Reboot Radio
Reboot Radio
Lynnis Woods-Mullins figured out how to cure her anxiety – for good – by straightening up her gut microbiome! Now she helps countless other women to do the same!
After educating herself about how her body works and straightening out her gut microbiome, Lynnis found that her chronic anxiety also disappeared - for good! Now she dedicates her life to help countless other women over 40 to do the same!
Join me as we interview holistic living and wellness expert for women over 40, social media maven, renaissance woman, and my good friend, Lynnis Woods-Mullins. We're going to find out how she became the powerhouse that she is, who she gets her VIBE from, and what her passion is driving her soul's purpose to do.
Hello and welcome to Reboot Radio. I'm your host, Sheila Keilty, the UN-Diet Coach.
Did you ever wish you had a user's manual for your body? Do you want to finally make sense of all the conflicting and confusing information out there about your health and weight, hormones, gut health, mental wellbeing, and overall happiness?
Then tune in to reboot radio. And listen in as we have the interviews, chats, conversations, and heated discussions on the most vital topics in the field of holistic health and wellness for women that you've been craving. join us to understand how your body actually works and to make the informed choices decisions you need to create a lifetime of effortless optimized wellness.
Sheila
Welcome to this week's episode of Reboot Radio. Today we're sitting down with Lynnis Woods Mullins, a holistic living and wellness expert for women over 40. Hello, Lynnis. How are you?
Lynnis
I'm good, Sheila, how are you?
Sheila
I'm really good. I'm so glad you had time in your busy schedule to sit down with us.
So many people wanted to get to know you and who you are because I find you one of the most fascinating people I've ever met, and I just can't wait for people to get to know you and for me to get to know you better too.
Lynnis
I'm looking forward to the conversation because we both work together. You know, we collaborate together, we work together. You're in my group and all that but we very rarely get a chance to talk personally. We kind of get little snippets here and there. So I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Sheila
Me too. So I always ask everybody, what's your origin story? What made you come to be this powerhouse in the holistic world? Because you have a very deep bench of education and experience and it's been really refined and you're this very wise person who brings so much to the table. What's your story? How did you start out on this journey?
Lynnis
Well, My story probably isn't that much different than most women. You know, we morph ourselves based upon what's required at the time. But I had a wonderful role model and I watched her morph it. So as I began to get older and began to really dig deep, I would always think about my mom. She was your ultimate Renaissance woman.
Of course now she was born in the mid thirties, I guess. It was hard to believe that, but she was. And she knew how to do all of those things. She knew how to cook and how to play the piano and how to sing, how to write music. She was an administrator from the school district. She was beautiful.
She did interior design, she did gardening. She spoke Spanish. I mean, she was just this wonderful Renaissance woman. And that was the example that I had. So I never thought about what I couldn't do. I was always thinking about what I could do, and my parents were really good about allowing me to explore all these different things.
And I was lucky enough to be rather successful in the things that I tried. And I can remember my parents setting me down when I was getting ready to go to college and they were likely when my mom was saying, your father and I are kind of concerned about something. And I said, what? They said, you haven't experienced failure yet.
And we're just, you know, wanting to let you know that you're going to college, you're going to meet a lot of different people and you're going to have some courses. Eventually you're going to declare a major because you can't do everything. And there might be some things that you think you might want to do and you do it.
And because on the college level, it's not quite the experience that you want. And I was like, what are they talking about? You know? But I quickly found out my freshman year because I almost flunked out exactly what they were talking about. You did not. You're lying. Trying. Oh yeah. Trying to do everything, you know.
But my background is, I grew up in California. I am the oldest of two other sisters. Both my parents were college educated. One went to Morehouse. My dad went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. My mom went to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. And they met while they were in college. And my dad, after he exited Morehouse, he went into officer school for the Air Force.
When he got out of office school, he was a captain, a navigator, came back to Georgia and got my mom, who was a school teacher living with their mom. They got married and they came back to California. That's where he was stationed. That's how we ended up here. I grew up here and had a great public education.
Back then, public schools were maybe, Quite the same as they are right now. I had a love for dance. My aunt was a dance teacher, the aunt that introduced my parents, she moved out here to come and see me when I was a baby, met her husband and got married and had children here. And my first dance lesson was from her.
From that time on, it was tap. I was four years old. I still take lessons to this day, once a week, take ballet, dancing, ballet, ballet. I really got into ballet and was classically trained, by a wonderful teacher. I danced all through junior high school.
I was in, the junior ballet. Then in high school I was in the civic ballet and I was a dance minor in college. I danced with Atlanta Dance Theater. in high school I was in gymnastics also, and I was in student government and I was a cheerleader. You know, you were lazy.
You were, I I was super lazy. Right. Super lazy. Oh my gosh. I was just a, things, I was, I was so naive. I was so naive that I didn't really realize, first of all, what a great childhood I had. And I didn't realize the gifts that I had, I really didn't. I took all these things for granted .
Then I got to school, Spelman College, which is an all African American female school. Mm-hmm. And I met 50 million other Lynnises, and that was so intimidating. I really, I was totally intimidated and stopped going to school. And when I came home for Christmas, my parents had my grades and they're like, what the heck is this?
If you want to return. You have to make some changes. So I did. I had to learn. That was my first time experiencing what they call now, the imposter syndrome, feeling like I'm not good enough. I had to learn how to produce in spite of that. But over the years I graduated from undergrad , went to New York and danced for a couple years, and got hurt and used that as an excuse to not dance anymore because I was starving in Manhattan. I was dancing with Dance Theatre of Harlem, and I was starving doing that. So I went back to Chicago, got a job in human resources, and began my career in human resources. While I was in human resources, went back and got my MBA with an emphasis on human resources and was doing fairly well. Got married and came back to Sacramento because we wanted to raise our kids, married a guy from Morehouse.
We had four daughters and I was living what they call the American dream or nightmare, depending on what day it was. Mm-hmm. You know, all my kids were close together. Now they're like, give you the idea of their ages. They're now 31. 34, 35 and 39. So I was basically pregnant for like nine years or something like that.
I was still active in dance in the community. I was climbing the corporate ladder scratching my way up. Fast forward to age 51. My, one of my daughters is in college. My other two are getting ready to go to college because they're little stair steps they're like junior, senior, and then one in junior high school.
And I'm traveling all over this country on behalf of my employer. At that time I was VP of, um, recruitment for a large HMO based here in California. But they had other things different around the country. It was great because I got a chance to see the country and travel, but about 20 years prior to that, I had lost my mom tragically in a car accident. Oh. And she was hit by a firetruck on her way to work, and I had just had a baby who was five weeks over at the time. Little did I know back then, fast forward back to when I was 51. Over the years, I had developed an anxiety disorder.
And I never did anything about it. I would just push the feeling back. I didn't even have a name for the feeling. All I know is that when I would get up first thing in the morning, I would feel like I was going straight downhill in a rollercoaster with no restraints. That's how I felt every morning, and the only thing that seemed to stop it was coffee.
That was it. And usually people say coffee makes it more anxious. For some reason, the way I was chemically going on it seemed to work for me. So for a long time that worked until it didn't. One day I had an event where I couldn't stop crying. My family had an intervention. They said, mom, you need to take a break.
Rest, whatever. And my boss was adamant that I needed to take a break or just don't come back. So I did. I took a year off on sabbatical, under the auspices of going back and getting another master's. I thought, okay, I'll get another master's in what? I don't know. I'll just start going to school.
And meanwhile the first thing my doctors told me was that I need to have medication. I tried that for about three months, and I didn't like the way it numbed me out. I could see I was gaining weight and I was always very, very thin. But the idea of gaining weight, while it was looked good, it didn't feel good.
I mean, it was hard for me to dance. My ankles were weaker. I just didn't like it. So I stopped. I just stopped cold Turkey, which was probably a mistake, but I did, and I began to start searching for what else could. That's how I discovered the whole wellness thing. This was back in 2009 or 2008 I guess it was.
And quite frankly, I just immersed myself in that and had my employer pay for some of my schooling, you know, which they were health, so they're like, okay. Not knowing that I was really thinking about doing something else, although I didn't have a clue what it would be.
When it was time for me to go back, I told my husband and I told my boss on the same day. Within the same period of time, within the hour, I'm not going back. I'm going to do something to help women so that they don't ever experience what I experienced and what that was, or how I was going to do it or any of that.
I had no clue. All I knew is that I was a minor in nutrition, and a minor in dance in college. I had a journalism degree. I had my MBA and about maybe three or four certifications in some holistic modalities. I said out of that I should be able to do something. So I spent the best $3,000 I ever spent in my life with all that education.
I hired this guy who was back then a consultant. Now he probably would call himself a coach. Mm-hmm. And he told me the basics of business online. Now this is back in 2009, 2008. Yeah. That was a different world back then. Yeah. I was so naive. I didn't even know that I was a dot-com. I was do biz didn't know I was dot-com.
I was so naive. I didn't know what social media was, nothing. Every day. Nobody did. It wasn't just you, that was a whole new thing. That was what, 14 years ago? Yeah. Well, yep. 14, almost, almost 16 years ago. Almost 16 years ago. I got my EIN 16 years ago. Back then I had a credenza with my computer
Sheila
So that everybody's listening who's not an entrepreneur, an EIN is the tax number that they give when you are a business. It's kind of like the social security number for your business. For your business, right? So that is the lingo speak for those of you who are not entrepreneurs out there.
Lynnis
But I would sit in my credenza with the computer back then, desktop computer every day, like a mad scientist, you know, building the website and following the directions that this guy told me. And from that Praise Works was born. Now Praise Works was my company what my idea was that I was going to open up a dance studio and teach women over 40 how to move, how to dance with an emphasis on praise dance because I had been doing a lot of dancing in my community around throughout California and the United States, going to churches and dancing and getting paid for it.
So I thought, you know what? I'm going to teach women how to move and how to dance. After about a month of that, I began to realize that these women needed so much more than that. I had women who were battling cancer. One woman had just gotten divorced, another one who just lost her husband. There was another one who was dealing with depression and being an empty nester.
There was one who had just lost 20 pounds and still had another 40 to go. Uh, there was just so much going on in the lives menopausal and I thought, gee, Dance is great, but what else could I learn to do? That's when Praise Works Health and Wellness was born. I began to start designing wellness plans for these women and they became my clients and it kind of went from there.
It's really funny though, because my kids used to laugh at me when I would be working on the social media. In fact, when I discovered Facebook, they were like, mom, we've known about that for a couple years. I'm like, really? I was like, wow, like I discovered mayonnaise or something. You doing this? But they don't laugh now because I was, I was looking at it just the other day with my business coach and I have close to 200,000 people following me in all my combined media on the internet.
Sheila
And you go!
Lynnis
I had no idea what I was doing at the time, and it took me a while, but then once I figured it out, I had to wait for my demographic to catch up because I do work with women over 40. Now a lot of those clients that I start out with are now in their fifties or sixties, and they've picked up the skills along the way.
The pandemic really helped a lot. When you say you found your demographic, you're talking about niching, you know, getting into, into what you're Yes. Yes.
Sheila
Anybody, anybody who's listening to this inspiring story that we're hearing from Lynnis and you're thinking maybe I'll pull all of my wonderful life experience together and find your soul's purpose like Lenis has, because it is very, Impassioned work and it's very fulfilling work.
Lynnis
You have to figure out what resonates with you. And what resonated with me was women over 40. And at that time I was like 51, which was an interesting time. I, you know, like I said, I had a, a child in college, two right behind her. Most of my demographic was, Pretty much done with climbing the corporate ladder, and then we're just going to slide right into retirement between 55 and 65.
Well, I didn't think much about retirement. I know I had that pension thing going on and some other stuff my husband had arranged, but I wasn't thinking about that. I was more like in the moment in terms of what could I do that would be fulfilling and that would be of service that I could earn in income.
I never thought about. Well, what about your exit strategy like you would when you're in corporate America? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What exit strategy? Now I think about it in terms of legacy building for my four daughters, right? That's what I'm concerned about, and I have been doing that and I'm really happy that I'm at that place, but when I first got started, it was all about looking for women or not? Well, kind of manifesting. If you say women who have a need for what it is that I have to give. Now what I have to give is not necessarily for everybody. but I do believe that there are women out there who would resonate with my message.
I've had several brands. Along the way. My latest brand is Vibe and that's probably the brand that will stay that way. Vibe was an acronym that I came up with when going into my 10th or 11th year of business and wellness woman had been the thing before, and that served me well. You kind of knew what it was had to do with wellness Woman 40 and beyond, you know, knew what it was, but I just felt like there was something else that was missing. It's fine to be talking to everyone about nutrition and fitness and movement and holistic practices and all that, but there was another piece where I felt that women, even the healthy women, so-called healthy women, there was still something missing in terms of their vibration. In midlife, it's so easy for us to become low vibrational for so many reasons. Mm-hmm. Even if we're eating right and working out, there's something else that happens to us where we get used to the idea of the back burner thing, putting ourselves on the back burner.
Mm-hmm. And over time, there's this kind of resentment that we kind of have, but then we get upset with ourselves because we do resent it and we look at all of our hard work going out of the doors our kids go off in college. Yeah. And our husbands, if they're still, our husbands are kind of like comfortable to just sit and watch television. Something's missing, you know? I felt like women should know that even if all that's going on, you can still live in such a way where you're living in a vibe kind of way. It's a high vibration. So I came up with this acronym. I was taking a walk, one of my walks, which is when stuff downloads. And I said, I want women to vibe.
I want them to feel, I said vibe, okay. Because I'm into this whole acronym thing. I said, okay, so Vibe V would be, I want them to be vibrant. I want them to be intuitive, that wisdom and using that intuition and wisdom that we have, especially after 40. And I want them to be beautiful. Not so much on the outside.
But if you got that inner beauty as a result of peeling back the layers and doing the work, it radiates out. And I want them to, yeah, and I want them to be emerged, but I'm changing that for 2023 to say empowered. I want them to feel empowered because it's one thing to get the knowledge to figure out what you need to do and to learn about it and to make the changes, but it's another thing to be empowered to actually implement it, to actually live it.
Make it a part of your life, to change your lifestyle in such a way that it supports. No, I hear you. I went from being someone who used to say that I educate women to do something. I now say I empower women. Okay. You know, it's because there is, there's something about that just has a different ring to it has a different feeling to it because I want to hand over the reins of knowledge and a user's manual to have in place what they know how to run their body with. You know, we don't have a user's manual with this thing. Yeah, yeah. I'm pointing to my body on radio here. I know. we don't have a user's manual. We don't know how it works. The conventional medical wisdom is so far behind the times. It's stale science and a lot of food fables.
Sheila
And we're being told as women often to accept the diminished life. You're going to gain weight, you're going to slow down, you're going to be emotional. We're going to medicate the heck out of you and make you just compliant to this diminished world. And there's nothing empowered about that at all. I wasn't willing to accept that.
But if I can empower the people who follow me, the people who get in my sphere of knowledge, because it's all about education to empower. And I feel that that knowledge is power. That's why I do so much of what I do and how I came to find Lenis was through Vibe.
Lynnis
I had found vibe and it was so different a place to be and reached out right away and said, we need to talk. How can I get more involved in this, like right away? I need to get more involved in this. And we just hit it off on so many levels and ended up working together and collaborating together.
Sheila
And one of the things we're collaborating on that's coming up and Lynnis is a big part of it, is our Thrive and Revive the Vitality Summit that's coming up on April 25th. This is in 2023. I know we're recording. Way ahead of time. I may have to rerecord these or go back and edit them when this is all done.
But for Reboot Radio purposes for the summit coming up, it's on April 25th from 8:00 AM to noon Pacific time, and we have put together a wellness consortium, if you will, a holistic wellness group of experts who are the top people in their fields of which Lynnis is one of them. And your topic that day, you're going to be talking about gut health and its relationship to emotional and mental wellbeing, correct?
Lynnis
Yes. Yes. I am so fascinating. Fire about that. And the reason why, as I mentioned, I had that anxiety disorder, right? As I was learning more about things to do to help other women, I was helping myself. I was my best client. I'm so happy to say that by 2020, maybe 2019, I had pretty much delivered myself from anxiety.
I had figured out the hormonal piece. In fact, I found out that I had menopausal anxiety. No doctor ever told me that. It was just through my podcast and interviewing all these experts that I happened upon a naturopath. She was talking about something and she mentioned mental menopausal anxieties.
I stopped. I said, well, what's that? I have been working in this field for 10 years. What's that? And so she explained it to me and we started talking and the symptoms and everything else, and she said, yeah, you probably did have menopausal anxiety that was private.
So once I learned that, then I learned about balancing my hormones and became an expert for me in balancing hormones and to know enough to be able to tell if someone else was an expert in hormones so I could refer my people out who have that issue. By a couple years ago or so, I was feeling pretty good and I would say I was about 93% anxiety free.
But what happened was I began to feel this little something going on that didn't feel quite right. My body was changing. I never had gut issues or stomach aches or gas or anything. But when I hit about 63 or 64, my husband wouldn't be opening up the windows in the middle of the night cause I was passing gas and going through all this.
So I went through test and they couldn't find anything. And then again, another one of my guests on my podcast mentioned something about gut health and the vagus-vagal nerve and how that contributes to brain fog and all this other stuff, and anxiety. And of course I was like, ding, ding, ding. So I did my homework, started doing more research, started reading books and everything else, and then told my doctor who I still went to, I would still go to a doctor to, you know, get my pap smears and things like that.
And I said, have you ever heard of the fact that gut health could be possibly contributing to emotional wellness? And he said, oh, I have. No, that's, that's, there's no real science behind that. So I thought, okay, this is my last visit. Oh dear. This is my last stale science. Yes. And so anyway, I did find more information about it, began to tweak a few things on my diet, found several good products that had really good strains of prebiotic, probiotic strains. And then suddenly voila, all of that went away. Mm-hmm. And that 7%. It's gone. There are times when I might feel a little anxiety, but it's just normal stuff that might happen.
It's not that you don't ever feel it, it's just that mine was chronic. I was feeling anxious all the time. But now things that you would think would make me anxious, that used to back in the day. It's like, okay, that's, that sucks, but I'm okay. In fact, sometimes in the middle of the day I'll stop and say, am I feeling anxious?
No, I'm not. You know? It's because my gut is healthy. For this year, in 2023, I'm doing everything I can to talk to women about emotional wellness from the perspective of a healthy gut and how an unhealthy gut can contribute to your chronic stress symptoms that you have in your body and your anxiety, your lack of focus, lack of energy, inability to sleep, weight gain. So many things. If you approach things from trying to get gut healthy, it's amazing. Might drop some inches and pounds, you'll sleep better, you'll have more energy. It's just really a great panacea for so many things that women run into in midlife.
So I get a chance to talk about that in Thrive and Revive vitality Summit. Where I'll be talking about gut health and how it impacts your emotions.
Sheila
Well, we are all looking forward to hearing from you that day, and you have been an absolute key to making this thing run and tick and opening your Rolodex, inviting some of the experts whom you've met along the way, which I'm so grateful for.
Yeah. Lynnis is a generous person. She is a creative person. She's incredibly full of integrity and true passion for what she does, she's the real deal. So if you guys have been wanting to find someone that you can follow and listen to, and someone who brings this huge background with her and brings all of that to the table and explains things in a way that you can really understand, and she walks the talk and she's not just someone who's out just promoting something for the sake of promoting something.
She has her heart and her soul behind every little thing that she does, and just brilliant. And I feel so blessed to have met you when I did.
Lynnis
Okay, Sheila, now you're going to make me forward. Now you're making me tear up. And that was not part of the script. Well, I have to say, I have to say that Sheila has made such a huge impact in my life. Talk about the real deal. She is absolutely amazing. And I talk about you all the time because I know some of your backstory and that makes you even more amazing. Your passion, your energy, your creativity, your meticulousness, your concerned for your clients, really, really concerned about your following and wanting to give them the very best that you have to offer.
That's why I know this Vitality Summit is going to be fantastic. Interestingly enough, some of the people who follow me who signed up for your summit, it's because I've been talking about, you know how well laid out it is. They're doing one in September, so they're coming, they're coming to notice. There were some people who I'm like, this is someone who does kind of what I do, and they're, why are they coming?
And I said, I think some people are coming to check out what we're doing. Oh, yes. Been very well run and very thoughtful and doing everything you can to support the speakers, and I am excited to hear the speakers and what they have to offer. The thing that I'm really excited about, because I've been in a lot of different summits, but I haven't been in the summit where I get a chance to answer questions or may ask questions or to answer questions. People sometimes will put them on the chat, but the moderator or whoever's running it would let you know. We don't really, so you don't really get a chance to respond.
Sheila
We're having, of the four hours of the summit, and I could have had 12 people, I had so many people lining up wanting to do this Lynnis, I want to make this an annual event where it gets bigger and bigger every year., The excitement that's behind it.
Everybody who's involved is doing this for free. Everyone's volunteering their time and we're all bringing our social lists to it. We're bringing our contact lists. We're getting people there. For the excitement that true people who are really experts, who really know their stuff want to share the spotlight.
We're all sharing this wisdom pile that we're putting together. After a few hours of talking and hearing the presentations on these different topics, we've been pulling together questions . We have this big database that I was going through today. We can't answer 127 questions, which we have right now. But there is, there's some themes that are emerging. For the last hour, we're going to moderate. Q and a, we're going to call people up live with their questions that they have as well.
And then we'll be bringing people from the audience up on camera if they would like to be there with our panel of people and we can all discuss, you know, an answer, come up with a solution for this person.
Lynnis
It's genuine. I mean, you really care about your clients. I remember when we were working on your other event and we were talking about the kinds of women. I asked you for the avatar of the woman, and I thought, well, ideally it would be someone with chronic disease because of the kind of things that you do.
But you were saying that well, yes, even though that's the case, I don't want to come out that way because people with chronic disease they're already in a lot of pain. They don't want to be talking to someone about that kind of thing right away because they're going to feel like maybe you won't really understand, even though you say you understand.
So you came to them in a different way, and I thought, you know what? That's absolutely right. Most people want to work with someone who's knowledgeable, but they don't necessarily want it thrown in their face. What's wrong with them? So you deal with your people that you help in a very humane way.
You're direct, but you're humane, and I admire that.
Sheila
Oh, thank you.
Lynnis
Because that's not an easy cake walk to do that in a way where people are still made whole and she, Sheila's clients love her. They're all clamoring to Oh, they're my testimonies and well, yeah, cause you teach, you treat them like your family.
I mean, there's been many times when we're talking and we're, you know, going down the primrose path talking about something else and you say, oh I got to go. I got to go. It's my group. I can't be late. You know? Uh, and that just shows someone that has a go give heart. And, you know, the coaching business is interesting because a lot of my clients really become my friends.
It's hard to draw that line. Over time, I spend more time with them than I do my real life friends that I can touch and feel sometimes. And when you're in the virtual world, that kind of happens. But I admire how you treat your clients and how you treat your collaborators, how you treated me.
Sheila
Thank you. Very kind.
I measure my success by the relationships I make with the people I serve and the people that I work with. And I am, I am the mean boss that makes me stay up all night and work at something. Yeah. And I are also, I have a, a classical dance background as well, and a classical music background and there's a discipline that goes along with that. No one ever had to tell me to be disciplined. And it's something that Lynnis also had, and we touched on that in our very first conversation, I think lasted two hours. We were supposed to talk 20 minutes, we talked for two hours. Like, ah, we got to go. But when you find those people that, that strike your heart like that.
I'm very excited for people to get to know you at the summit, and thank you so much for joining me today. Was there anything else you wanted to let people know about you?
Lynnis
Well, I do want to let them know about this fabulous group of women on Facebook that I get a chance to get to know. That is the Vibe Wellness Woman Group on Facebook.
If you go there, you'll get a chance to get to know me a little bit and also get a chance to know over 20,000 women- we're up to 20,300 women. Amazing. I know. But this keeps growing. I'm going to. Used to not go on as much, but I am going to start going on more because I'm going to be creating another network off the platform for those people who just want more contact with just me, and that's in the works.
Sheila
And so I'll be talking more about that. Oh, I'm excited to have you back on. You can talk about that. I'll be sure to put all of your links. Into the transcript as well. People know when they come on Reboot Radio, the transcript at the bottom are all the links on how to get in touch with the speakers because I want to, to build that network for people.
Okay? So, Lynnis, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. You're so busy and so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.
Lynnis
Oh, no, this has been a treat. This has been the best interview I've done today. This is like my sixth one, but this is the one that was the most fun. I'm, I'm, I'm serious about.
Sheila
Oh, all right, Lynnis! It's been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to seeing you at the summit.
So take care. This is Coach Sheila Keilty. Have a great day. Bye now. See you next time on Reboot Radio.