Katy Leeson: 5 Things I Learnt From Liberty Mills On Fertility, Stress, and Not Dumbing Yourself Down

Katy Leeson, Founder at Courageous, shared on LinkedIn:

“I had one of those conversations on the podcast this week that I’m still thinking about days later.

Liberty Mills is a fertility and hormone specialist, and her own story is wild: told she was ‘barren,’ 0.7% chance of conceiving even with IVF using her own eggs. She went away, changed her approach to her health, and got pregnant naturally within four months.

Gave birth two weeks before turning 45.

I went in expecting a conversation about fertility. I came out with one about stress, self-worth, and permission. Here’s what I learnt from Liberty.

1. Infertility is not just a ‘women’s issue.’

48% of infertility involves a male contributing factor, and 20 to 30% of cases are down to male factors alone. And yet we’re telling every woman in her twenties and thirties to go freeze her eggs, and saying almost nothing to the men. Same urgency, same biology, half the conversation. If we actually want to shift this, men need to be in the room, sperm quality and all.

2. Test, don’t guess.

Liberty’s approach isn’t ‘take this supplement because it worked for someone on Instagram.’ It’s find out what your own body actually needs, DNA testing, how you detoxify, how you absorb nutrients, even what your tongue is telling you about stress and sleep. Copying someone else’s health protocol is like following a stranger’s satnav to get to your own house. You’ll end up somewhere. Just not where you meant to go. I’ve ordered my DNA test, and I’ll share that process with you.

3. The basics beat the biohacks.

No one wants to hear ‘sleep better, breathe properly, drink more water.’ Everyone wants the magic pill. Liberty was blunt: there’s no point fitting the pill to the ill if you haven’t nailed sleep, breath, hydration and stress first. She talked about clients waking up straight into sixth gear, phone first, stress immediately, no gear change all day. Eventually, the engine gives out.

4. Stress isn’t a personal failing; it’s a design problem, and most people are hiding it.

This is the bit that actually stopped me. Liberty ran a webinar for a 300-person cybersecurity company and asked people to put their hand up if they weren’t sleeping properly. 70% did. Then she asked people to email her privately if they were on antidepressants or feeling overwhelmed at work. She got 30 emails.

The MD had no idea any of it was happening in his own company, and quietly offered to cover half the cost for anyone who wanted support, on the condition nobody found out it was him. That’s the real picture behind most ‘high-performing’ teams. If a room full of senior people needs anonymity to admit they’re struggling, the problem was never their resilience. It was the environment.

5. The golden hour is worth stealing.

Liberty’s morning routine is 20 minutes of journaling and gratitude, 20 minutes of movement (walk, gym, dancing around the kitchen, doesn’t matter), and 20 minutes reading something completely unrelated to your goals just to get your brain firing differently. Nothing complicated about it. I’m already rearranging my mornings around it.

6. Advice vs Action.

This is a new regular feature I’m bringing into the podcast, tied to something I talk about in my TEDx talk: we are drowning in self-help. Courses, therapy, podcasts, now AI that can hand you an answer for anything. What we’re not doing is putting any of it into action. That’s the gap I care about, not ‘what’s the best advice you’ve ever been given,’ but what have you actually done with it.

So I asked Liberty both halves.

Her advice came from Susan Batson (Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s acting coach): don’t dumb yourself down to fit in with everyone. She admitted she’s done exactly that, plenty of times, that voice that says ‘we’re doing well, let’s not push further in case it makes people uncomfortable.’

But here’s the actual implementation, the part most people skip: when that instinct shows up now, she takes the focus off herself entirely and asks two questions.

What’s the purpose here? And how do I want people to feel?

That’s it. That’s the mechanism. Not confidence, not a mindset shift, a repeatable question she runs every time the instinct to shrink kicks in.

Advice vs Action is going to be a regular feature on the podcast from here on: the advice and the receipts.

Massive thanks to Liberty for such an honest conversation, and to our podcast sponsor, We are The Allies, for making these episodes possible.”

Stay informed with the latest updates in fertility and reproductive medicine on Fertility News.