Have faith no matter how strong the winds are blowing and don’t reach for results but keep a clear direction of where you want to go in every circumstance.
Today, more than ever, wellness is at the forefront of societal discussions. From mental health to physical well-being, women are making significant strides in bringing about change, introducing innovative solutions, and setting new standards. Despite facing unique challenges, they break barriers, inspire communities, and are reshaping the very definition of health and wellness. In this series called women in wellness we are talking to women doctors, nurses, nutritionists, therapists, fitness trainers, researchers, health experts, coaches, and other wellness professionals to share their stories and insights. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Elaine Drolet.
Elaine Drolet is the Chief Executive Officer at BainUltra. She leads the brand with a team-focused approach that she believes is the secret to the company’s success setting the standard for luxury bath tubs. Drolet brings years of chaordic management to balance and drive BainUltra’s team and swiftly adapts company practices to trailblaze new innovations. She couples extensive employee training with proactive communication that offers everyone the opportunity to advance and grow the BainUltra vision with new technologies, artisan craftsmanship and outstanding quality tubs. Drolet is an expert on wellness therapies and bathing and recently co-authored the book, “On Bathing: A Ritual for Releasing Your Inner Energy.”
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
Icome from a very modest and simple background with extremely loving and dedicating parents. I grew up in Quebec city Canada, a French cultural city. Very young, my passion went for discovering the beauty of humans being. At the age of eight, I used to escape from home to run to a river near where I lived to write about life and people. A passionate reader and experiential discoverer in, psychology, sociology, management, spirituality, I collected books one after the other and many travels at different places in the world to understand what I was reading. I did not follow a straight academic path (I have an aversion for straight lines, the more unexpected curves, the better I feel), my first degree in University was in Psychology followed by Master courses in Sociology of the Organization. It is while doing a third world country experience at the time, in one of the poorest countries in the world in Africa, that I decided that we needed help in North America. Thinking I was going to help people leave a better life out there, my heart was blown away by the joy and the life that was present in each person I was meeting in Africa. From that moment, I knew they were rich, and we were poor. I came back to Canada with the certainty that the best way to help humanity would be for me to try to impact, the way leaders think and lead. If more leaders were conscious of developing business models carried by a strong human and compassionate culture, if business places could bring the best (the higher self) out of each individual, the world would be a better place. Therefore, I started coaching leaders of business until life proposed an incredible adventure in joining Bain Ultra. This is where I was able to experience what I have been teaching for years.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
WOW! What a great question!!! So many amazing things happened to me that it is difficult to choose from one. One thing I can share is that the most incredible things that happened to me were always unexpected, they were not planned. They were plain gifts of life. Life is incredibly generous when we keep an open heart. I guess my meeting with BainUltra and the insistence of Henry Brunelle for me to join his team at a time where I had other projects was one. Another one would be my meeting with Dr. Ken Redcross on airplane while flying to New York, a beautiful and loving exceptional human being that became not only a dear friend but the co-author of the book we wrote together. My takeaways from these experiences: Magic happens when you place your heart first. We have a tragic tendency as human beings to want to organize and plan, out of fear, everything that will come to us. In doing so, we walk often, blindsided, looking straight ahead to reach our cherish goal but while doing it, we don’t see wonders along the way that would have brought us more fulfillment, happiness and success.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I just love mistakes!!! They are my best allies! I don’t call them mistakes; I call them growing experiences and they are your best friend!
One major mistake I believe I am getting better at, but not there yet, is to believe in others more than they believe in themselves. It is in some ways a good thing, but I see things that they don’t see yet and sometimes my way of talking to them is not well understood. It is almost as if I was speaking a language they have not learned yet. It can be scary, and I have to learn to listen more who they are at that time in life and adapt my crazy beliefs in a translation that make sense to them. My lesson is to listen more and be kind in respecting their rhythms.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
I lead an incredible business that has an exceptional human culture, built by exceptional and unique people. Our mission is to bring more health on an everyday basis at home by creating a spa sanctuary that help you remember the importance of slowing down and taking care of your life. We have a moto at BainUltra: ok guys, let’s change the world one bath at the time! Bathing is for us a transformational experience, extremely powerful that people have forgotten. You don’t bathe for a hygienic reason, you bathe for therapeutic reasons. Every person that take a daily BainUltra bath gets immerse in water and with the use of our therapies, become less and less anxious and stressed (our products are recognized by the American Institute of Stress as a product that aids in reducing stress). Therefore, in a better state of peace and harmony, one relates to others in a more positive and compassionate way. In doing so, pushing this logic further, the way you relate to others create the world we leave in. Less stress, more open hearts, more peace and a better world. This is the way we think.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
On a general scale, everyone should create a ritual that suits their own character. I once read a fabulous book written by a French author called, Jean-Yves Leloup. The book talked title was l’assise et la marche, which translates to, to be seated and to walk. Basically, his saying was that in order to be well balanced and to grow into a good holistic health, one that touches on a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level of energy, we should start our days activating to functions, the one of stillness and attention and the one of motion and action. I believe that these days, many people get the action one but not so much the stillness one. Most of us take our energy from adrenaline and not from PRANA and contemplation.
- Getting up in the morning, one should start his day by slowing down, sitting, and listening to the state of their heart that day. Do you feel turmoil inside or at peace? Are you anxious or calm? Are you joyful or concerned? Do you feel happy or sad? Often, we are our worst enemy. To be our best friend, we need to be aware of how we feel and see if the rhythm of our heart will conduct us, during the day, to interact with situations and people positively or reactively. That awareness will help us lead our day instead of being led by our emotions. We can decide the rhythm and outcome of that day.
- Practice a small meditation session of your choice. There are many types of meditation and again, you have to see which one speaks to you the best. Here, the attention will be on the breading and on the capacity of letting go of the interference of the mental getting in the way of your clear vision that day. You will become more centered, focused, and able to discern what is important that day among all of the information that will come to you.
- Take a warm bath. Let the warm water surround you and bring an instant feeling of wholeness. Water carries memory of the safest place we ever lived in, the whom, it also connects us to the universal and powerful energy of the sea (where we all come from as a species). While doing it, add some visualization to the moment. I like to do the Tonglen Buddhism practice that make you brings in any element of darkness of the world and letting you get out these same elements, transformed in a rain of light or in a flight of butterfly or in whatever positive vision you can have.
- Take a minimum of a twenty-minute walk. Feel the fresh air, be attentive to any distinctive thing that stimulates each one of your senses. Sharpen your senses and let the life go through you gently, sensually, become one with power of the surrounding nature.
- Do anything that brings joy into your heart. It can be playing with your kids, listening to a beautiful music, having a delightful coffee, caressing your dog…the list is infinite. Only you know what can make this joy grow into you. No matter what your choice of action, you must do it with attention and gratefulness.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I often dreamed of starting a movement called The Pink Glasses Movement. I had many people saying to me while I was sharing my conviction that life was always perfect (I did not say always easy…), when I was wearing pink glasses. Most of the time I laugh and answered, “better having pink glasses that can let the light go through than black glasses that will put me in the dark!” The pink glasses movement would be a movement that would put emphasis on everything that makes the world, on an everyday base, an amazing and beautiful place to be. It would counterbalance the way the media portray our human journey on a negative perspective most of the time. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up in the morning, open the radio and find out about different incredible and sometime, unnoticeable facts that made the world a better place during the last 24 hours?
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Being a leader has nothing to do with management practices, giving a direction starts from inside, the rest is only alignment and choices.
- Spend more time listening to the life within you and the lives within others. What you see and hear has often nothing to do with reality, the interior reality of a human being determines what is real and what puts someone in motion.
- Integrate practices and conditions of work that lead to a living workplace. Put less rules and more conditions of growth and empowerment for each employee. Have confidence that in revealing the higher self-part of each person, when they meet and work together, they will create something bigger and greater that you could have ever dreamed of by implementing a model.
- Have faith no matter how strong the winds are blowing and don’t reach for results but keep a clear direction of where you want to go in every circumstance.
- There is no secret that what will keep you going, growing, and creating as a name and it has to lead anything you think, say or do. It is called LOVE.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Mental health without doubt. Mental health to me is crystallized violence that people went through, either in their past life or even in the past life of their ancestor. When it occurs, it makes a human being believe that they are not worth living and often it is reinforced by others not seeing further than incomprehensible actions or discourse making them feel out of place. To me, mentally ill people are my heroes in the sense that they have more courage, resilience and determination than most of us to go through their days. They can’t deny their sensitivity, their fragility, they can’t play the game of being superman or superwoman. Where many people are hiding their pain in performance compensation, they can’t. Their hearts are real. We have to learn from them how to read a human being at a second level and they make us better human beings by forcing us to slow down, look at things differently and accept the unknown. I would love to educate more people to the richness that lies behind mental illness.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
Follow and search for our book coming out soon: The Forgotten Power Of Bathing: How A Daily Bath Can Change Your Life And Bring You More Health And Happiness.
To learn more about BainUltra and their unique therapies and technologies, visit BainUltra.com and follow them on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.
About the Interviewer: Wanda Malhotra is a wellness entrepreneur, lifestyle journalist, and the CEO of Crunchy Mama Box, a mission-driven platform promoting conscious living. CMB empowers individuals with educational resources and vetted products to help them make informed choices. Passionate about social causes like environmental preservation and animal welfare, Wanda writes about clean beauty, wellness, nutrition, social impact and sustainability, simplifying wellness with curated resources. Join Wanda and the Crunchy Mama Box community in embracing a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle at CrunchyMamaBox.com .
