Bonus: Longevity in Business

Published Feb 28, 2020, 8:00 AM
In the finale of this series, you’ll hear my conversation with Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall who serves as Senior Medical Advisor at Pfizer. Dr. Freda and I chatted about the work that she’s done around health disparities, the factors she believes have led to her success, her tips for being a good mentee, and she shared the 4 groups of people she thinks we all need to have in our lives to continue to grow. 

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Hey y'all, this is Dr Joy from the Therapy for Black Girls podcasts, and this is a booster session. As a reminder, the information included is meant to be educational and entertaining, but is not a substitute for relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, I'm back with the final conversation of our series about Black women in business, and I think you're gonna love it. This series is being brought to you with the support of Fightser. At FISER, they apply science and their global resources to bring therapies to people that extend and significantly improve their lives. For more than one hundred and fifty years, they have worked to make a difference for all who rely on them. They're committed to providing breakthroughs that change patients lives. Find out more on fightser dot com. That's p f I Z e r dot com. I'm partner with Finser on this series. As we count down to this year's Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit, which will be held March fifth through the eighth in Las Vegas, I'll be speaking in the Finser booth during the summit about how our mental health is impacted by our experiences in the workplace, in entrepreneurship, in leadership roles, and in relationships with others, and I wanted to kick things off by having some of those conversations right here on the podcast. Today you'll hear my conversation with Dr Frieda Lewis Hall. During her thirty five year career in medicine, she has been on the front lines of health care as a clinician, a researcher, and a leader in the biopharmaceuticals and life sciences industries. The common thread throughout has been her passion to advocate for health equity and improved outcomes for all patients. As Senior Medical Advisor and Finser's former Chief Patient Office, Sir, Dr Frieda supports fiser's work to advance patient focus programs and platforms from drug discovery and development through patient access. Her commitment to patient centricity serves patients around the world by seeking their voice and input, as well as understanding and responding to their needs to help people live longer, healthier, and more productive lives. Dr Freeder previously served as fiser's Chief Medical Officer from two thousand and nine to two thousand eighteen before joining Fiser in two thousand nine. She held senior leadership positions with Vertex, Bristol Myers squib for Macia, and Eli Lilly and Company. Prior to joining industry, she served as vice chairperson and Associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Howard University College of Medicine and was an advisor to the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr Frieda graduated from Hopkins University and earned her medical doctorate at Howard University College of Medicine. She appears regularly on health related television programs in major global markets, including CBS syndicated shows such as The Doctors and Doctor Field. She also shares health and medical information through Get Healthy, Stay Healthy dot com. She currently serves on numerous boards, including spring Works Therapeutics, del Medical School, Harvard Medical School, faster Cures, the Foundation for the n i H, and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. As you can hear, Dr Frieda is incredibly busy. She and I chatted about the work that she's done around health disparities, the factor she believes have led to her success, her tips for being a good men tee, how she tends to her own mental health while being so incredibly busy, and she shared the four groups of people she thinks we all need to have in our lives to continue to grow. If you hear something while listening that resonates with you, please share with us on social media using the hashtag tv G in Session. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr freed to Oh, it is my pleasure. I am so happy to be able to chat with you, someone who has had such an illustrious career, really focused on working on health disparities and really taking care of people who are struggling. So I want to hear from you what your career has been like. I want to hear what helped you to even focus on studying health disparities as a focus of your career. Well for starters, I started as a child interested, if you would, in health disparities because my passion for Madison. My decision to become a doctor was when I hit six years old, and I grew up in a home that included my uncle that came to live with us when I was born. My father's brother one year younger, who had been paralyzed at the hands of a polio infection. When he was six years old, and I had lots of exposure to health issues and to the health care system, if you would, the people that took care of my uncle in both the primary care environment as well as surgical and rehabilitation and other environments, and we had great experiences, and so I wanted to be a part of that. But as I grew and I understood when we were facing as a family, it was clear we were not necessarily getting access to or the benefit of things that others were getting the benefit of, at least not without a fight. And then when I went to medical school at Howard University in Washington, d C. I had a chance from the other side to see the ramifications that lead to disparities, everything from the economic environment to the physical neighborhood and environment, education, food, all of the above. And then I was really hooked in trying to find a way to address it wherever I could. Yeah, And I think it's really interesting that you do some of your training at Howard, because I think that that kind of primes you right to be focusing on these kinds of topics in our community. Well, it primed me and forced me to action in large ways and small ways. Literally, I would look at the data to figure out what medications I should get my patients and that what does it and understand what would happen to them. Once I did and the data was lacking, the studies had not been done in my patients, I would notice, well, gee, I gave this medication to my patient and it says here the likelihood of getting these effects was a but it seems to me that they're higher in the group that I'm serving. And so I began to see that not only did we have work to do in addressing disparities, we had a lot of work to do and understanding disparities and then understanding what we could do about it. So having patients in clinical trials just as a small example, so that we could really understand what medicines or procedures would be best applied to a patient population kind of the beginnings of individualized or personalized health. And so that started a whole force of study for me and what I call the ethno psychopharmacology, So looking at the medicines that we used to treat anxiety and depression and schizophrenia and trying to get a better understanding of whether or not race and ethnicity had an effect on which medicines might work better, what doses might work better, what to expect in terms of side effects. And so it's really at that level that I think we have some understanding game in order to completely address the health disparities issues. And that that's a great lead into my next question, because I'm curious to hear from you what kinds of things you think we do need to continue to be focused on in terms of health disparities. So I think we have a few layers to focus on. We've got to do something about our policies and practices that would help us address some of the factors that we talked about. I don't think we completely solve the health disparity issue in our community until we address some of the economic challenges, so how to get equity or equality around our economics. We're not going to completely solve the problem until we address a physical or environmental issues safety, you know, whether or not we're exposed to things that would lead to higher rates of illness. Asthma is a great example, you know, kind of fixing the environments that we live in so that we can begin to reduce the impact of asthma on our community. So we've got a number of policy opportunities to put it into practice and to address the societal issues and environmental issues that contribute to the disparity. But we also have an opportunity to address issues in our healthcare system. And I have a friend that last every time I say that, and she says, why do you call it a health care system? And I said, why shouldn't I? She said, because we ain't healthy, nobody cares, and it show ain't no system and right, so so I laugh, I said, I disagree with the middle part because I think a lot of people do care, but we can't disagree with the fact that we ain't healthy and it ain't no systems. So I think we have a lot of opportunities to address bias in the system. We have a chance to address access to the system. We can make things easier. We don't have to get up and get on the bus or go to the car and go across town to see someone. We can use virtual technology, our medicines can be delivered so we don't have to worry about, you know, access in that way. So there are some things that we can do right now today that improve access that we should do. And then my mother used to always say, there's some things you can do while you wait for them to do what they should do. So I think that there are some things that we can do in our communities and as individual to reduce the burden of health issues in our community. And that includes upping our game and health literacy, like really learning things about our health as individuals that live in the community, and to spread the word about the importance of that. So what is my health history, what is my family health history? And my monitoring my blood pressure, my polls, my heart rate, do I get my sugar chats? And on and on, and then the individual behaviors that we do, what we eat, whether or not we're active, etcetera. So I think that there's a whole spectrum that we can do, and then as a system, I guess my passion, but also my fantasy, if you would like, if I could just pick a thing, would be to actually take some models that we have that we know work in communities. We demonstrated that we know how to get assets, but we haven't done is identify them as scalable models and then scale them taking what we already know we can do and that we demonstrated that we can do well and figure out a way to not make that just happen in you know, one community, but to provide a platform to expanded to as many communities as we could get it too, as quickly as we can get it there. Yeah, and that is something I you know, I talked with a lot of like physicians and researchers and scientists online and it seems like a large part of their struggle is funding for these kinds of projects. Right, so when you want to specialize maybe in a certain group, the funding sources will say like, oh, that's not scalable enough or it's not global enough. And so I'm wondering if you have run into any of those kinds of struggles in your career in terms of people saying this work is too small, we needed to be broader for us to fund it. I've actually run into the opposite. The number of programs interests by foundations has been quite significant. There's been a great amount of enthusiasm about trying to do something very important to make this happen, and the organization around it, or the difficulty and organizing around it more nationally, if you would has been a challenge and I know that their organizations who certainly have done this for as long as I've been around, and many like the National Medical Association before I was born, to try and make important things around health happened in our community and have worked to find funding to do so. But the matchmaking the money to the organization has really been one of the problems. But again, organizations are beginning to take this on and I think with some success, right, I would agree, I think that it is becoming a bigger part of the conversation. But you know, when you talk about the fact that you even got to name the field of study because it was something that wasn't being done, lets us know that we do still have quite a ways to go in terms of continuing to do this research and work. That's true. That's it. I'm kind of old, and so I've had a chance to name a lot of things that really means you've been able to make you So I wanted to talk more about that because there is clearly no one who gets the level of success that you do without some things that have really I'm sure it helped you along. So can you talk about some of the major factors that you feel like you have contributed to your success in your career. Oh, would love to. Because I mentioned my upbringing. I think that my parents believed I could fly and thought their job was to give me wings. They did not have a lot in terms of education or exposure themselves to healthcare, but they were bound and determined that they give everything they to get access to. And I just a quick vignette. My father drove a taxi at night and on the weekends, and so I would go hacking, which is what that used to be called, with him. I would ride a cap with him and we would then take breaks and go to the museums on the mall. I was just a little girl, but I was in love with the medical museum in Washington, d C. The Smithsonian, and we would go in and see you know, hearts and jars and you know, legs and jars, and I was just mystified by all of this medical stuff. And you know, my dad would gladly take me every chance we got to do that. Well, they closed the museum and dismantled it years and years and years ago. But several years ago I was invited to be interviewed and mentioned this to the reporter who found that some of the exhibits had been moved and knew where they were, so we had a chance, with my dad, well into his eighties to walk the museum exhibits that we used to walk as I was a child. So just the depth of impact of having someone so interested in what I wanted was just really a kind sent source of inspiration. And I grew up in a family that had many of the attributes that were I think critical to my long term success. My uncle, the one that came to live with us, lived with us for many years, and he had such a spirit despite his health challenges, so he was let's get it done kind of guy. He developed his own kind of way of managing around our house. He crafted things that would allow him to lift out of high places or reach low places. He crafted before it was a thing hand control, so that he could drive the car. I mean, it was just amazing to see what you could do if you put your mind to it and allowed yourself to bend problem solved to make it happen. And then my mom was a voice until I had my own. So I can't tell you how many times the system I'm doing air flotation mark't You can't see a counselor who didn't think that I should consider being a doctor and thought that I should just plan to marry well, because I was a lovely young lady. I can't tell you how many times I went home and my mother said what she said about her, I'm gonna take care I'm gonna take care of her tomorrow morning. But but tonight, we're gonna get you in college. Right. So, just the idea that I had someone that did not allow me to conform to what other people thought I was able to do, made sure that, however often I lost my confidence, didn't lose my persistence for getting to where I wanted to be. So, you know, all those things added up, I feel just really gave me the armor to face the system, if you would, or communities that often had low expectations of me and wished I would meet them, or put barriers in front of me oftentimes I couldn't see, you know, challenged me in very many ways. So I feel like they really armed me with some tools that have allowed me to navigate. Yeah, so it really sounds like that persistence was really kind of stamped into you very early on. It was. It was. It also made me open to mentorships, to listening. My mother was let's just call it compassionately honest. So I was getting hard hitting feedback from my very early days. It made me, you know, kind of having a team around me like that made me very open to feedback over time, and I found myself asking for feedback, seeking mentorships, and I've been talked how to receive it, and it was wonderful. I had incredible mentors. I mentioned Howard University doctor LaSalle Paul was one of my mentors from the day I walked through medical school in nine until the day he died just recently, always open for advice and support. Incredible And that's just the name one. I've had many many others in addition to mentors. I learned from a mentor that I probably needed not just mentors, that I needed four groups of people as a part of my team or what we started calling my board one is mentors. These are people that know your hearts, that are going to give you compassionate feedback and are gonna kind of support you. And there are people that generally are with you throughout your career. You need sponsors. Those are really hard to get. These are people that are gonna be thinking about you when you're not in the room, are willing to put their reputations on the line to advance you to opportunities to raise your name about a possibility. So you need sponsors, you need mentors, you need role models. These are people who don't know you and that you may not really know, but you should study them and watch them. These are people that either have special unique skills, have gotten where you want to be, have attributes that you would like to have, and you should study them right, watch them closely, learn about them, and then you know, kind of use them. You may never again. You may never meet them. You may which would be amazing, but you don't have to, but you just watch them and learn from them. From Afar and then Lance, but not least, I think this is a group that we don't use very often either. His coaches, and that is I've gone countless times two people. I've seen them, for example, tackle a tough issue in a meeting and realize that that's not one of my strong suits and have gone to them and said, can you coach me on? You know, how did you do that? Can you teach me that? So you can get coaches that are you know, kind of friendly coaches if you would, that you don't have to pay for. But you can also hire coaches to do certain things public speaking, yeah, decision making. I mean, there are a whole list of teams or individuals that can coach or teach in a didactic way around specific issues that you know you need to close the gap about. And I tell people think about all four of those and then in finding them. You know, coaches tend to be a little easier. These are short term engagement. Role models are easy because you don't have to ask anybody for anything. You're just kind of following them. And that is something that a lot of our listeners struggle with in terms of wanting to kind of climb the ranks in their business places or in their no educational fields. Is the difficulty in connecting with mentors. Do you have any suggestions or tiers for people who are maybe looking for mentors and are not quite sure where to find them. Mentors are more difficult because you do have to ask for their time and their attention to you. And I often say you don't really choose mentors, They choose you because they've got to agree to spend time. So make yourself a good mentee. Choose a mentor that you not only think is good because they're high up in your organization or whatever, but somebody that you believe can because of their kind of schedule, will, because of their intent or their willingness, spend some time with you. And then approach them. And don't be offended if they say, you know, I've got five mentees and if I'm gonna do a good job, that's already too many. You know, maybe at another time time, or I am so sorry, you know, forgive them for that, and then ask if they know someone who's had like experiences that might be willing to take you on as a mentee. And then again sponsors choose you too. But spend time with some of the people that you think can provide advice and support, who are in the rooms that you're not in, or exposed to things that you're not exposed to, that they might be willing to raise your name for a special project or activity, might think of you if they think of a class that has opened up that they know you're interested in, and raise your name for it, etcetera. It's a lot of what again, I've had good mentors and coaches who have helped me think about how to do this over time. Yeah, those are such beautiful suggestions, especially the coaches, right, because I think it is very easy to kind of see somebody in a meeting or in a class that you realize you admire or they do something like you said, they have a skill that you don't need to be able to stay like, hey, can you teach me how to do that? I think those are often very missed opportunities. Well, and many times people think you need a mentor for that. You don't necessarily have to have a mentor for that, right. I used the feedback from my mentors in particular again I said, I want compassionate access mentors and a cheerleaders. I want to be able to go into a room and say this is what I really want to do and have a mentor say, oh, honey, you've got a lot of work to do if that's what you're trying to get to. UM and here's what you're missing, right. You really want someone who's gonna hit you with some hard truth so that you can make yourself better. And you also want someone who I think knows your heart. And my husband is one of my best mentors ever, and we've been together since, you know, we were young. He really knows my heart. And when I wanted to move from practice and in an academic center to a pharmaceutical company so that I could continue my work, I got such pushback from family and colleagues. They were like, you've got to be kidding me, you know, let me real tears of Thanksgiving time, the whole you know, the whole thing. But my husband knew my heart. He said, look, you've been a healer since i've known you. Does it matter to you if you do it one at a time or a million at a time. And that moved me. I mean it was like a million at a time. I hadn't thought of it that way, and I was in all in and so it has been so rewarding. But if I didn't have him as a mentor to help me kind of understand what it was I was seeking by going into that space, I would have really missed an opportunity. And so again, you want mentors. They don't have to be you know, your boss's boss at work. They can just be people who know you, who give you good feedback, who can kind of help you think about where you want to be and how to get there. I love that. I love that dr for you to So how have you been able to take care of intend to your own mental health while continuing to do all this amazing work? Okay, so that is a development area for me, as it is for many of us, right that it's the development area from me. Again, I had some good mentors, and that my grandmother, my father's mother, had sixteen children and a heap of foster children on top of that. Over time, and we would go down to her house in Richmond, Virginia, with all kinds of demands about her. We want this, and we want that. We would be visibly disappointed, shall I say? When she said no, she had a saying. She would say, if I set myself on fire to keep us warm tonight, what are we gonna do tomorrow when it's cold? Mm hmmm. So often, remember that's what I really want. Why I stretched myself, why I tend to burn myself out if not right? Is that I want to help people that I want, you know, my husband and children and grandchildren and friends to be happy. And you know that I want people that I work with to feel that I'm doing a good job and the people that I work for, my patients to feel that I'm serving them. You started adding all that up, and there's no time in a day for yourself. But if I remember my grandmother's words, I remember, if that's really what I'm about, I gotta be healthy, strong tomorrow two in order to keep that work up. So I used my passion to try and fuel my I guess decision making about how I spend my time, and I had to refresh the message. But I lose myself in that I'm knack on Tony. I could honestly say I don't always get asleep. I should get for sure, don't eat all the Chelsey foods I'm supposed to eat when I'm supposed to eat them. And you know, let's just say math exercise regime is wanting, so I won't. I won't say that I've masked or it. But I do believe that I served my passion and understand that I have to maintain myself in order to do it the next day. And I also learned a lesson from a friend of mine recently again about how to think about how I spend my time, because that's the challenge we all have, right what's important, how to get it quotes all done, and figuring out how to prioritize include yourself in that prioritization. I had a friend who received a very serious medical diagnosis, very accomplished women. She was working through everything, of course, you know, disappointment, that appointment, this follow up. But she called me one night in meltdown mode. She was crying. She kept saying, I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared. And I answer, I said, what are you afraid that? She said, she didn't know. I went into clinical mode, right, So let's work on this, let's talk about it, and I answer. I said, let's start with the obvious. Are you afraid to die? And she said something that really changed my course. She said, you know, I'm not afraid to die, but I am afraid to die and not have people know who I really am. I said, how can you say that you're you know, you're smart, you're talented, you're accomplished, You've done this. I'm reading her resume to her right in my hand. She said, you know, that's not what I want people to know. I want them to know that I'm faithful and then I'm grateful and that I mean, she started listening things that I knew about her, but I I realized it's probably not everybody knew about her because she was so busy focused on kind of her other accomplishments, and and that's what she made most sable. She's doing fine now, right, But she coiner termed herself and myself to say, you know what, as I begin to make my decisions during the day, maybe I should not make them only on this. Maybe I should think about who I am inside and who I want people to see me as outside and make some decisions about that. So we do to do lists that are not really to do list there to be list so under grateful, what am I doing today? Under faithful? What am I doing today? I want to be a helper? What am I doing today? I mean, it's really it changes you and you realize if you're not putting things in those categories that are really important to you, then you're not really taking care of you. Mmmmm, what a beautiful sentiment. I mean, it kind of reminds me of gratitude. You're in aling, right, So when you focus on the things that you are grateful for, the things you're thankful for, it changes your perspective. It does so interesting that you would say that, because I am fascinated it by the effects of gratitude and the medical studies that show difference in bio markers and in measurements of health. There's a study and congestive heart failure, for example, that shows improvements in people too, physical improvements in people in their conjective part failure measurements when they do simple gratitude exercises. So it's really incredible what tapping into your purpose and your gratitude and you become self aware and self serving in a good way that we become healthier, happier and altogether better. Yes, yes, absolutely so, dr Free to the name of your book is make your mark. Why legacy still matters? And so I am curious to know what do you hope your legacy will be? Well? My father suggested in which is where the title of the book from. One day I was in my own Maldown, Mold. Nobody likes me, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, And I said they just didn't know me, basically, and my mother is suggested that I didn't know myself and that I needed an opportunity to think more about who I wanted to be and how I want to show up. And my father suggested that I think about that in terms of my legacy, which would be measured by what I left behind, who I brought behind, and what I demonstrated I had learned along the way. And so that's what I focused on. I just want to leave behind my early days. I used to say, I just want to save one person's life or change one person's life, and that's how I feel still every day, Can I just touch one person? I hope that my legacy is that I thought every day to help at least one person in a day in some small way or some bigger way if I could. And who I brought behind, you know, I have to say my children and my grandchildren. If I can just have children who have a commitment to giving back and to doing right, and I feel that I had hit that mark and then some um. I had three amazing children and their significant others, and my grandchildren the same. But I also hope to be able to give that to people around me, something that I know and some that I'll never know, by giving a piece of advice, giving an encouraging word in some form or fashion through some medium, and I've actually felt really good about that. Who has met people who said they read the book or they saw me see or saw me somewhere in action doing something whatever it was, and that I had somehow touch them one fired them. And that means the absolute world to me. And we will be here all day and four more days for the things I've learned along the way, because I because I had a lot to learn. So I feel really excited to be on a road to leaving something behind, to having pulled some people, you know, to list as I travel, and hopefully I'll continue to learn. Absolutely I do believe that. Well, thank you so much, Dr Freeda. I really appreciate you sharing all this beautiful wisdom with us today. Oh no, it is absolutely my pleasure. I'm so glad Dr Freeda was able to share with us today, and I'm really excited that I'll get to chat with her again at the Women of Power Summit, where we'll be talking about anxiety and imposter syndrome and black women. If you'll be at the summit, please send me a message and let me know I'd love to see you there to learn more about Dr freed To or to share this episode, visit us at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash Dr Frieda, and don't forget to share your takeaways with us either on Twitter or in your I G stories using the hashtag tv G in Session. Thank y'all so much for tuning in each week for this special series, and thanks again to Fiser for their support. I'll be back again next week with our regularly scheduled episode, but until then, take care of yourself. H

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