Leah Olude
Well-being Program Manager at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Human Resources
Education: University of Wisconsin - University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Biography
I am a Well-being Program Manager at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, focusing on the design and delivery of well-being education and programming that supports individual and team well-being, while also supporting the strategic goals of the organization. I am also the CEO of my own consulting company, Revolutionary Self-Care Services, dedicated to providing employees, teams and leaders in the caring profession with tools and resources to better manage stress, prevent burnout and cultivate personal and team resilience. I have 15 years of experience supporting individuals, teams and leaders in the healthcare industry. I am a social worker by training and received my Master's in Social Work in 2012 from the University of Pennsylvania.
Passion
My personal and professional mission in life is to revolutionize how we take care of ourselves and each other through revolutionizing the conversation around stress and self-care. I have experienced the power of self-care in both my personal and professional life, and I am committed to helping individuals, teams, and leaders learn how to create self-care practices that are nourishing, restorative and sustainable.
I am willing to travel
More than 100 miles
When it comes to payments
I generally get paid for speaking but make exceptions
Topics
Origin Story
I wholeheartedly believe that caring for others begins by caring for oneself, and as the late beloved activist and writer Audre Lorde said, self-care is not “self-indulgent” but rather an act of “self-preservation.” Yet so many of us pour all of our energy into the people that we care for, leaving nothing for ourselves. And then we wonder why we are tired, depleted, burned out, and sometimes even resentful of the people we care for. Which is why I started my own consulting company, Revolutionary Self-Care Services which offers workshops centered around self-care and community care. We live interconnected lives and must find solutions in partnership and in community. Hence, the focus on both self-care and community care.
I believe that when individuals engage in self-care practices that are truly nourishing and restorative, it can produce a ripple effect in families, communities as well as the systems we wish to change. As Shelly Tygielski writes in Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World, “The successful inner journey of me leads toward a collective healing of we.”
Example talks
Self-care isn’t enough. How to revolutionize employee well-being and workplace culture through community care
The pandemic created a national conversation about employee well-being, and forward- thinking companies have realized that if they want to stay competitive and retain top talent, they need to incorporate employee well-being into their organizational strategy and have done so my encouraging employees to practice self-care. However, if a workplace culture is struggling with a lack of psychological safety, microaggressions, sexual harassment, then individual employees practicing self-care will not solve those systemic issues alone. So, the way in which an organization can truly revolutionize workplace culture and employee well-being is through revolutionizing how employees take care of each other, and this is done through community care.
In this workshop, participants will explore the concept of community care, including: RSS’s working definition, examples of common community care practices individuals can implement at work, how to redefine well-being to include the concept of community care, and how a culture of community care can create a workplace culture where every employee feels like they are deeply cared for and truly belong.
How to use positive emotions to build your personal resilience toolbox
When we are going through tough times, we often overlook the importance of positive emotions. But cultivating small moments where we can really feel our positive emotions like joy, happiness, gratitude, and awe are scientifically proven to increase our resilience and ability to effectively deal with the tough things’ life throws our way. In this workshop, you will learn the neuroscience that explain why positive emotions boost resilience, and how to build a personal resilience toolkit using positive emotions like joy, creativity and gratitude. You will also learn why engaging in activities that utilize your imagination and creativity have the same calming effects as yoga and/or meditation, and how you can harness your positive emotions to help you thrive even during your most stressful moments in life.
How to cultivate resilience, manage stress, and prevent burnout to help you thrive
Many people and organizations suffer from the adverse effects of chronic stress. Overwhelming stress and exhaustion are leading causes of burnout. Unmanaged stress can lead to physical and mental health concerns, decrease productivity, motivation, innovation, and focus.
This workshop trains participants to understand and manage stress with practical exercises and techniques applicable to work and life. Learning Objectives:
* Learn how to identify stress in your body in order to create constructive thought processes and actions that will help you stop stress in its tracks.
* Learn how to determine how stress affects your physical, emotional, and mental health.
* Learn how to identify how stress affects your work and relationships.
-Learn a basic overview of how stress works in the body
-Learn practical, simple and sustainable strategies to manage the little and big stressors of everyday life
-Learn about signs and symptoms of burnout and how it can be prevented and/or reversed
-Learn how to recognize and address signs of chronic stress and burnout in your employees, and your organization.
-Learn how to cultivate greater resilience at an individual and organizational level