The Grit & Grace Leadership Podcast
What fuels the heart of a leader? Leadership isn't just about guiding—it's about persevering, learning, and growing. On the Grit & Grace Podcast, we shine a spotlight on the stories behind the leader. Leaving listeners with the inspiration and tools to do the same.
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The Grit & Grace Leadership Podcast
Master Confidence & Achieve Unshakeable Self-Worth with Dr Bimpe Ayeni
Empower your leadership journey with Dr. Bimpe Ayeni, an Ivy League-educated plastic surgeon turned entrepreneur. Dr. Ayeni shares key strategies to cultivate confidence and achieve unshakeable self-worth. From leading in the operating room to founding the men's skincare line Blair & Jack, her story embodies confidence, bravery, resilience, and success. This episode offers actionable advice and inspiration for anyone looking to elevate their leadership skills and make a lasting impact.
Discover strategies for mastering confidence: Gain insights into how Dr. Ayeni cultivated a deep sense of self-confidence throughout her career, along with practical advice for viewers to apply in their own lives.
Explore the building of unshakeable self-worth: Learn about Dr. Ayeni's journey to develop a strong sense of self-worth, both professionally and as a mother.
Understand the importance of bravery and resilience: Learn valuable lessons on navigating challenges from the operating room to entrepreneurship and discover tips for overcoming daily uncertainties.
Impart values to the next generation: Find out how she shares the lessons she's learned and instills these values in her children, offering viewers insights into passing on lessons of confidence, bravery, and resilience to their kids.
Subscribe for more empowering insights, and share your thoughts and experiences. Connect with Dr. Ayeni and explore Blair & Jack further:
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Today I welcome Dr Bimpay Ayani, an Ivy League educated plastic surgeon, an inspiring mother of twins and now founder and entrepreneur of men's skin care line Blair and Jack.
Speaker 2:What pushed me to go from just thinking about it and maybe one day I'll get to it was what I was talking about before, this whole notion of why not, why not?
Speaker 1:me. Her journey from medicine to entrepreneurship offers strategies for building confidence and self-worth. In this episode, we explore the lessons within these bold moves and how they can reshape our lives and impart invaluable tools for our kids. Let's dive in, bimpay, thank you so much for coming and being in studio with us. Thanks for having me. We have so much to dive into. I want to just start with the context of who you are professionally. What brought you into the world of medicine? You've gone to Yale, you studied at Oxford, mcmaster and you did a fellowship at Harvard. You've risen through the ranks through surgery and started a venture as a recently as an entrepreneur. Before we get into all of that, I feel that there is a family lesson, a mentorship and entrepreneurship in your backstory. Remind me how many surgeons are in your family today?
Speaker 2:A ton, okay. So, starting with my father, my dad's a general surgeon. He retired recently. Growing up, dad would say you know what guys? Do whatever you want, really, yeah, do whatever makes you happy, just be a professional. And lo and behold, one by one. So I'm one of five children and four of us are surgeons. So medicine has sort of, over the years, become the family business.
Speaker 2:So even though I was born in Montreal, I spent my childhood in Nigeria. Oh wow, I love just the unity, the togetherness, bonding with relatives, so that was a very important part of my childhood growing up. And then, for the medical part of things, my dad had this amazing job. So, even though he trained at McGill in Montreal, he wanted to go back home, back to Nigeria, to make the country healthier. And my dad had many patients who couldn't afford to go to the main hospital, and so he opened up his own little sort of private center and he would fix their hernias, remove their lumps and bumps and cysts at no cost. And so I always think back and say you know what that is? Such a wonderful skill and a wonderful attribute that he passed on to all of us and something that, as a mom now, I kind of want to pass on to my kids, my twins.
Speaker 1:Well, you touched upon something I think will be important for listeners. You know your father was very open about allowing you guys to be curious and explore. You have twins. I do how old are they, they're five, they're five, yes, so when you think about your father's legacy, what he taught you, and how you're taking that and you're making it your own, how do you foster that curiosity in the five year old today?
Speaker 2:I think for me as a kid, I was a quiet kid. Growing up I kind of stuck to myself. I was a middle child, number three out of five, and my parents, my family, they always gave me that space, so they didn't say, oh, you know, be more like X, it was just this is who you are and that is absolutely okay. It's okay to be quiet, it's okay to be nice and I'll get back to that because for my dad, as a surgeon, you have this role where you can walk into a room and demand, you know, power and spring for your instruments and whatnot, and my dad was never like that, you know. So he sort of taught us directly and indirectly that it's okay to be a nice guy, it's okay to be polite, it's okay to be humble, and so those are really important values and virtues that I wanted to pass on. But I think for me as a mom, what's really important is just pushing kids to not feel boxed Kids. They're just like they're blank slates and they can do a lot more than I think we give them credit for.
Speaker 2:You know your kid well, Watch, look for cues. When you ask a kid a question like, oh, how was school today? Oftentimes the answer that I get On the drive home is it was good and that's the end of the conversation. One thing I noticed my dad had done over the years was, no matter how busy he was with his practice, no matter how busy mom was with all her different activities, we would always Come home and sit down together for dinner every single day. When you have an hour or even half an hour to sit together, you get a much fuller picture, yeah, of what their days are like. So when you kind of gather all that information and data, you can kind of apply that to what they do, to their activities, and I think for my kids I really just put them out there and just tell them, like my you know question when I choose your activities and choose the things you take part in this, why not?
Speaker 2:Why not, I don't want to limit you because of the things that I may not know how to do. Oh, interesting, yes.
Speaker 1:You know you touched about something on your father's leadership style. What are the most important qualities in your own leadership as it relates to your medical professional experience?
Speaker 2:so I came into medicine after. So I finished my degree at Yale, then spent a year doing a master's at Columbia in New York City which was wonderful, yeah and then moved to Ottawa for medical school and then McMaster for residency and then Harvard for the fellowship. So I share all that sort of show.
Speaker 2:The yeah, yeah, the timelines, yeah it's a long haul and I think what I learned by that is just this notion that you can do hard things, and I think it really made me more tenacious a person, so that as a leader, things aren't gonna be easy. You'll make tough calls and tough decisions, but you just kind of keep on trucking the same way you kept trucking along the years when you were still studying and you know your friends had all been settled in their career for a couple of years and you're still a student. I think. Also, leadership is Sometimes you sort of define it as you know being the one in control and calling all the shots. My dad and his style In how he's so respected by his peers, seeing that interplay between when you lead and when you follow, I think has been very interesting. So you follow at times instead of always being in the driver's seat.
Speaker 1:Along the way when you're in school, you're kind of collecting these Moments where you're like, oh, I was able to do that in this way here, and then you applied it into another Facet and I think sometimes that's a bit of a lost art because we we don't apply One lesson in a different paradigm sometimes, and I think being able to go. Hey, when I was a student, I knew how to move past this place of discomfort to get here.
Speaker 1:Now I can do the same thing 20 years later and I can apply the knowledge from 20 years ago. I don't always see people doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think being able to look back and just reflect on lessons learned it takes a lot of self-reflection mistakes made and what you learned from them. It's not always comfortable, and what you're asking actually makes me think back to the long days or the rough days back in medical school, where so, for example, if you're on rotation, that you're not enjoying at all and it takes everything out of you to get up and get out of bed to go to this block in a certain area of medicine that you know you're not going to practice in, but it's required of you. So it's just that notion of showing up. I don't want to be here, but I'm still going to show up. That's an important life skill and I do that as a mom, like my kids will sometimes say, oh well, you know this thing, you know swimming is so hard. And I say, yep, it is. So I tell myself we're still going. So, yeah, there's something to be said for just pushing through.
Speaker 1:What is your skill internally to not mistake the resistance that comes up when we're on the quest for our next evolution of ourselves with. I'm in the wrong spot.
Speaker 2:I think I'm of true mind. Sometimes you are in the wrong spot, yes, and it takes just really sitting with the discomfort and trying to really analyze at a deep level what is it about this scenario that is, you know making me feel this way and then just understanding, having a really good sense of self. You know knowing your strengths, knowing your weaknesses and saying honestly to yourself well, I feel uncomfortable, but that's a me issue, yeah. And then you know being able to see the external factor, being able to separate those I think is very important, but it takes a lot of self reflection.
Speaker 1:You said something about the process of you know how you move through discomfort and medical school. You said you could see the light at the end of the tunnel, right, yes, there are many people who are can operate in that framework because there's a given, there's a known. At the end, there's a known entity when you get there. Yeah, and that's the case in entrepreneurship. And I am so fascinated by your story because you are operating in both tracks highly successfully. What has the track of medicine taught you that you can apply to entrepreneurship and what has been completely new terrain that you've had to cultivate a skill on as you've kind of built this business?
Speaker 2:for yourself. So from medicine, I think I have the ability to synthesize a lot of information, to be very analytical, I am my approach, to be very good at managing my time and being organized. And then the entrepreneurship piece. I think the main difference is just what you're saying is there are no guarantees with entrepreneurship, there's no real playbook and every day is just another day of trying to put things together and you sometimes have to stop and say what am I doing and who do I think I am? And I think it's this fascinating industry where you keep on showing up, yeah, even when your knees tremble a little bit because you're thinking like whoa, and I think what I love about it is just that a lot of things that I do scare me. You know, I'm picking up skills and talking to different trades and industries that I've never worked with, which can be scary, but I love that. I love that just not being the pro or the expert and having to rely on my gut feeling, my ability to sort of think on the spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Lots of troubleshooting, lots and lots of that. And you know what I do. I'm being very purposeful in passing that along to my kids, okay, and every so often I get a moment or a glimpse of it and I get very excited for them and for their futures. So my twins are five, blair is our daughter and Jackson's our son, and it's just very funny watching boy girl twins grow up in you know, strengths and weaknesses and interests and likes. And one thing that I'd love to see is Blair tends to be cautious when approaching new activities, whereas Jackson is cautious in approaching new people. So they have this thing where they. You know they are just the perfect balance for each other. So I remember when Blair started learning how to ride her bike oh, she was terrified.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so her father and I were watching her doing one of her lessons, and when she finally, you know that moment when they finally are able to go on their own, and there she was, peddling along and she's saying fear is not real Fear, Like highlight oh yeah, fear is not real.
Speaker 1:The thing I'm learning through this story is that you're teaching your kids of learning how to access something from inside of them, absolutely All on their own, yes, and draw on it exactly when they need it. Absolutely so for you, building your company. A how did you know you had the potential to do it? But B what was the spark and the genesis of you wanting to do it?
Speaker 2:So my husband had these shaving bumps and irritations and he really was sort of the genesis of this entire venture. Okay, you know, he came to me and he said he had skin issues and he felt that with my background as a plastic surgeon I was well positioned to help him out. There are just so many different elements that come into play. One is the network. We all have a network.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you forget how strong that network is until you sit down and you say, hey, wait a minute, he's asking me for help with a skin issue. I do this every day, you know, for a unique skin issue. That is so whenever I have these situations and challenges with my own patients, what do I do? I look at the literature and review it, and then I call people in my network, ie my colleague Miranda from Origins Pharmacy, and I say, hey, listen, I've got this issue. You know, what do you think? Should we mix a little bit of this for the itchy part, that for the pigment, this for that? And you know, we try, just using our different skills. That's right.
Speaker 2:I called a compounding pharmacist. She made a solution, he tried it. And here's the thing about my husband he's really honest, sometimes too honest, and so I sort of, you know, made this first, the very first concoction, thinking, ah, we'll see how it goes, knowing fully well that if it didn't work, he would tell me sorry, this isn't it nicely, but he's not somebody who kind of tells you what you want to hear just to make you feel, you know, a certain way. The moment I knew I was on to something was when this honest man had tried the combination I gave to him from the pharmacist and he, without me even asking or prompted and said this is incredible. Out the gate. Out the gate, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I thought, wait a minute. You know, knowing him for who he is and and how he communicates, I thought, hmm, this is interesting. And he kept saying it over and over. So this consistent message of this is amazing. You know, I'm a 40-something year old man who has tried many things over the years and this actually really works for me. And I think hearing that was when I thought, okay, how many other men are like him who are out there, mm-hmm, who are looking for something that doesn't exist yet? And so I think that pushed me to say, okay, let me focus some more energy and attention on seeing how I can take this from a solution for one to a solution for many. And I think what pushed me to go from, you know, just thinking about it and maybe one day I'll get to it was what I was talking about before this whole notion of why not? Why not me?
Speaker 1:I love that line because we can all apply that line. Okay. And then second thought after why not me? What happens?
Speaker 2:It's. You know, looking At the other questions how, how am I gonna make this happen? What do I have to do to get this to when I want it to be? And that's involved a lot of help from a lot of people. Whether it was something like Looking at how we initially we just had, you know, good old-fashioned medical grade packaging, and then it got things really got elevated to a different level.
Speaker 2:And I was very fortunate along the way because what I found is, whenever I would ask people for help, they were very generous with their time, with their ideas, opinions and contacts. Yeah, you know that always Stuck with me in this notion of paying it forward, because I'd love nothing more. When all this is said and done and I have more time, wish me luck. It'd be amazing to mentor those who are in beauty spaces looking to do just this. Right. There been so many ups and downs and trial and error, some complete failures I'll never forget, you know, during the pandemic, waiting weeks and weeks and weeks for packaging to arrive. And then packaging did arrive and took it out of the boxes and my husband and I were like the white bottle that we thought we were getting is gray and and the lettering is a little askew. It's not straight.
Speaker 1:What do you do with that? You send it back or you go forward with it.
Speaker 2:Well, you know a little bit of both yeah, yeah, went forward and then just really thinking outside the box, right, you know, and saying, well, I guess we're gonna revert to plan.
Speaker 1:B. I am so curious on why you didn't give up because one could say, hey, I have this great other thing going over here I mean medicine, yes, why do I need all the hassle?
Speaker 2:I guess quitting isn't my thing. I'm one of those who just you know and my, my parents all that early on they would say I mean, she's just relentless.
Speaker 1:I think this is a big skill of people, but goes back to know thyself right and when are my strengths.
Speaker 2:What is trying to?
Speaker 1:emerge. How do I move into this next version and chapter of life and have the courage and bravery to do it? Mm-hmm, how do you hold all of this together with a level of balance, being a mom, twins You're still in your medical practice and you're launching this business.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What is your secret here to the balance of this multifaceted life you live?
Speaker 2:Balance is an interesting word, yeah, and I think for me, balance means Keeping it together in spite of all the various challenges. Yeah, so for me, on like a daily or a weekly level, that means what did I do well this week, because I know for a fact that I'm not going to be able to get every single thing done at a very high level. There are some weeks where I am on top of things when it comes to all the facts that's coming into my office for my practice and I say, wow, that was incredible. And then there are some weeks where you just look and you say, well, well, well and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Being okay and not holding a level of guilt or a standard to yourself that you obviously do right, Like you have a very high standard of excellence, but there's some level of personal empathy that you give yourself along the way. Here I think humor helps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to be honest, you have to laugh at yourself I hope that women listening can give themselves a bit of this release valve. There's a lot of pressure and stress and high ambitions and wanting it to be perfect. I see a lot of high performing women in leadership. You know holding this impossible standard and not necessarily learning to navigate that. I think that's kind of the chapter I see a lot of women in right now Absolutely.
Speaker 2:There's just so much to do in any given day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like the world needs to give us grace to do that and to be vulnerable and to fail at times and not then. You know, brush this, you know stroke of. Oh well, see, that's the problem with you trying to accomplish so much, because that's not fair.
Speaker 1:I have one more kind of leadership skill that I'm curious to get your perspective on bravery. I'm thinking like what does it take to be a surgeon? You embody some bravery, and how have you had to lean on it and how has it evolved over time?
Speaker 2:for you, it takes being brave to meet strangers yeah, strangers on some of their toughest days and being able to have them trust you, trust that you're going to put their best interest in mind. In many ways it goes both ways. They're pretty brave as well, you know fear is real.
Speaker 1:It's real for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I don't think there's anyone who doesn't feel it.
Speaker 2:Exactly and embracing it and saying you know what? I'm coming into this very good intentions. It's the most important thing. Like you know, you're trying to help people and you, just you, push through, you persevere In spite of you know what you think, what the world thinks, how people have defined you, your own limitations, you set on yourself. You have to put all that aside and just say no, no, no. Here is the mission and I'm going to get it done.
Speaker 1:There's nothing more important than people feeling comfortable in their bodies and with their skin, and you know I suffered with eczema and acne growing up, so I know what it feels like to not feel fully able to show up and be comfortable in your skin. And so thank you for being brave in your pursuits, thank you, thank you. I appreciate that, yeah, and you're doing wonderful work in the world. Thank you, if people do want to kind of follow along on your, where can people find you?
Speaker 2:Blair and Jack. B-l-a-i-r and Jack, and then on my professional page at Dr Bimpay, so D-R-B-I-M-P-E Okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming into the studio. Thank you, this was great. Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn, where we transform the wisdom from our podcast into practical tips, tools and takeaways for your leadership journey. Find us at gritgracepodcast. See you next week.