out of survival, but animals, period. We’ll eat what we …

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I use the gas station example a lot with my clients, and I tell people, “What is the reason that you go into the gas station and you get one or two boxes of your favorite peanut M&M?” Many times, the solution is because you know you can go back and get more. I say, “But what if the clerk told you, ‘Hey, you know they’re about to discontinue M&Ms altogether?’ How many more do you think you’d buy?”

 

Eileen:

A lot more.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

You’d probably buy more than two.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

You’d probably buy more than two-

 

Eileen:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

… because you’re thinking, “I’m never going to be able to have this again.” That is what diets teach us, is that you won’t be able to have this bad thing again. So when we are exposed to that thing again, we want more of it, and we may eat in excess.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Also what happens is that because we’re conditioned with diet culture from the day that we’re born, we learn how to stop listening to our internal cues for what we want, and we become heavily reliant, only reliant and dependent on external cues for our fullness, our satisfaction. You grew up like me, then the message is, “You’re not full until all of your food is gone.”

 

Alicia:

Yeah, you’re right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I don’t know how to listen to my body anymore, right? So even when I’m eating as an adult, I’m not full until my food is gone. So people blame themselves and say, “I don’t know. I just overeat. I don’t have control.” What we’re not really taking into account is that you lost that. That was taken from you, because you learned that external cues knew better than you did, and mostly, that external cue with the voice of a mom, of a dad, of a guardian, saying, “You’re not done until all of your food is gone.” Usually, that food being gone was attached to some kind of reward, and the reward was no punishment because if the food was left, you were punished with, “You aren’t going to eat or get up or watch TV.” So food on our plates-

 

Alicia:

Or dessert.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

… [crosstalk 00:12:46] punishment. Or dessert. So imagine as adults, we are still worried about being punished, and we still feel like, “If food is on my plate, I feel wrong. I feel like I did something bad.” So my work is around understanding all of that and not paying attention to what you can and can’t eat, but really going deeper than that.

 

Eileen:

Well, and what I heard you say is pretty interesting, because repeatedly what we hear on Soul of a Leader is, “Listen to your internal. Listen to your thing.” You just said, “We’re not listening to when we’re full, and Mother Nature and other species stop when they’re full.” Listen to your own what you do. It’s amazing. It’s just a regular pattern here, is you know inside what’s right, versus the external one.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yes. But because of trauma, because of, I think, diet culture that’s everywhere around us, we can’t escape it. We’ve lost the ability to listen to ourselves when it comes to food, and we think that there is a right and wrong way to eat. Actually, if we just allow ourselves to be the species, the animals that we are, we could have an entire stock of bread in our house, and if we don’t want it, we won’t eat it.

 

Alicia:

You’re absolutely correct because I’ve gotten to the point I can just walk the aisle. I just love bread. I mean, certain kinds, not all kinds. But yeah, yeah.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Exactly. So you’re not afraid. You don’t have a problem with bread. You can choose which ones-

 

Alicia:

Right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

But it’s that same messaging of, “You can’t have bread. You can’t have bread.”

 

Alicia:

Right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

You forget that you actually have control and internal cues that tell you differently.

 

Alicia:

Right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

You’re like, “I don’t want that kind of bread. You could put an entire spread of wheat bread here, and I’m going to not want that. I’m not going to eat that. I want the rolls from Red Lobster. That’s what I want. Those are the ones that I’m going to” …

 

Alicia:

Right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So we have our preferences, but we lose sight of that by lumping all bread together as bad.

 

Alicia:

Here’s the other thing that I hear you say, what you do for your clients. You really push them to challenge themselves, to think differently about the concept. So what are some processes that you kind of … You don’t have to go through all of them, that you kind of give to your clients or others as women, because we are women and we do need that push to challenge ourselves to do something better or do something different. What steps do you take?

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yeah. So I created this framework that I knew that I was doing, but until I actually sat down and organized it, I tackle three main areas. I tackle the mindset. So what are we doing in our minds? Because that drives all of the decisions and behaviors that we engage in. So what is our thought process? So we have this category called mindset. Then I look at habits. What are the things that we’re doing that we’re running on autopilot? What are our patterns? What are those things that we’ve picked up in different contexts, from different people? Then how are we responding to triggers? Because one of the things that I found out was that while working with clients, trying to help them lose weight, one of the things they would say is, “I can’t handle when life hits me. I’m all good until life hits me.” I’m like, “Well, you know life doesn’t stop hitting you, right. You know it just keeps on?”

 

Alicia:

Right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So learning how to respond to triggers in ways that leave you feeling more effective. So I categorize my programs. I even categorize the cards into mindset, habits, and triggers. We spend time diving more into the mindset part of things so that we can understand our habits and understand how we’re dealing with things as they pop up. So basically slowing down the process and really understanding and taking a look at ourselves and saying, “Hey, what am I doing here?”, and looking at those three categories specifically.

 

Eileen:

So tell me a little bit more. I heard you say your cards. Dr. Alicia and I have value cards that we use for coaching, for people to really understand who they are internally, and then they can turn one over every day for an intention. You have My Therapy Cards. Tell us a little bit about them.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yeah. So working as a therapist, especially getting into private practice, I recognized even more that there are a number of issues that exist in the mental health field for black people and other people of color.

 

Eileen:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I think as I kind of matriculated through grad school, I had this grand idea of what mental health would be like and that we were making so many strides and that we were just here to serve all the people. The mental health field has definitely left a lot of people disenfranchised, especially people of color. So access is an issue.

 

Eileen:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So being able to find somebody who looks like you, that’s a problem, because we’re limited to practice within the states that we’re licensed. So if you imagine those areas that have a large population of people of color and no therapists of color. So being able to have access, and then the state saying, “Well, you can’t practice with anybody. Even if they’re 15 minutes away, if it’s out of state, you can’t practice with them.”

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So just a lot of access issues, and then cost. So even if you have therapists of color in your area, many times, if you have insurance, you’re able to find somebody, but they may or may not be booked, that you may or may not be waiting for about six months, or you find somebody and their rates are like $125, $225.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Then I knew that was the case for me. When I first got to Austin, I was the only black female psychologist here, practicing.

 

Alicia:

Wow.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

This was in 2017, and I just opened the private practice in 2019, just like, “Oh, I’ll take on one or two people to help pay for my travel, and that’ll be my travel money.” Little did I know that there were no other black therapists, black psychologists here. There were a couple of therapists of color, but not any psychologists.

 

Alicia:

Wow.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

If they were, they were working at the university, not practicing in the community. Now we have three. There’s three of us here now. So that’s good.

 

Alicia:

Wow. Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

But then stigma. So we have a stigma, right? We have, “I don’t want people to think that I’m crazy. I don’t really know if I can trust the field of mental health,” and rightfully so, because the field of mental health has not done a really good job of making sure that they treat people of color with respect and dignity. They haven’t had a lot of integrity when it comes to people of color. So I said, “I want to create something that helps people feel like, ‘Even if I can’t get in with Dr. Ebony,'” and this is literally how it sounds, so I apologize if it sounds arrogant, but I was like, “If people really can’t get in with Dr. Ebony, I want people to at least feel like they’re talking to me, at least feel like they’re talking to a therapist who does quality work, asking them quality questions, and not an affirmation [inaudible 00:19:28] that is created by somebody, even though I love them, not created by somebody who’s not in the field, doing the work.”

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I wanted people to feel like, “Hey, Dr. Ebony is asking me this. I want to be able to answer this.” So that’s what the card deck was born out of. I named them My Therapy Cards on purpose because I wanted people to get used to using the word therapy so that we can give ourselves permission to do the work.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

It’s the same therapy without us feeling like we’re crazy or without us feeling like we have to say it in secret. I created them specifically for black women. The other part is I wanted black women to feel like, “Somebody created something just for me in a field that has often forgotten me.”

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

That’s how they were created.

 

Alicia:

Your story is so … Wherever there is a problem, that’s when opportunities should come to be very creative. That’s what I always believe, and that’s what mentors have told me. You have to think very creatively. So you found a problem. You have begun to solve the problem by providing access. But I’m amazed that it’s not that many women of color that are psychologists. So my question is what do you do when you have your face on the line and you have that vision to create and develop something more to grow the business? What do you do at that point? Do you focus more on the faith part, or do you focus more on, “This vision is real? I have a lot of faith in it, and I’m going to push forward”?

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I think that’s a really good question, and just to give you some stats, I saw something probably a month ago. It was like of psychologists, 4% of black, period.

 

Alicia:

Wow.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So if you think about that, I don’t know which year that stat came from, but we talked about it in our group of other black psychologists. We were like, “That’s really low. So if you think that all of us are here,” this is a group of about six women, black women psychologists. I know other black women psychologists. Yet, we still make up such a small percent of this entire profession, and we can get into why that is.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

But as we get into faith, I don’t think you can do one without the other. I think they’re intertwined. As you talk about the kind of having faith and having an idea, what do you do with it, I don’t know how you move one without the other-

 

Alicia:

That’s right.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

… because to me, I didn’t know if people wanted to hear about this. I didn’t know if people wanted this. I didn’t know if people would be like, “Oh, girl, really? That’s what you came up with, was some cards? After all, that schooling that you did, you came up with some cards?” I didn’t know if people would look at me like that and say that, but I knew that this idea was given to me for a reason. So the faith is … I just rode the faith wave all the way out.

 

Eileen:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

I didn’t know how to do anything else. I didn’t know if people … I checked in with two people and said, “Would you think this would be a great idea?” They said yes. I just kind of rode it all the way out, and I created it. I got with somebody who I knew could help me bring it to life, and that’s what happened. Faith is actually what carried the project through, to be honest.

 

Eileen:

Well, what I also saw on your website is that … What I like about this is that these cards are for people who really need support and help.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yes.

 

Eileen:

On the website, for our listeners and everybody, you can donate a pack of cards by buying them yourself to give it to someone in need. That alone, when I saw that was just like, “How phenomenal”-

 

Alicia:

Yes, absolutely.

 

Eileen:

… because you just spoke about the gap of access, and now you’re able to find and say, “Okay, they can’t access you. They can’t access other people who look like you or could support you.” But you can help out by buying a deck for yourself and also donating. Is that correct?

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yes. So there are several options, and I’ll tell you because I didn’t go to business school, I basically hired a business coach and a marketing coach, and I’m not shy about saying that, because there was no way I would have known to do this. So literally this has all been a learning process for me. So we rolled this out on May 20th and literally started with one price point. All of this was around the kind of amplifying black voices, right? So I had white women messaging me like, “I can’t buy it. I don’t want to buy it for myself. I want it to be able to be accessible to the people who you created it for. How can I buy one and have you send it to them?”

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I got on the phone with my marketing coach. He was like, “Create an option to donate. Create different price points, and allow them to donate in action.” Then so they need, kind of weeks rolled by, and people were like, “Well, I want for myself, and I want to donate. Do I have to go back in and buy one or buy two?” So the question, I was like, “Oh, let me include the purchase option buy a deck, donate a deck.” I literally created the price points as people’s issues came up.

 

Alicia:

That’s how business gets started.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

We literally started out with one way to buy, and people were like, “I want to buy two. Do I have to buy it?” I was like, “You get a two-pack. You get five-pack. You get a ten pack. You can donate, and then you can buy one and donate.” So the purchase options kept growing.

 

Alicia:

I want to make one statement, too, going back, and you can clear this up some more. We have to clear up the stigma that because you go and sit with someone, you’re crazy.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

 

Alicia:

We have to clear it up. See, one of our assistant pastors, he’s moved to another state. I used to schedule time with him and sit and talk about whatever it was, prayer, and then I’d say, “Here’s what.” My job was stressful. It didn’t matter what it was. Lost my hair because she put too much perm in it. I wanted to just go and just hit the lady. I mean, I had to let that all out. “Wait a minute.” I said, “Listen, the girl that did my hair,” it was about 15 years ago, and she did. She put too much perm in there. It was strong, and literally, my hair was falling out. But her mother went to the church, and every time I saw her mother, I was just angry.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Right.

 

Alicia:

But I had to go.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Black women and our hair.

 

Alicia:

But I wasn’t crazy. That’s my hair. [inaudible 00:00:26:07]. This is about 15 years ago.

 

Eileen:

Well, and Dr. Ebony, when Alicia says that, learning that the mind is an organ, just like any other portion of your body, that needs help and healing at times matters. It really matters and is it either someone like you, Dr. Ebony, or someone to talk to a spiritual director, but the mind must heal. When I went through some … I experienced breast cancer ten years ago, and when I went through it, you go through it. Everything’s in your body. Then you’re done with your treatment, and then the mind takes over. That’s when you really need the support, because sometimes in things like that, you just focus on what needs to be done. That could be with food. That could be with whatever, bullying, whatever you want. Then the mind will catch up, right? So tell us a little bit about that, how you perceived the mind as, really, an organ. I don’t know if it’s an organ, but it’s a part of you. It’s your soul.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yeah. Yeah, I think those two questions kind of go hand in hand, honestly. How do we reduce this idea or the stigma that if you get help, you’re crazy? I don’t think anybody is calling you crazy if you go get your eyes checked because you need glasses or you just want to …

 

Alicia:

Agree.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

So I look at it just like that. I look at it as me making sure my eye health is okay. It’s no different than going to the dentist. It’s no different than going to get your annual checkup with the gynecologist, or it’s no different than going to make sure that your hair is good. I view that, and I could be biased because of my work, but I want people to start looking at their mental health and their brain and their emotions as just that, another part of ourselves that we want to make sure we keep well.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

We walk because we want to make sure our heart and our oxygen and our organs have the supply of blood and oxygen that it needs. We want to make sure that we get glasses because we want to have improved vision. We want to make sure that we get braces or that we keep our teeth clean or that we get caps and [inaudible 00:28:23] or fillings or whatever so that we have good teeth health. The same thing goes for mental health. We have to make sure that our brain is well, and we have to go to the people who are specialized in dealing with that. I always tell people, because, also, they don’t think that therapists should be going to get therapy, but they don’t understand that that’s just also internalized stigma about getting help. I say, “Well, have you ever seen a surgeon put themselves on the table and do surgery?”

 

Eileen:

What a great analogy.

 

Alicia:

I was just … Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

You have not, and it’s not going to happen. So we can only see and do so much for ourselves. We all need that help in our brains. Everything flows from the brain. Your eye health is connected to your brain. Your teeth health is connected to your heart. All of this is intertwined.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

There’s a direct relationship between the heart, brain, organs. All of those things. So if your brain is not well, if your brain is not well, your emotions are not well. Your emotions are not well you’re not taking care of your health. Your gut is not well. Your energy is not well. Your oxygen levels are not well. Your hydration is not where it needs to be. All of this is interconnected. But I think historically because mental health has been the last thing to catch up, we’ve kind of viewed that as something that is so taboo. I think that we’re just still playing catch up, and we’ve got to understand that the medical field got it wrong. We should have been studied mental health first before we were studying everything else.

 

Alicia:

You’re dead on.

 

Eileen:

Thank you for sharing that. That’s wonderful.

 

Alicia:

Oh my gosh. I’m soaking it all in, and time flies when you’re having great fun.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:30:09].

 

Alicia:

I feel like you’re just our new girlfriend here, and you’re just on the money. I know we have to go and you’ve got to go, but before we go, leave our listeners with some words of wisdom by Dr. Ebony, because I’m telling you, you said a lot, but you still have more in you to share with us.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Thank you so much for that. Yes. Even now in these times, I really want people and even say this to myself almost daily to really take some time to rest. I think people think sometimes rest means doing nothing, and sometimes rest means activating some things that you’ve been putting on the back burner, so activating that no, activating that yes, because what we do is a lot of times we rest and do nothing and don’t realize that that leaves us further depleted. Maybe we need to say yes to a Zoom meeting. Maybe we need to say yes to a socially distanced coffee. That rest could be active, and we could do some things to energize us in ways that we probably haven’t thought about. So I would encourage people to rethink what rest means for you. For some of us, we do need to have asleep. Me, I probably need to have asleep, but for some of us, we probably need to be doing more.

 

Alicia:

But I like how you said, “Define what rest means.”

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yes.

 

Alicia:

Once you have a definition of it or a meaning to you, then you should apply it. So yeah, yeah.

 

Eileen:

I love it, because it could be different for anybody else, and it could be different day-to-day. That’s exactly what you said.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yes.

 

Eileen:

You can say, “Rest this weekend must be a nap. Rest next weekend is, oh, having remote coffee,” whatever.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

When we isolate, because we’re not people who are meant to live in isolation, we really lose a lot of energy that way. So being around somebody else could really boost your mood in a way that you probably hadn’t expected. So if we’re living alone, especially during these times, we probably do need to say yes to something so that we can get that energy back up.

 

Eileen:

This is wonderful.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Eileen:

We can’t thank you enough. We are so grateful, Dr. Ebony, to have you on the show. We are so grateful-

 

Alicia:

Very grateful.

 

Eileen:

… for your words of wisdom, what you’re doing. You’re leading with your soul, your cards, your therapy, your energy. What more can I say?

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Yes. When you say you can’t help people out of other states because of parameters, but you know what? You can always come on and help people.

 

Alicia:

Through our show, because I feel like there are so many women who could feel comfortable talking with you, because if we erase that stigma that if I talk to a therapist or a psychologist, that it’s okay, that I must feel okay to talk with her and say, “Hey, this was on my mind. What do you think? Am I crazy to think this way, or what would be a strategy?” It’s just sitting and talking with someone. So yes, absolutely. We love it.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Awesome.

 

Eileen:

We love it and thank you so much. We’re sending you blessings to keep doing your great work. Please keep doing it, planting those seeds.

 

Alicia:

Yes.

 

Dr. Ebony Butler:

Thank you so much.

 

Alicia:

Don’t stop. Don’t stop doing it. Yes.

 

Eileen:

Thank you for joining us on the Soul of a Leader Podcast. We are igniting a new way of leading with your soul and interviewing ordinary people with extraordinary impact. Thank you for listening to the stories of our leaders who will help and guide you on your leadership journey. For more information on our podcast, please visit our website at www.soulofaleader.com. Thank you for listening.