On today’s episode, I’m talking to Associate Professor and Researcher Dr. Elaine Choung-Hee Lee about celebrating our strengths.

Dr. Lee is an Associate Professor, Director of Research Support, and Director of the Human Performance Laboratory in the Department of Kinesiology at UConn. She’s also the first Dean’s Leadership Fellow for UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources. Dr. Lee studies the cellular and integrative physiology responses to stress and adaptation to stress. She was a former NCAA Division 1 Rower and Coach and pursued study and research in exercise, nutrition, and 'omics to understand how to help individuals enhance resiliency and performance. While it is hard to imagine that Elaine would ever be doing something else, it took her a long time to figure out the direction of her career. It wasn’t until she discovered how much easier it was to study and learn about topics that clicked with her that she came to realize how important it is to celebrate our strengths.

We talk about:

• Her journey of discovering what she was really interested in and how she had to break down her expectations for what her career was supposed to look like. 
• How she pushed her whole department forward by providing a new perspective and new tools, even though, on paper, she could have looked out of place. 
• The extra stress that women take on in the workplace when they are automatically assigned the role of “kind person” or “caretaker” and how hard it is to step away from that.

You can find the show notes and more resources at https://madamathlete.com

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