Women in Customer Success Podcast

139 - The Power of Goal Setting: Building Your Path to Leadership with Lara Barnes

• Marija Skobe-Pilley • Episode 139

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We sit down with Lara Barnes, Chief Customer Officer at Crownpeak and a champion of authentic leadership, to unpack the true meaning of goal setting, resilience, and growing your career with purpose.

With over 25 years of experience in high-growth, customer-centric tech companies, Lara has led global Customer Success teams at Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, and Sitecore. She shares her rise from senior director to SVP to CCO, offering insight into the unique challenges women face in corporate settings and the critical roles of perception, sponsorship, and values in career advancement.

Lara opens up about navigating corporate politics, embracing vulnerability, and becoming a people-first leader grounded in heart, clarity, and courage. She reveals the mindset shifts that helped her succeed while staying true to herself, and how goal setting became a powerful catalyst for transformation.

We also explore her personal mission-turned-passion project in functional neurology, inspired by her journey to help her son overcome learning and behavioral challenges. What began as a search for answers has evolved into a purpose-driven venture, now helping hundreds of families thrive.

You’ll discover:

  • How showing up as your authentic self builds trust and impact
  • What functional neurology is and how Lara helps bring a sparkle of hope to parents and children
  • The value framework, and how will it change the way CSMs are operating
  • How to develop your leadership style and lead with heart 
  • Playbook to building your path to leadership (& the golden trio: Evidence, Perception and Sponsorship)


Don't miss this enlightening conversation!



💚 This episode is brought to you by Deployflow: https://deployflow.co/

___________


👉 Follow Lara: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larakelly/

👉 Learn more about Deployflow & P-Suite by Deployflow and get a quick squad estimate at: https://deployflow.co/p-suite/

👉 Learn more about Crownpeak: https://www.crownpeak.com/

👉 Learn more about Lara's work with children with neurological disorders: https://www.braindevelopment.co.uk/

__________________________________________________
About Women in Customer Success Podcast:

Women in Customer Success Podcast is the first women-only podcast for Customer Success professionals, where remarkable ladies of Customer Success connect, inspire and champion each other.


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Host Marija Skobe-Pilley


NEW - Women in Customer Success Courses:

  • Thriving as a First-Time People Leader - https://womenincs.co/thriving-as-a-first-time-people-leader
  • The Revenue CSM - https://womenincs.co/the-revenue-csm



Speaker 1:

It was a journey, but it was based on deliverables. Goals is really important, but also you've got to create the right impact. As a woman, I think you always have to prove yourself way more than a man. Perception is exceptionally important because that's going to get you that role. You need to be showing, to do the role before you get the role. Some of the stuff I put in place seemed impossible, really impossible in our environment. Just you have to chunk it down and it's always. It's never eating the whole elephant. At one time I sat in a leadership team meeting one day and I just looked along the line you know mostly guys, few women and just thought is he delivering, is he delivering, is he delivering, is he delivering? And then I look at my results. I'm like I'm smashing it out the park. I can't believe I'm sitting alongside these people and they are SVPs and they're not even delivering their numbers. This is out of order.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the new episode this week. I'm incredibly excited to introduce you to Lara Barnes. She's an outstanding woman who has an amazing career, and I can't wait to dig deeper into her career journey. Currently, she is a Chief Customer Officer at Crown Peak. Lara Barnes, welcome to the show Thanks.

Speaker 1:

I appreciate you inviting me.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, lara for, I believe, those few people who don't know who you are yet. How would you introduce yourself? What's your story?

Speaker 1:

So being a customer success for quite some time. I've had quite a varied career across lots of big corps but also some smaller companies and startups startups so I've seen it from many different areas currently chief customer officer at crown peak, but it's taken a lot to get there and to really achieve that role. There's some, you know, amazing insights I can give you as to what I did and how I did it. But my career, you know know, spans across.

Speaker 1:

I thought Microsoft, I was at Facebook, I was at Orange, I ended up at Oracle and after Oracle it finished me off with a big red corp. So I decided to go and work for a smaller company and up until last year I was working at Zycle building out the whole custom effect and renewals operation, and I did that for seven years on an amazing team and I absolutely love leadership and growing and developing people. And then at the end of last year I took a job working for a woman CEO which I was very excited to do and coming in to help Crown Peak with their whole customer experience. And they've recently brought together three teams, so customer success and renewals, the professional services team and also the support team. So how we build out a customer experience is what I'm tasked to do, as well as ensure that we are renewing and growing our customer base.

Speaker 2:

As you said, it has been quite a journey and you had such a varied experience in huge companies and the smaller ones as well. When you look back into your career, what are some lessons that you think everybody should learn at some point in their life? Anything from your career, yeah?

Speaker 1:

I'd say I'm pretty goal-driven that every year was really a point of reset at some point in their life Anything from your career yeah, I'd say I'm pretty goal-driven, so every year was really a point of reset. What do I need to achieve this year? And I did write down my goals. I was very directive in how I wanted to achieve those specific things, because, although I'd write down a few goals of what I want to do by the end of the year, in 12 months, you've got to write down how you're going to get there. You can't just write down that you want them and magically they're going to appear. You need to work out how it's actually going to happen and who is going to help you. So who's the network in order to help you get there? What do I need to get involved in in order to achieve those specific goals and what are the types of projects that I'd like to showcase to get me to that position Whether it's a role change or whether it's just further experience and where I set my goals.

Speaker 1:

I would then set those specific things for my team members too, because it was always based on a vision of what I was doing at that current time with that company and where we were going to take the business, and that was really important to define out so that you can also track it. So it did all flow into my KPIs and my OKRs and how I then went and presented my quarterly targets and our quarterly projects and what my team were working on at the time. It was basically building a pathway for, you know, an amazing customer success, capability to build a service and an experience, but also we were doing it all together and building that journey ourselves as a team, and then that helped me build out where I wanted to go with the company and then that also helped me with the role positioning that I had because of the amount of things that we'd had an impact on and how that positioned myself to climb. I went in as a senior director. Then, within two and a half years, I think, I was VP, and then another 18 months I went to SVP and then I ended up running not just running EMEA, I was then running the global team and from there I then took on and we built out renewals as well, because that was a finance-driven process. So it was really. It was a journey, but it was based on deliverables and I think goals is really important, but also you've got to create the right impact.

Speaker 1:

As a woman, I think you always have to prove yourself way more than a man. So true, and I believe that deliverables you can't argue with, so nobody can argue that you never did it, because there it is, it's done as the deliverables are really important. And also you do need the sponsorship. So you do need the relationships around the business. You need the perception is also another huge part to how you develop your career and who is along with you on your journey. You know you've got. You've got people that are with you, you've got people that sponsor you and you've got people that speak for you. And you've got to have a mixture of all of those people because when your name comes up for a specific role, that perception is exceptionally important because that's going to get you that role.

Speaker 1:

You need to be showing to do the role before you get the role, and I've always done the role before I got the role and sometimes I've had to wait way longer than I really wanted to to get that role and you need to be patient. But you also need to be pretty outspoken, because you sit alongside people that aren't delivering like you are, and you need to be outspoken and you need to be your own PR agent too. And it's not about you, it really isn't about you. It's about how you represent what you're doing and the people that you bring with you. That's also really important. Otherwise, you know, you'll be pretty selfish if you are not doing it for the greater good. But you do have a part of you that wants to progress. So if you deliver and you're showing that you're delivering, you're creating that perception across the business. There's a lot of input, there's a lot of buy-in and people are with you. So when that role comes up, nobody questions it You're that person.

Speaker 2:

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Speaker 2:

I would like to unpack a few bits of it. Firstly, your goal setting. Can you take us through that process, maybe in a very concrete way, for example, when you were a director and then you were about to move into a VP role? So what would be the type of goals that you put for yourself and for your team to deliver? Of goals that you put for yourself and for your team to deliver that at some point you are really, you know, just showcasing those results and then is it when the role becomes available, you almost apply for it, or you you follow the process, do or do you create that role based on your accomplishments, or is it a combination?

Speaker 2:

I would like to understand more of that exact process on your accomplishments, or is it a combination? I would like to understand more of that exact process for your goal setting, simply because so many people set goals, you know, and those goals can be pretty vague and, as you said, if you don't have exact next steps for every month, like we forget about it, we don't follow, and then at the end of the year you can just see like, okay, I wanted to do it, but I haven't. And in your case, it seems that that journey has been so properly structured, probably pretty much based on your goals. So I really want to understand more. What is that actual process and how do you put those things down? How are you then communicating with a team to achieve it?

Speaker 1:

So when I went in as a senior director, I was running EMEA and I was given some responsibility globally but it was too difficult. So I was working for the head of support and customer success at the time. So they were a VP, I think they were a VP and then they went up to SVP and then you know integrated things and they were incredible to work for. And then you know integrated things and they were incredible to work for. So what I did was I ended up helping put people in place. So there was a me in APJ, there was also me in America, but I took the responsibility of running operations. So I was literally running how we operated and building out game site and building out the playbooks and how we should onboard CSMs on a global basis. So I was set in framework. So I had that responsibility, which was great. So when you go through building out a team and we went through many stages we wanted to bring in across enterprise level and then we wanted CSMs across enterprise and then we built out mid-market because we could see the opportunity and it was about getting headcount and showing the growth really on those accounts and what we were doing for them and showing the opportunities, the SQLs. It was also showing the level of engagement with those customers and the NPS and what you were driving there, and that perception created a we need way more customer success managers across the business. And so we ended up getting more headcount. And then we built out a full coverage model and so we were building this beef, which was amazing to cover 3,000 customers because I was also running the operations. I was setting all of the frameworks as to how we should operate. So that really gave me a great insight into all of our data, and data is exceptionally important. If you don't have data, you can't prove anything and, like I said to you, it's about what you deliver and showcasing what you're delivering. So I had opportunities then to showcase with different you know decks as to where we've been and where we are now and what impact we've been having, and it was across all of the data that you know. You know now it's GRR, nlr, vx. Well, it's about ads of casino, it's about NPS, it's about you know C-STAT how the customers are engaging, what else are they buying, the level of growth across each of those customers, especially the enterprise level customers, which you know was pushing 18% growth year over year. It was amazing. So I had that level of detail and data.

Speaker 1:

And then we had a number of acquisitions across the business and because we went to cloud, we needed a leader that was running our cloud capability, and so my boss went on to run everything across all those acquisitions and our existing products there, building out on a cloud basis, and so that then opened an opportunity for customer success to be its own unit and then build out renewals and compliance. So that role came up and because I had shown I had done all of those, they even brought in external candidates. And I remember that process at the time because I didn't believe in myself, I didn't believe that I could do it, and I, you know, was in a call with my future boss and he had gone out to the market and they had like one woman and two guys and they got it down to like two guys and I, you know, I just thought there's no way, I'm even, I'm not, I didn't even go for it because I just thought I'm just not good enough. And it was my future boss that came to me and said you know, do you want to go for this role? And I said I don't think you know it's right, I don't think it's for me. And he said but why? Why isn't it for you? And I said I don't think I can do it. And he was like what do you mean? You've been doing this for like three years. You're the best person for the role in the company. What do you mean? You think you can't do it? And he said you're the person with all the knowledge. You know what's actually been put in place. You know the difference that you've made.

Speaker 1:

And he said um, he said something quite you know cute. Like what if there was this person that could do the role, but they just don't believe they could do it? And, um, you know, perhaps do you think that person would, should jump in. You know, it was kind of positioned in the third person and I said look, yeah, all right, I'll do an interview. Anyway, I did the interview and I smashed the interview and he was like we're not going with anyone external, we're taking you. And I was like oh, my god, you know this is unbelievable. And that was for the VP role. That's how I got my VP role. But I told you, sponsorship is so important Perception, and that's how I got VP.

Speaker 1:

And I ended up running everything globally and the people that I had brought in alongside me ended up working for me. I was then the person they reported to and I was you need to be really I don't know. You have to get your head around that, because your peers are now working for you. So you now need to set a different way of operating and set precedent. So for me, the next steps, the goals, were I need to align the data. I need to, you know, ensure that Gainsight is our record of truth for customer success. I need to also build out renewals as a capability, and that was huge because it was TPQ nightmare and you know how we were going to do that with setting up a team. So you know I had all these goals, these things, these specific things I had to deliver in within 12 months, and so it keeps your mind very, very active on specific things.

Speaker 1:

And if you set those goals and then you know how am I going to show up I'm now this global leader of customer success and we're building out renewals how am I going to show up? What do I want to be different? How should I be leading my team on a global basis and growing it and what's important to people. You know how do I step my leadership precedence as well, and that also you really do need to define out, because you need to show up and you need to provide individuals with that level of vision but also understanding that they can get there, because some of the stuff I put in place seemed impossible, really impossible in our environment. Just you have to chunk it down and it's always. It's never eating the whole elephant at one time. You need to bite pieces off of it and the more we built the vision and we took everyone on the journey and we gave different projects that needed to be done across different parts of the globe, so everyone was involved in it. They then felt that they were also part of this whole journey too, and that then built people's culture dance that they can. They can achieve that vision and that journey and we achieved huge amounts in the time that we were there as a team and we became so close because we did it together and that was what was so inspiring, but I also. It helped me believe that I could do it and it really.

Speaker 1:

It really wasn't until I've sat there one day and I'm talking two years down the line and this is where I really fought for my SVP is that I sat in a leadership team and the leadership team changed a few times. I sat in a leadership team and the leadership team changed a few times. I sat in a leadership team meeting one day and I just looked along the line you know mostly guys, few women and just thought is he delivering, is he delivering, is he delivering, is he delivering? And then I look at my results. I'm like I'm smashing it out the park. I can't believe I'm sitting alongside these people and they are SVPs and they're not even delivering their numbers. This is out of order.

Speaker 1:

And that's when I got to a point where I thought that I'm going to become vocal and say what you want to say is really important, because a lot of the time people don't want to step in. And I always quote you know, brene Brown did a great presentation on the man in the arena and it's a Theodore Roosevelt kind of passage and it's about you know, if you're not marred with blood, sweat and dust, you're not in that arena. You're really trying, you're going to get beaten up in the arena. But if you're not really trying, how do you know whether you can really do it. And so I really stepped into that arena and became that SVP, without that role, and I really showed up and it was pretty stark in terms of a transformation and I just decided I was going to be this SVP and the perception that it created around the business and my knowledge and my you know nature of wanting to get it got me there. But I did have some very difficult conversations with my boss, too, in order to get it got me there.

Speaker 2:

But I did have some very difficult conversations with my boss, too, in order to get there oh my gosh, I love so many aspects of it how you decided that you are gonna become building on the previous experience, when you didn't believe in yourself and you needed your sponsor to tell you like, seriously, you can do it. You're already doing it. It's amazing just to see how how that situation propelled you to gain so much confidence, based on the things that you were doing anyway. Um, how do we find a sponsor like that?

Speaker 1:

he was exceptionally good at pushing women forward because he used to see what wasn't happening with other people right in the team and a lot of the time it's the women that are delivering but just are afraid to show up because they just think, no, they know way more than I do, but most of the time those individuals are well. Your sponsor is seeing the capability of everybody else as well and actually can see the people that are shining as you do in leadership right, but if they don't have the confidence, it's amazing. He really did push me at certain points, like I would say things in one-to-ones and I'd say why is this not happening? And we should be doing this? And and then in the leadership meeting he'd ping me and say this is where you talk about that thing. And I'm like, yeah, but you know I can't. I can't talk about that. You know everybody else is going to challenge me. You think, oh, everyone else knows so much more and everyone's going to challenge me and I'm going to look stupid. And and then I'd say it and they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'd be like what did I say this before? So then you start to build confidence and he did that a number of times before. Then I was like, okay, you want me to talk, I can just give you vocal. And I really became this vocal individual that stood out and would question everything. And then that's what built me and I've really only been this way for the past I don't know two years. I suppose the confidence in me is, you know, I'm grounded and I know what I'm able to deliver and achieve.

Speaker 1:

And I've, you know, come into Crown Peak with a great view on what's possible. And you know, I've been there about 10 weeks have been pretty hard because a lot has been needing to get off the ground, but we've got some amazing projects going. And I saw today I'm so excited I saw today the value framework that we're building out to change our customer experience. And it's just, it's going to be an absolute change for how we run our customers and it's going to, you know, put such momentum and rigor into how our customers see us. But also it's going to give the confidence in the CSM to be able to know what to do, when to do it and how to drive success for that customer and to not have that before.

Speaker 1:

You know, it's amazing how so many businesses just don't have that, and then, as we go into this year, we're going to have it and it's going to be life. It's going to be life changing for our customers, but also for how we operate internally. You know, the work has come from a few clever people and now we're going to take it to another level in detail and then we're going to build out the technical documentation and then it's going to become the foundation of how we do all of our QBRs and building out, you know, very strong success plans, because we define what success is for a customer and that is, you know, an amazing place to be, and I'm really excited for the rest of the team as well that they needed something like this. They need that vision and the ability to understand where they take their customers. For that, yeah, really really exciting milestone, quite you know, a few literally weeks into where we are at the moment, with me running this Amazing huge milestone.

Speaker 2:

How did you say you call it, is it?

Speaker 1:

value framework. Yeah, so it's really understanding what does success look like for that customer, what's the most ideal customer looking like and where are your successful customers and what have they got implemented and why are they successful? And then it's literally working back and it's looking at what are the adoption milestones that they need to get to and when does that happen? Should it all happen? At implementation, what did an amazing, like excellent, onboarding look like? And are there things that happen in onboarding that you really want to change?

Speaker 1:

Because, know, certain things fall over and are all the customer ends up cutting a few things and therefore it it is not really a set up for success from the beginning. And so what's the minimal viable product that we need to put to market for that customer and then optimize like, how do we do that? What is that? And then are there things that we're compromising within onboarding that should actually be in the contract and so that we can really understand how we take this customer from you know the concept of what they want you to deliver through to actual this, the most successful install that you've ever done, you know it's that building that creative ability to deliver that, with the team and everyone knowing where they're going and I think a lot of the time in many companies it's not defined enough to really understand what success looks like.

Speaker 1:

And then how do you get that customer there? So I call it a value framework and we built this out at site court and it it was incredible and we we built out specific things in those adoption pathways that we could track and then we could have data that we could track it and then we could see on a maturity scale where are they? And then you can set that in Gainsight or whatever your CSP is is the maturity level. And then you've always got the stages that you're taking that customer through to hit that customer success criteria and it always gives the CSM and the capability of taking a customer from A to B to B to B to success. And then you know you've got your advocate, you've got a very engaged customer, you know it's a framework of how you should be operating and it's worked before and I know it's going to work again.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's like a transformative framework for customers. Right Right now, at the very beginning, we are starting out, and these are the five, ten milestones and transformations that you have to go through to become, you know, an amazing customer. However, outcomes that looks like for the customer that is great.

Speaker 2:

I've seen it only in some places where I've been previously and when you put that framework into place, as you said, it changes the whole team, it changes everything. It just gives you a point of reference of what are you actually doing with customers and how are you helping them out I think the other important piece to it is how are you tracking that progress?

Speaker 1:

I mean, everything's about measurement. So how do you track the progress? How do you track that customer that you know had a maturity of two and they need to get to five, and what you do during that process and what automated training pieces or you know documentation that you could send them or what are those things that you can put on an automated basis or knowledge and learning kind of videos through to how do you engage with that customer and show value? So it's so. It's about planning out the journey and how you're going to get there and what's going to get them there, and also feature level adoption too. You can align features to a level of success.

Speaker 1:

You know you've always got customers that only adopt 40% of the product and you want to get them to 60. So what are those features that actually get them there? And if you can track that and then it goes to helping the maturity scale from two to four then you know you're really showing that that pathway is driving the right behaviors and if you can show that value, that also then helps in a renewal becoming a non-event. It gives the confidence in the customer to then buy more or buy another product. You then got your advocate. You know it's like the knock-on effect is huge and you know you then have a better customer outcome and you retain that customer. And the more customers you retain, the you know, the greater the revenue over time.

Speaker 2:

I love that framework. It looks like you have done it a few times previously and that is one of those frameworks that you swear by that is working and that you know everybody should do at some point, shifting gears a bit. Lara, I would love to know more about you as a leader. Yeah, just a few minutes ago you mentioned in your career journey when you were in a position to work with your peers, but then, from Monday onwards, they are working for you. Now you're a boss and you have to rethink about how you're leading and who you are as a leader. Tell me more about that process and how often, if often, you are revisiting that whole idea of how you are as a leader. How is it that you want to show up?

Speaker 1:

I've done a lot of work on myself to understand what my values are and what my leadership style is, and I think defining out your values is really one of the key things, because then you live. You live and die by your values anyway, right? So understanding them is really important, but then communicating them is too, and I think one of the biggest things that I have is honesty and integrity and achievement and very much about collaboration and doing it together, and that leadership style is born out of those values. And I'm sometimes too honest. I'm very direct, I give the feedback. I also give some very tangible what you need to do in order to actually get there and change.

Speaker 1:

You know a perception and you know I've had many conversations like that over the years, where people are just not seeing how they're behaving and, you know, not in a bad way, but just they're missing. They're missing things that they could be doing and they're so much better than what they think they are, and I can see the qualities and it's about bringing those qualities out and actually ensuring everybody else sees them too. Yeah, I've helped grow individuals that have come into my, you know, managers and now leaders and are just doing exceptionally well, and it's about understanding what impact you have on that perception too, how you're putting yourself out there, how you come across, what they see in you and a lot of the time is that passion and drive to actually get something done. But you have to do it in the right way, depending on the other person you're sitting in front of. But you know you have your goals and you have your way of operating and how you read the room and how you see the individuals that can help you get. There is also another thing that is be aware of, but how you manage and what you do for that individual is really important and I come from the heart a lot of the time in terms of doing the right thing and I have fought tooth and nail to do the right thing and people see that and I think the support that people see. Even sometimes you might not get what you want for them, but they see that you've done it to really try and that's also really important to put across.

Speaker 1:

You know so many people don't actually open up as themselves and you can and I have been that person in over my years in my career, like way before my last job but you put on a persona and that persona is not you. You know you become this other person because you think you need to behave like this, this you know fictitious person that you see as a leader, and in fact, it's wrong, because if you're going home at night and then you literally take off your coat after being in the office as somebody else, then you need to start thinking about how you, how you show up, because you need to show up as your true self and people buy into your true self and that's who they follow and why you become you know such a strong part of their life and why they remember you and what you've done with them and for them. And I think people need to understand how you are. So I did a fireside chat with my new team last week and the interviewee is my head of customer success and she was brilliant and I was so honest and so open and I showed them that Brené Brown in the arena speech and I said this is me. So if you want to understand who I am, this is me and it makes me really emotional watching that, because standing in that arena is what I've done to a, you know, an extreme sense in many respects, because I really don't feel comfortable in that arena and you are going to get beaten up right and you're going to have times where it is really bloody tough and there are interactions you have with other people that you don't know how to manage and you know you're in political situations too and you're trying to navigate that, how you deal with that and who you who you are, how you come across. You are growing as an individual and you are also learning and the more you go through those really difficult moments in a job, the more you learn about yourself and how you want to show up and who is Laura Barnes? And that also is one of the things that I've learned so much over my past few career years about myself, as to how I want to continue to be as a leader, and that fireside chat was very open and honest about how I operate, who I am, what I'm there to do, and you know you have, you have pretty tough questions, like now.

Speaker 1:

You know what you've come into are. Are you, you know? Are you regretting it? And I'm like absolutely not, because you know the challenge is the best thing, right? We can all do it together. We can change things in a very positive way and I think also a massive part of me is belief. I believe that I can do it because I've done it before and also, if other people can believe it too, then that's how change happens and everyone's in a job of transformation. It's just how you take that on and how you manage through it and I think you have to believe it and I've said that many times in other talks that I've done. You have to believe that putting in a customer lifecycle across a company, with all of those different individuals that are resistant to it you have to believe it's going to happen and there are ways and means of getting there and influencing people.

Speaker 2:

I love how much you speak about who you are and how you came to become who you are, and it looks like you have done a tremendous amount of work on yourself to understand, as you said, your values, your beliefs. But there is something else that is outside the world of customer success, that very much plays into who you are, and that's functional neurology Complete new topic, and now we are almost wrapping up, but I would like us to go into it. Tell me a bit more about what is functional neurology and how does it play to who you are?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I studied functional neurology because of my son and I studied it in 2018. Every month I went to Barcelona to do a course by Dr Robert Melillo. It was a functional neurology course on children with childhood and neurological disorders. So children with autism and ADHD, ocd, asperger's dyslexia, autism and ADHD, ocd, asperger's, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia and my son had been having some learning and behavioral issues, but he was more on the dyspraxic, dyslexic kind of side of things and he was really struggling at school, really struggling with reading and writing. And here's the belief thing again, I never accepted that this was, you know, what we were going to be facing. And when I studied this course and then started to put some of the things in place and what this course really taught me was about the foundation of the brain and the foundational blueprint of the brain and how the brain develops and what can make the brain go and develop in a, you know, a different, a more accelerated way on one side rather than the other. Instead of having that synchronicity where everything plays at the right timing and synchronizes them, certain things can throw that off. So he had a very developed right brain but an underdeveloped, immature and underconnected left brain, and that was where his speech was as well. So the fact that he couldn't string a sentence together and speak, and he was six years old and he would stop, start and you'd understand what he wanted, but he couldn't tell a story and that was something that you have to tell stories. People don't engage with you unless you really tell stories. And so I wanted to change that for him and I studied functional neurology and I learned about primitive reflexes and the vestibular system and the ocular system and how the brain actually operates. And then I started doing all of these exercises with him to understand what reflexes he had, how his vestibular and balance systems were, how he could track.

Speaker 1:

And most of these children can't track. Therefore they can't read, they can't look down at paper and look up at the board and actually write it down. Their hand writing might be larger, smaller, slanted. Yeah, they might not be able to really track and their eyes can't track. You know, when you put your finger across and you ask them to track their eyes, you know like jump, and that shouldn't happen. They might have different behavioral traits as well which really throw off the behaviors to a point where it's pretty difficult to live with. They might not be able to, you know, sit down at the dinner table without getting up with every five seconds, or they might still wet the bed. And they're six years old, you know. It's those types of things that we experienced and I wanted to find out why, and so I went into functional neurology and I started to do the changes in him.

Speaker 1:

And now I help other parents with their own children who are really struggling, and I bring just a little sparkle of hope to them that it is possible to actually change your child. And I've done it to my own son and he's 13 now and he's absolutely amazing and he won a scholarship of which I never thought would happen. He is doing exceptionally well in English and maths and he still doesn't like reading, but he can read. And we really worked on his ocular and auditory systems too, because all of these systems are off when you have imbalanced food. So you reset the foundation and then you work on all these other systems and find motor, gross motor up to higher level learning and being able to take in information and process that and apply. It is what you need to do at school. So when you haven't got the foundation set, it's very difficult to actually function.

Speaker 1:

So I help other parents reset the function in their child's brain by doing primitive reflex exercises and vestibular and ocular exercises here to help them with the foundation. But I also help connect them with other doctors who can help with the other areas as well as the nutrition and lab work. And we work on the inside as well as the the brain, and we also can do, you know, qeegs and see what's brainwave within that child too. There's a lot yeah, it's a lot about me that many people don't know. I've used light therapy, photobiomodulation, vibration hell of a lot. I know tons about that subject. So if anyone wants to know any more, please reach out to me. My website is braindevelopmentcouk and that's just a side gig that I do On top of my job as chief gastroenterologist braindevelopmentcouk.

Speaker 2:

Lara, I'm just making me a bit emotional. I mean, you've been studying all of it for years basically six, seven years while achieving amazing successes in your day job, because you're a mom and you wanted to help your child and you did it and he's exceptional. And now you're helping how many hundreds of other parents to do the same. You are such an inspiration. I I wish you all the amazing moments in your work with those parents, because what you are doing is incredible.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, I mean it.

Speaker 2:

Is it really Thank?

Speaker 1:

you. I mean it is, it really is something that I love doing. It's like a love, it's like a passion we were talking about passions earlier. It's a passion of mine to actually help people and share this information, because it's only in America at the moment and there's only a few people that really understand it, and I want to be able to eventually bring this to the UK to ensure that many, many, many more people understand it.

Speaker 1:

I mean I'd love the NHS to adopt some of these types of abilities to assess and also to integrate those reflexes, because if you don't integrate those reflexes by 12 months old, that's what really sets things off kids don't crawl on time, they don't walk on time, they don't talk on time, and there's a prevalence of it at the moment, with more and more kids getting diagnosed with different things. But it's all down to many things, you know toxins in our environment and the layers and layers of toxins, as well as our food systems and how it's so broken, and viruses that come up and, you know, trigger certain things or don't actually disappear and stay within the brainstem, and viruses that stay in the gut, and there's loads of things that you can actually do. It's just that many people don't know and it's not widely known, and that's eventually. That's where I'm going, that's what I want to do. It's not widely known and that's eventually.

Speaker 2:

That's where I'm going, that's what I want to do and I believe that you will be doing it because this is such a huge passion of yours. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing this. It's braindevelopmentcouk for all the parents and everybody else who want to find out more. Please get in touch with Lara. But thank you so much. I am excited for all of our future conversations, because I know there will be many more, because I want to find out more about what you do and how you do it. But this has been such an incredible conversation on such a wealthy career that you had such an amazing, rich career full of accomplishments and full of impact on other people, plus Plus this new gig that you've been doing, almost hiding it during the weekends, and it's incredible and I can't wait for it to you know, to leave the light to the fullest, because you're already helping so many and I can just imagine the impact you will have even more when you bring some of those programs out to the world. Thank you for sharing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for listening to today's episode. I really appreciate you taking time to learn something new and propel your career in customer success and beyond. If you like this episode, share it with your colleague, with your team member, with someone you know needs to hear it today. We appreciate your support, so please follow us and subscribe to our channels so many more women can hear about this. Thank you.