We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lisa Menninger. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lisa below.

Lisa, appreciate you joining us today. Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?

My story has many tangents. I started my professional life in music and theater. Did that for decades then wound up in professional athletics. That led me to being a therapist.

As a kid, I was always outside playing some kind of sport. But it was play. Nothing I ever considered for a career path. I had a tremendous passion for music and theater and pursued that through college and after. I stayed active and interested in the body and the mind, but kept my focus on music. In 1996, I ran a 5k for fun and came in second place. The following year, I decided to “train” for it and won the race. I began wondering if I could run a marathon and what that could teach me. So while working in music and theater (and raising my then 6 year old son), I trained for and ran my first marathon. I qualified for Boston and ran that. This then led to a career as an endurance athlete, keeping my hand in the music. After a while, friends began to ask me to coach them, which then led to training and becoming a coach in running, cycling and tri/duathlons, and a certified personal trainer. I began to slowly transition out of music and theater as my training and my “side job” in athletics and wellness was taking more and more time.

What I soon realized was that I was having to refer people out to mental health professionals when I hit the wall of my own scope of practice as a coach and trainer. I wanted to be able to treat the whole person – body and mind. And that is when I went back to school at Westminster College and did a 3 year masters degree to become a mental health counselor. I have been practicing for 7 years. I opened my own practice this past March – Neuro=Integrated Counseling.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The pursuit of understanding brain and body have been a life-long passion. I practice an evidence-based therapy called, Interpersonal Neurobiology, that couples attachment research with neuroscience so we can understand how our early environments affected us, creating coping behaviors (many which we may identify with as part of who we are instead of what we do) and neural grooves that can be triggered in our daily lives, without us understanding why.

Once we can construct this cohesive narrative by looking back at our experiences and their effects, we can notice our present feelings/behaviors/triggers, name them, compassionately contextualize and understand what happened and why we are currently triggered, then make conscious, present choices vs unconscious, implicit reactions, allowing us more self regulation and response flexibility and dis-identify with coping we developed when our brains were not fully developed, to manage what felt unmanageable.

This conscious, self regulating way of living our lives, improves our relationships and our wellbeing.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

In both of my previous careers, we trained and then shared what we learned in very specific ways. I was expected to be an expert – both as a performer and as a trainer and a coach. Curiosity was for my own learning and training journey so I could use that to inform how I trained and coached others, or performed professionally on stage.

When I became a therapist, while I did need to learn and train to sit in a place of knowing, I also understood that my job was now very different. The client is the expert on themselves. To use curiosity as a way to try to deeply understand and relate compassionately to them was the focus. I needed to use the tools I had learned to facilitate and support understanding and self discovery, not to teach or coach. This was an important and useful ah ha.

It is my personal belief that curiosity is the means to all real learning and change. It helps us wonder about things in an open, present way, rather than react unconsciously to the things that happen.

If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?

I would keep my path the same, as wacky and unconventional as it has been. The learning provided to me through all of my various careers has allowed me the honor of working and observing so many people, in so many environments (some of them very stressful), and ignited my passion and compassion for humanity.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lisamenninger.com