Making Sense of the Menopause with a Menopause Coach
Maria Anderson is a midwife and menopause coach from Jarrow, on a mission to use her own experiences, both personal and professional, to help other women take control of their health
She first came to national attention in 2012, when a book she wrote detailing her experience working on maternity units, Tales of a Midwife, made the Sunday Times Bestsellers List. From the outside, it looked as though things were going incredibly well, but in private Maria was experiencing an inexplicable loss of confidence. ‘I thought: I’m gonna figure out why I don’t feel like me any more,’ she says. The perimenopause was the explanation she landed on.
‘I thought “If I’m feeling like this as a health professional, with all the information that I’ve got, I don’t know how other women are dealing with this”,’ she says, adding that this was before celebrities like Davina McCall had begun speaking publicly about their experiences of menopause.
Maria still works as a bank midwife (the midwifery equivalent of a supply teacher), but for the latter part of her main career in the NHS she had also been an improvement leader, using data-driven approaches to improve services. ‘I started to apply all the principles from improvement science to myself,’ she says. ‘I started to get data looking at the things that actually did make a difference.
‘I’m a member of the British Menopause Society, and there is a lot of theory [and] a lot of information, but the gap for me was [translating] that information into simple steps for women that they can apply to their everyday life. That’s what I’ve managed to do, and that’s using continuous improvement methodology.’
At the centre of her approach is helping women to understand their own health, both physical and emotional, in order to make changes to improve it. The approach is personalised and holistic, bringing together an understanding of lifestyle factors like their family life and work life with an understanding of hormones, the menstrual cycle, brain health and gut health. Something that she says can make a particularly big difference is understanding sources of stress. ‘A lot of women believe that they can’t control a lot of things in their life, and so I help them to understand that they can,’ she says. ‘I help women understand patterns in their life and highlight things that they didn’t even realise were causing them stress.
‘A lot of women are juggling children, juggling work, juggling family, juggling life generally [and] put subtle symptoms down to “oh I’m just busy”, and then “I’m getting a bit older”,’ says Maria. These symptoms are so numerous and varied that they frequently go unrecognised, but despite these barriers to diagnosis, we do know that huge numbers are leaving the workforce because of their menopause symptoms.
As well as coaching patients privately, Maria runs a free Facebook group, has a podcast called HRT is Not the Only Solution, and more recently has been working with the Scottish Football Association to develop a programme that can be delivered to communities through their football clubs. A pilot programme, Menopause Goals, was delivered to 25 women at St Mirren Football Club in Paisley. The results of the programme were evaluated by academics at the University of Glasgow, with findings that were unequivocally positive in areas ranging from memory, concentration and mood, to physical symptoms like headaches, bloating and – of course – hot flushes.
The programme has been designed to be scaleable without compromising on its individualised approached, and she has already trained representatives from eight more football clubs to deliver the programme to their own communities. It’s still early days, but she tells us that she is a huge Newcastle United fan, and hopes to work with football teams in the North in future. If the results so far are anything to go by, we don’t doubt that she will.
mariaandersoncoaching.com
