The show’s guest in this episode is Dr. Kim Alexander. She is a Canadian Obstetrician/Gynaecologist specializing in HPV Disease and Vulvar Health. She is a Certified Facilitator for the OWL: Our Whole Lives comprehensive SexEd curriculum and the curriculum designer for GrownUps: Your Sexual Self, a week-long workshop for adults exploring healthy sexuality. Dr. Alexander is the author of an upcoming book on sexual health and writes the monthly Savvy Sex Ed column for the Medical Post.

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Experimenting with Learning about Sexuality with Dr. Kim Alexander

Hello. I’m Melanie Parish and I am so excited to be here on the experimental leader podcast. Hi, Mel.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m a professor of psychology at I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair.

And I’m an executive coach and an also an educator, I teach some courses around coaching, and a content creator. So it’s super fun to be with you today. And what have you been thinking about?

Well, I have been thinking about leadership change. And the reason I’m thinking about this, as our longtime academic department, administrator, or academic department manager, Melissa pavlica, is has decided to retire. And we’re in the process of hiring a new academic department manager. And I’m going to share some some of Melissa’s wisdom, she, she sat down one day and was gonna write down what everybody in the front office does their different tasks, their different portfolios, what they manage, how they relate to each other, how they relate to her. And then she decided not to, because she realized that when they get a new boss, they get a new, a new leader, they can have a new relationship and they can they can have, they can tell their new boss what’s in their portfolio, they can tell their new boss, how they relate how they talk, how they meet, how they talk to each other, how they, you know, how they hand off tasks, how they, how they communicate, they they get to redefine and tell the new boss, the way they were the way they want the new office to be. And so they’re just reflecting on the idea that, that it’s going to be a big leadership change in our department. And it’s an opportunity for people to reflect on who they are, what they do, and how they relate to each other and their boss.

I love that. I love this idea of a brand new day like, and I’m wondering like how you think roles are gonna get filled that have to be felt like, like, how do you think that’ll happen?

Well, I mean, that’s one of the challenges of the new leader, the new leader will look around and see who’s who’s picked up what tasks, and they might decide to re you know, if a task hasn’t been picked up, they might assign it to somebody, but they might decide that’s in their portfolio. That’s, that’s one of the things that they enjoy doing. So it’ll be, you know, putting all the pieces in place will be the job of the new manager.

Well, it’s so funny because I coach people often when they’re starting a new role. And in the beginning, they’re often trying to figure out how to offer value. Like that’s one of the hard parts is what do you pick up when you come in? Because everybody’s doing things? And it’s super interesting to just like, look for the orphans and have something to really dive into and then go, oh, yeah, I think I’m gonna pass that now or whatever. So there’s, there’s on the other side of it for the new leader, it gives them some really unique opportunities. If things you know, if all this goes well, they also have some cool work to do, as they learn all about things to try new things.

Yeah. What have you been thinking about in leadership?

Well, I’ve been thinking about the word respect. And I have to say, I’m not a fan of this word. I, I get really, my ears perked up when I hear this word. Because people often use it to say, Well, they didn’t treat me with respect or it just, you know, it’s right in line with. It’s just common sense. And both of these are super frustrating to me. And one of the reasons I don’t like when people talk about respect is because it assumes a set of social rules that are not always in evidence. So if you treat me with disrespect, so say, You didn’t give me a present when I wanted one. Well, that’s just disrespect. Well, maybe you didn’t want to give me a present like, like it takes away your autonomy or someone I’m didn’t invite you to something you thought they should. And that’s a lack of respect. Well, they get to choose. And they may have had reasons, but I’m using the word respect. It’s like, it’s like you’re underlining something that you feel already. And you’re using it as evidence that isn’t actually evidence. So you didn’t like something that happened, and then you name it was just respect or respect. And then you get to, you get to demand that someone changed their behavior without a deeper conversation about what’s underlying that. And I think it’s particularly challenging if you have different cultural backgrounds, different race backgrounds, different, like, LGBTQ or straight, or like, all the all the protected groups may have different definitions of respect in, in their culture. And, and, and so. So the words really problematic for me. So that’s what I’ve been thinking about, right?

And if the if the expectations aren’t universal, and you’ve assumed that they’re universal, but they’re not, then you’re actually creating barriers to inclusivity.

Absolutely, and promotion and all sorts of things. Because if you see someone as disrespectful, because they didn’t do what you assume they would do, but you never told them that assumption, you never had feedback, then you actually may just permit people that have the same underlying assumptions that you do in your organization. So I think it’s really problematic in the short term, because it breaks relationships without conversation. And it’s really problematic in the big picture long term, because you’re operating under undisclosed assumptions.

So who’s joining us on our podcast today?

Yeah, I’m super excited about our guest today. Our guest is someone we’ve known for a long time. And her name is Dr. Kim Alexander. She’s an OB doctor in Brampton, Ontario. And she’s also writing a book on sexuality and sexual health. And she has an amazing newsletter. And so I can’t wait to hear what she has to say today.

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Dr. Kim Alexander, welcome to the show. Thanks

Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to see you in this forum.

Yeah, it’s and we’ve known each other for a long time. So it’s quite fun that we’ve gotten you to come away from your busy practice to talk to us.

Welcome Kim. Its fun to have you here today. Absolutely.

And we met as you say, probably 10 years ago now. Because we’re both trained to facilitate sex ed courses, and I met you at a workshop that you were running around sexual health. So that may be an element of your life that some of your listeners don’t know you are an expert in.

Externally pushing it like, especially when they were in their room with you, but it we definitely enjoy talking about education around sexuality.

And Melanie and I have both been very active, our facilitators, and we work together, and we’ve worked separately to facilitate our classes.

Curriculum.

And for those who are listening who aren’t familiar with the owl curriculum, the the flagship program is a 26 times two hour session program for grades seven to nine. And then after they did that, they added programs for elementary school and for adults and young adults. And all of them. The focus of the program is just that people learn better communication around sexuality. What else would you guys say that are some of the important things about our world?

First of our listeners who are in Ontario that our curriculum has become, what was the foundation of the updated SexEd curriculum a few years ago?

Yeah, I think it helps with value identification to for the kids really thinking about, especially at that age where there’s so black and white about what they believe. They’re really having an understanding of where the gray is and how they feel about that, how they can deal with complex situations and thinking about that before you end up in the thick of it.

Well, and I remember hearing, you know, talking about how one of the things that’s really useful, especially in that seven to nine curriculum is what if you like someone and they don’t like you? What if someone likes you and you don’t like them? Um, what does it mean to have like, a kind and, and honest conversation without being mean? Or, you know, stonewalling them or ghosting them to use more current language? You know, how do you treat people with respect when there’s feelings that may not be reciprocated? And I think that’s really useful in a business context. You?
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like how do you just manage honesty in relationship? I think it’s really important.

So, Kim, how is how’s your leadership going? These days?

There’s been some interesting developments on the leadership front. For me, it’s been a year of really exploring what that concept means in the context of being a medical doctor.

Yeah, tell me more about what what does leadership mean in that context.

So the term physician leader is a very specific kind of doctor when it comes to kind of medical parlance, a physician leader would be a doctor who is employed by a university, collects a salary, sees a fairly low volume of patients spends a lot of time on research doing the science of how medicine develops, and works specifically at academic hospitals rather than community hospitals, and spends time looking at policy development and guideline implementation. So physician leader really is much less engaged in the everyday practice of medicine, although it’s required that you carry a patient load, and more and gauged on that kind of development, right. And it’s one of the reasons that medicine works as well as it does. I don’t think there’s a lot of other fields, where you have a really regimented method of conducting research, doing the experiment. summarizing those findings, discussing the findings, in a really pure base setting, let’s formalize and then communicating that to the people who are actually doing the work. And then having that chunk of specialists in their field, take that work and do the kind of grind of figuring out how it works in the day to day, and then communicate it to our generalist peers and family medicine. So teachers really don’t do that all that well. The the pedagogy piece of how education works from a scientific standpoint, doesn’t really get communicated, or it doesn’t get implemented in the classroom nearly as well as we all hoped that it would. And I think in a lot of businesses, that experimental pipeline isn’t really in place either, although I know that that’s one of Melanie’s passions is making sure that businesses have that in place.

So Kim, what’s your role in this whole system?

I am not that thing. I’m not a physician later. I’m a clinician, I see patients all day every day, my clinic today I saw 22 New consults, yesterday was in the operating room from eight till five, with three different patients. The day before I was in clinic, I prophesy 18 or 20. So my day is not in front of a computer, it’s not in the lab, it is in the office.

And what does leadership look like? From that point of view.

So from that point of view, leadership becomes much more about communication, it becomes much more about being a science communicator, and inspiring your patients to be to look up to the knowledge that you have to have conversations with you and figure out how to meet their goals, and to go out into the community and share what they’ve learned with their peers. So it becomes very much more about that kind of science communication piece and helping improve sexual health literacy in the population specifically, in my case.

Can you can you give an example of that communication piece? Because I think I know because I know you but I want to understand like, how is it leadership to have conversation?

Sure. So the work that I do, probably about half of the work that I do is around cervical cancer prevention. So the whole reason that people get a Pap test is to hopefully catch changes on the cervix before they become a cancer when it’s easy to treat. Cervical cancer is a sexually transmitted disease is caused by this little virus called HPV. It’s really common about 80% of us get it at some point. Right? So we all get it. Most of us clear it with it. In any trouble, our immune system is able to take care of it. And over about a two to four year period, we eventually clear the virus solve any problems associated with it and go back to our normal life. But a certain proportion of us can’t do that our immune systems, we’ve inherited immune systems that just aren’t good at that kind of job. But that’s the case and you happen to catch this virus as 80% of us do. Over many years, it can grow into a cancer. The good news is we have this incredible vaccine, the HPV vaccine that is amazingly effective at preventing cervical cancer. So that vaccine is accessible in Canada to anyone of any age at ongoing risk of HPV infection. And yet, when you look at the percentage of people in the population that have the vaccine, it’s about 10%, maybe a tiny bit higher, now it’s very, very well. So when I do this teaching with patients who wound up in my office, because they’ve had a funny, Pap, it’s something that’s super relevant and current to them right now. And we talked about how important this information is and how they wish they’d had it, and how they can bring that back to their community, to their friends who at risk factors to their friends who are out in the dating world, you know, have the conversation about the vaccine and the fact that it’s available at your local drugstore.

And so the leadership piece for you is in providing.

Is in teaching. Providing the education to empower people to go out and do what they want to do.

Not just treating but sharing information. When you see 22 people, I mean, that’s so many people in a day. So when you see that many people you’re still trying to hold on to the I don’t know, what’s the value under that? Is it accessible information or…

See its health advocacy? Right? Like, what information do you need to know so that you can access the very best health in your life and your community that you can?

And what are the challenges of being that kind of leader?

The biggest challenge, I think is the bottleneck, right? That I can only see so many patients in a day. And there are more efficient ways to get that information out there. But there are ways that I don’t really have access to because I sit in my office all day.

So how do you address that bottleneck?

So years ago, I started thinking about that, and what what my purpose was right? Like as you enter middle age, you start to think of it like what why are you here? What’s your purpose? You know, what are what are your goals for the second half of life, right? I’ve raised two children who were kind of on the verge of launched and what’s next. And I decided that my purpose was to improve healthcare literacy in North America to improve sexual health literacy specifically. So I was talking with a mutual friend of ours who’s been on your podcast, and Baccarat. And I said, you know, and this this is this is I think, my purpose for my second half of life. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. But this is what I’m thinking about an answer. That’s easy. You can just write a book. She went on to say, you know, in the current media climate, and in our current society, your book is your calling card, to be able to have conversations. The book is how you get on the podcast, the book is how you go on morning television, and how you get the articles in the newsletter and write all of that stuff that helps improve reach and platform and communication. And at the time, I was raising two young kids that I was like, shut up and really just wrote a book. Problem, I’ll do that big and kind of dismissed it. And, and then time passed, and I kept coming back to that thought and thinking, Oh, well, lots of people write books. I could maybe write a book. Melanie Parrish wrote this amazing book called The experimental leader. And it started crossing my mind and then I did when I’ve an seminar, one of her writing seminars, and it had a really good reception from it and thought, You know what, I’m just gonna write a book. So that’s what I spent the last year and a half doing.

Cool, and like why this book?

There’s really nothing else like it out there. There are writers who write in women’s health. There are writers who write there’s lots of amazing content out there for you Like adults for youth and young adults, there’s such great work out there around sexual health, a lot of it’s in graphic nonfiction, so like a comic book style. But there’s not. And there’s some that’s much more encyclopedic right where it’s like every, here’s your tone. Over the next seven years, you can look to this reference novel, but there isn’t a lot of another, that’s conversational. There’s one other book written by an MD, who’s a friend of one of these big American personalities. And it’s the most terrible book I’ve ever written. It is fat phobic, queer phobic, misogynist, it is, I would pick it up and read a paragraph and scream and throw it on the ground, it was so terrible. So there really wasn’t anything out there that offered comprehensive sex ed, with the lens specifically, of people in mid life. There’s not a lot out there for us. And Lord knows, we certainly didn’t get a good sex ed in our schooling. As people in Gen X, or even the boomer generation, there was nothing even know what’s taught in the schools, really, our teachers to have a good curriculum, but not a lot of training. So I wanted to get this information in the hands of people who wouldn’t have come across it necessarily. And in midlife, there’s so much relationship instability, whether it’s, you know, feeling really stagnant in your own relationship and communication, or whether it’s the end of a long term relationship and the beginning of something new. So it’s a time when a lot of people are really looking for, for a fresh start.

Well, I get your newsletter, and I love your newsletter. And I’d actually love for you to tell people how they can sign up for your newsletter, because it is chock full of great, like tips and ideas and thoughts and things that nobody else is talking about. In my world. I always feel like I want to forward it to my kids actually. Like that’s where and I think I have forwarded to them, because there is this great information, but how would people get on your newsletter list?

Yeah, so I’ve been building again, trying to improve communication and availability of resources for folks. I’ve been building a website, so it’s easy to find me. It’s my name, Dr. Kim alexander.com. And they’re on the website, you can sign up for the newsletter and there’s also all my old articles are archived so you can find tons of articles there. podcasts that I’ve been on, on everything from spirituality to health and midlife to HPV vaccination, all kinds of stuff. That yeah, you can take a read through this month’s newsletter, I think last month’s newsletter was on HPV vaccination, I think this one’s newsletter is going to be on spotting manipulative behaviors.

Ah, and can you tell us where to find your book and also what your book is called?

Yes. So none of those things are certain yet. The newsletter is the best way to get the current news right now. So the book is done. And now the work becomes finding the publisher to take it off. Because again, if the goal is the widest reach possible, then traditional publishing is probably the best way to accomplish that. So I have an agent that’s helping me along the way, and we’re starting to query publishers.

Exciting. Yes. I have another question on dr.kim.alexander.com. How do we spell?

dr.kim.alexander.com.

Yeah. Spelling out loud. I was like, what what are we doing? I got it.

Yeah, so you know, leadership in the clinical setting becomes helping people reach their goals, right. As a business leader. It’s the same thing. It’s identifying those goals, marketing to make sure that they know about your service and then providing the service to help them meet their goals. So it’s the same in healthcare and clinical work. It’s all about helping people reach their fullest potential with the product you provide, which is your knowledge expertise.

Excellent.

Yeah, I really appreciate you being on today. I guess I’m curious if you have like a good tip for middle aged white life and sexuality.

I think the biggest misconception especially For people in long term relationships that people have is that if you don’t have spontaneous desire, there’s something wrong with you. So people feel like if they don’t, when their partner walks in from work, if they don’t immediately feel the need to jump that person’s bone than the problem is that but in long term relationships, and especially for people with predominant estrogen, so people with boulders and vaginas, we don’t tend to have spontaneous sexual desire, especially in long term relationships, we tend to have more of a responsive desire pattern. So responsive desire means that you don’t really start feeling desire until you’re actually aroused. You got to get something on board to start the engine. So that may be putting sexy little notes in your partner’s lunchbox, it might be reading erotic fiction, or watching erotic movies together, it may be wearing silky lingerie that makes you feel a little sexy through the day. But you’ve actually got to do that little bit of jumps or you’ve got to have that intentionality to spark arousal before you’re going to start to feel that desire for your partner. And that that’s absolutely normal.

That’s a great tip.

Thanks for that.

It’s been great having you here today. Thank you so much for being on our show.

It’s been great seeing you today. Thanks.

Indeed. And thanks for the work that you’re doing on this podcast, super, super interesting to hear all the different folks on in their own interpretations of what being an experimental leader means.

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So that was great talking with Kim. And what do you think?

Well, it was fun. We’ve known Kim for years. And we’ve seen it in a lot of different contexts. And we always end up talking about sex.

I know we always talk about sex with Kim. And she’s just so phenomenal at opening conversations, that being safe space, so many things that we value, and I’m taking away today that we have to rev the engine a little before to get things going. So I’m pretty excited about that, too. That was great to what are you excited?

Well, we I mean, we talked with her about not just sex but also about sex education and how to have conversations about sex and sexual health. And, and that’s her life mission. And that’s a that’s worth. That’s something worth doing.
All right. Well, it’s been great being with you here today. And I was great talking to Dr. Kim Alexander. Go experiment!

Important Links: 

Dr. Kim Alexander

 

Dr. Kim Alexander is a Canadian Obstetrician/Gynaecologist specializing in HPV Disease and Vulvar Health.

She is a Certified Facilitator for the OWL: Our Whole Lives comprehensive SexEd curriculum and the curriculum designer for GrownUUps: Your Sexual Self, a week-long workshop for adults exploring healthy sexuality.

Dr. Alexander is the author of an upcoming book on sexual health and writes the monthly Savvy Sex Ed column for the Medical Post. Visit drkimalexander.com to find articles, podcasts and handouts on sex and sexuality.

 

 

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