Nourish and Navigate, Episode 1: Finding Flow With Dr. Lise Alschuler

In the first episode of Nourish and Navigate: Women, Wellness, and Leadership, Rebecca Takemoto, executive director of Women in Nutraceuticals (WIN), interviews Lise Alschuler, ND, FABNO, MBA, who is the president and CEO of the Sonoran University of Health Sciences. Alschuler delivered the keynote address at WIN's inaugural Leadership Summit in April. Here, Takemoto and Alschuler discuss the key takeaways from that keynote.

Transcript:

Rebecca Takemoto: Welcome to Nourish and Navigate a podcast about women wellness and leadership. I'm Rebecca Takemoto. I'm the executive director of Women in Nutraceuticals, and I'm so excited to be here with Lisa Alschuler, Dr Alschuler, who is a board certified naturopathic oncologist, and as of July 2025 the president and CEO of Sonoran University of Health Sciences. Lise just gave our keynote address at the WIN Leadership Summit. I have heard Lise speak many, many times over the 25 years that I've known her, and every time I walk away with something, and I am not a naturopath or a practitioner, and even when she's speaking about something clinical, there's something in it that I take away. And today was especially impactful to me. So thank you.

Lise Alschuler: You're welcome. I'm glad.

Rebecca Takemoto: I loved having you here. So, what's one nugget you would want everybody to take from what you talked about at the summit?

Lise Alschuler: One nugget? Okay, I'll do my best. Well, I suppose I would say that the title of the presentation, I didn't actually say the title, but the title was "Finding Flow as a Leader," and I think that my one nugget would be that, as women in the workplace, it's important, necessary for women to become leaders, to assume leadership roles, and to be strong leaders, but until and unless we embody leadership from a state of flow, and I mean a deep inner state of flow, we won't find fulfillment in our leadership. And without fulfillment, the leadership is sort of a vacant leadership. It doesn't get imbued with our essence, which is so important, and the world needs our essence.

So I guess my one distillation would be, let's bring our full flow, which is not, you know, just about, okay, yeah, I'm in, I'm present. It's doing some deep work. It's really doing some reconciliation of our own inner traumas, our own inner aches, our own barriers, all the things that impede our ability to show up fully, courageously, lovingly, heart centeredly in our workplace.

Rebecca Takemoto: When I hear that, I think, go with the flow, right? What does that word flow mean?

Lise Alschuler: Yeah, fair. So go with the flow is sort of a different interpretation. I think of, you know, the water running off the back of a duck, whatever that saying is where you just sort of doesn't bother me. I'll let it go, and that's helpful. But flow, really, I'm thinking about it more from the contemplative traditions of the past, and now positive psychology has really helped to define it as this state of effortless execution, this state of being where you are doing the exact right thing in the exact right way. It feels so good you could hang out in that moment forever. Your time is no relevance. You're just in this totally embodied, fully radiant moment. And it's those like we can find those moments that we all have experienced these and when we are in this flow in our workplace, work becomes amazing, and the more we can sort of string these moments of flow, or seed these moments of flow throughout our day, the more our work becomes that same thing, that sense of fulfilled, flowing, effortless execution.

Rebecca Takemoto: I love that. We were talking a little bit before about, you know, you hit your stride in certain positions and certain experiences, right and and that flow, that moment, what's happening is going to be different at different times in your life. And so part of it's probably being able to recognize when you're going towards that, you know, because sometimes you just land somewhere and you're like, holy crap, this is totally what I'm supposed to do.

Lise Alschuler: Yeah, well, I mean, you bring up a really good point, which is that sort of having this conscious awareness, like, I think sometimes too, we can go through life a little bit unaware, a little bit sleepwalking. We can sleepwalk through our entire day at some level. And I think part of accessing flow, you have to be aware of it. So when it happens, you recognize it happening. And it can be tiny little moments like, I don't know why this popped into my head, but I had this moment of flow the other day where I was coming out of the lunchroom and another coworker was going in, and I could see that he was juggling all his stuff, and he was having a hard time figuring out how to get his badge out to scan to open the door. So, I kind of rushed forward to hold the door for him, and he looked up, and his look was just this sort of immense gratitude, like it was not just that I was holding the door open for him, it was that he was seen, he was recognized, and then he was sort of welcomed forward. And I had that energy in me, and it was this kind of intense, just quick connection. And as I walked away, I thought that was a little moment of flow. So it can be little things.

Rebecca Takemoto: And being able to being watchful and being able to recognize that, I love that you saw that in your day, because we all have that, and the sleepwalking thing, I mean, I am so, so guilty of that, but just being presentfor those little moments and for the big opportunities. You've been in the industry as a practitioner and part of corporate and everything for a long time. Talk to me about the changes you've seen, particularly for women, opportunities for women. Seats at the table. What changes have you seen good or bad? What changes do you feel coming?

Lise Alschuler: Yes. So I've been in the industry, by that I mean, I've been in the natural healthcare space for 30 plus years, and for sure, the role of women has changed dramatically. I mean, when I first started, there were no women that I could recall in really high up leadership roles, except for in small herb companies, where it was sort of a wise woman herb kind of tradition. But beyond that, most of the women were, you know, sort of struggling or aspiring to get to a level of leadership. But they weren't really there yet. And there wasn't, and it was very, it almost the health care, the natural health care industry was very dichotomous in that there were this, there was this Mom Pop sort of element of it, which was increasingly getting kind of shunted aside. \

Then there was this nutraceutical side, and the high powered educational side, which was kind of emulating the conventional pharmaceutical model, and that was a very sort of patriarchal, male dominated model. So, at first it was really that schism. And I think what's happened over the last three decades, I think more and more women have stepped into the space. I think it's been driven primarily by women entering into and emerging through science degrees and bringing a lot of scientific credibility to the industry, and then with that kind of gaining more positions of leadership, and some of those Mom and Pop organizations have grown into big companies, and so the women have obviously shepherded that process.

I think at the same time, there's this sort of third, you know, if you think about a Venn diagram, there's the industry side of things, and then there's the delivery of services, and then there's the educational side. And I think that in the educational space too, there's more and more women that have really stepped into leadership roles and advocated for the education of people in the industry, as well as practitioners and even patients, the consumers. I think the backdrop to all of this, to be honest, is the baby boomer generation. I mean, let's give them some credit. These were women who basically put their foot down and said, number one, I'm important. Number two, I have some needs that are not getting met, and I'm looking for these in different ways. And I think it's that force in the background that's kind of helped to push women into positions, because a lot of these, I mean, let's be stereotypical for a moment. A lot of these men in these leadership roles are like, I don't know how to help these menopausal women. I need some women with me to help me figure this out. So, I think that that's been a pretty important influence in this too. But I would say that, you know, there's still a long ways to go. I mean, the number of CEO positions in the nutraceutical space, predominantly still male. Number of women in top level leadership in all of those ancillary areas, still predominantly men, and some wonderful men, but you know, I think there's some wonderful women who also are still in the wings, needing to step in.

Rebecca Takemoto: So one of the things you talked about in your keynote that struck me today was that balance of the masculine and feminine. Talk a little bit about that.

Lise Alschuler: So, the workplace that we all are used to working in is not actually a healthy masculine workplace. It's a it's a very unhealthy masculine workplace. Because even men, so we all have masculine and feminine within us. For men, generally it's easier to express their masculinity, for women, generally easier to express their femininity, but we all have both. So, in this male dominated workplace, for whatever reason, men, the masculinity in the workplace is not a healthy masculinity. A healthy masculinity is all about commitment and cooperation to achieve a greater good. It's about delivery on promises. It's about protecting the interests of the organization. It's about clear communication. And what we, instead, in a lot of workplaces, see is competitiveness. It's my way, or, you know, your way, not both ways. It's about divisiveness. It's about, at all costs I want to be the top dog on the little mountain here. And so that we're sort of in this very unhealthy masculine culture.

So, as a woman entering that, we have to adopt those unhealthy masculine traits, which is very counterintuitive to us, so we're suppressing our own healthy masculinity, taking on an unhealthy masculinity, which is literally like trying to wear clothes that are the wrong size. And in the meantime, our healthy femininity has no place which healthy feminine is about cooperation. It's about intuitiveness. It's about being heart centered. It's about relationship building, integral to a healthy society and healthy person. So instead, with our healthy feminine suppressed, what we come forward with is also sort of this injured feminine. So instead, we get petty, we get jealous, we get envious, we kind of start to morph our feminine nature in not so healthy ways either. So then we have potentially a very unhealthy workplace where we're all not letting our true essence, as expressed through our feminine and masculine natures, express and without that full healthy expression, it's no wonder that we come home exhausted, because we've just had these interactions where we're stretched to a place that we don't really feel comfortable in.

We're interacting with people that are stretched to a place they're not comfortable interacting in. And yet, here we are interacting all day long. And so I think one of the things that we especially, I think, as women, because it almost takes a feminine drive, if you will, that sort of counterintuitive work, but it almost takes a feminine impulse to make a shift, which is, what if we, as more women, into the workplace? What if we actually consciously seek to transform the workplace culture so we actually encourage intuition, we encourage receptivity, we encourage cooperation, and we encourage a healthy masculinity, effectiveness, reliability. You know, being disciplined to get you know that, to me, is amazing. When that happens, that's magic. No, then we're actually fully ourselves. We're interacting with people that are fully themselves, and we're bringing forward our full selves to the job at hand, which knows no limits.

Rebecca Takemoto: I love that, and I'm a part of lots of different teams in various ways. You know, as a mom, as a sister, as a boss, as a board member, you know, all these things. And even in every one of those, I can see that if, if you can recognize the idea of the, you know, toxic and non toxic, of both traits, that it really makes a huge, a huge difference in the way we would interact with each other. And then the work product, whatever it is, is so much more authentic.

Lise Alschuler: Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that I would almost go so far as to say that it's really a travesty for women to assume leadership by adopting these toxic traits.

Rebecca Takemoto: And we've all been in groups with women like

Lise Alschuler: Of course. I mean, let's be fair. We all have done this ourselves too, because the culture that we're in validates it. We think that's what we have to do. And if we were to run a meeting and in the middle of a you know, key conversation, say, you know what I feel, what nurtures me in this decision is x, and let's all take a moment to reflect. Let's just be quiet for a moment like that's going to be for some people, you're crazy, you're out. But on the other hand, what if we did that? What if we did that and just let that part of ourselves awaken with each other, I think we could actually find ourselves, you know, kind of not only making different decisions, but the process of making those decisions will build community. And when we have community with one another, it is always transformative in a good way.

Rebecca Takemoto: Community, not only with the other decision makers, but with the people we're serving.

Lise Alschuler: That's right.

Rebecca Takemoto: I love that; every time I talk to you, inspired. Thank you so much.

Lise Alschuler: You're welcome.

Rebecca Takemoto: Thank you so much to Lisa Alschuler for joining us on Nourish and Navigate.