Pegs on a children's climbing wall, Walnut Park, Petaluma, California. Photo Eric La Brecque


TYPICAL WELLNESS BLOCKS

by Sally Boynton Brown
 
Checking up on my small garden boxes recently, I saw it had been overtaken by aphids. I started asking myself why I didn’t check it sooner. How I could let this happen? What was I thinking? As I was mentally bashing myself it occurred to me: the way I was seeing my garden was a good metaphor for how so many of us view our own wellness. We often spend a lot of time blaming and shaming ourselves for when our health goes awry. But what my garden really needed was not self-degradation but rather a little TLC.
 
If we beat ourselves up over our lack of wellness, that only compounds the situation and potentially makes it more challenging for us to heal. What is productive, however, is to make a plan for wellness. In future blog posts I’ll get more into mindsets and practices we can adopt to support our wellness and well-being. First I want to point out some typical wellness blocks I see, which tend to fall under the following three themes.
 
Some people think wellness is not possible. Many people don’t realize that they can play a role in their own wellness. (After all, if we can blame ourselves for our illness, then why can’t we impact our healing?) Believing they cannot attain wellness, some people aim for merely minimizing pain or discomfort, or at worst, they resign themselves to simply learning to live with it. Others might think they’re already so unhealthy that their actions toward healing won’t make any difference. Whatever your reasons for it, the belief that wellness is not within reach literally keeps it out of reach!
 
Many people blame themselves for their own lack of wellness. Sure, sometimes we do unhealthy things that have a negative impact on our bodies and minds. But shaming and blaming ourselves mostly just makes us feel worse. If we spend time dwelling on what we did “wrong”, didn’t do “right”, and why, we’re wasting energy that could otherwise be used toward supporting and ideally expediting our own recovery.
 
Many people are only focused on their physical wellness. When I use the term wellness it encompasses physical, psychological, financial and spiritual wellness. It’s a wholistic concept. Due to our society and its focus on looking outside ourselves for contentment, along with its emphasis on physical attractiveness, many people take wonderful care of their bodies and still don’t feel good, still find themselves in misery. They don’t factor in the wholistic element of wellness. Unfortunately, focusing on only one part of anything is a very narrow focus. The bottom line is, we can never really achieve optimal physical wellness if we’re hyper-focused on only one area of wellness.
 
In my upcoming blog posts I’ll be helping you identify your wellness blocks and offering tools for overcoming them. And hopefully, as we go, I’ll help you reframe the concept of wellness in a way that allows you to achieve more of it!
 


MITOCHONDRIA AND YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM

By Dr. Pejman Katiraei

We’ve all heard it before: the gut is the foundation for overall health. Treat the gut and the immune system will heal and strengthen. While I still believe this, one of the things I’ve learned in my years of practice is that gut health is not the whole picture. I’ve treated the gut for a quite a few kids whose symptoms just didn’t get any better.

So why is it that some kids respond to one treatment but others don’t respond at all? Why does someone like Elon Musk rarely get sick, only need four hours of sleep, and have the energy of an ox, yet other people his age are always tired and seem to get sick every time they open a window? It all has to do with the mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells.

Our mitochondria give us vitality, energy and resiliency. They’re primary to our state of health and long term ability to fight disease. In short, when your mitochondria are functioning at the highest levels, your immune system is at its strongest and your vitality soars.

If you do a search for “mitochondria” and “vitality”, you’ll find article after article explaining how these little suckers in our cells are profoundly connected to immune system functioning. One example has to do with your dendritic cells, which give marching orders to all the immune cells in our bodies. When dendric cells go haywire for whatever reason, your mitochondria get wonky. Then your dendric cell behavior begins changing in irregular and abnormal ways. The end result? Massive immune disregulation (even if the gut is in good condition)!

When your mitochondria are dysfunctioning, other organs systems besides your immune system go a little haywire too, and your whole body starts acting in an erratic fashion. The way I treat this (and any) condition is to address it at the cellular level: by working to maximize mitochondrial health. In short, what I aim to give my patients, in addition to relief from symptoms, is increased personal vitality.

The healthier your mitochondria are, the more energy you have. The more energy you have, the more electricity you can produce. The more electricity you produce, the stronger your immune system becomes. So the next question is, how can you optimize your mitochondrial functioning, particularly with Covid-19 out there? Stay tuned for future videos in which I’ll offer ways to do this, which will have the added benefit of revving up your overall vitality as well.


Story-Based Strategy Meets Growth Marketing Tactics: A Missed Connection?

by Eric LaBrecque of Applied Storytelling

In April, I had the privilege of speaking at the Activate 19 Growth Marketing Conference, hosted by Iterable, a company that has created a popular, AI-powered cross-marketing platform. Joined by my friend Hannah Mans, Director of Marketing at Directive, a search engine marketing agency based in Irvine, California, I gave a talk called “Stat Meets Story. The talk’s central question: Where is brand storytelling going in these increasingly digitally-driven times?

Within that larger question lurk smaller but still very big ones: What exactly is the relationship between marketing strategy and the tactical end of marketing, where so much digital innovation is happening? How are these two ends of the marketing spectrum talking to and informing each other? How do strategy and story influence and shape the creation of marketing collateral? You get the idea.

As someone who mostly creates and shares strategy with company leaders, I’m always interested in how that strategy plays out—or trickles down—in the implementation of marketing communications.

On stage at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, in a room of about 50 mid-level marketing managers, I realized I had an opportunity to unearth this kind of information directly by starting things off with a snap, show-of-hands poll. 

I was rather surprised by the answers I got from the six questions I posed. The talk itself made me question at least some of the assumptions I’ve been making about how brand storytelling is translated from the communications platform to the marketing funnel on its way to the end customer. 

First question: “How many of you have played a major role in a strategic brand initiative such as a repositioning or a comprehensive brand refresh?”

About 10 hands went up—10 out of about 50 marketing managers. Fewer than I would’ve thought, but okay, the big initiatives don’t come around every day, or typically even every year.

Next question: “How many of you have referred to a ‘strategic brand foundation’ (brand platform, brand guidelines, communications platform, etc.) —the output of a strategic brand initiative—in fulfilling your marketing responsibilities?

About 5 hands went up. The response caused me to wonder about the extent to which the kinds of things that are central to strategists (positioning, promise, personality, etc.) actually make their way to into the hands of technical marketing managers.

Third question: “How many of you are responsible for reporting Marketing ROI?” 

About a third of the hands went up. Fewer than I would have thought, but not surprising: Growth marketers’ activity tends to generate lots more in the way of metrics than strategists’. At times, we’re held accountable to KPIs but we’re almost never asked to demonstrate ROI in dollars and cents. Our clients are content to understand that we’ve helped them achieve strategic objectives, or what Gartner, who introduced the concept, has called VOI, value on investment. If they have a way of translating this to ROI, that’s their business. 

I continued on. “How many of you factor brand value into your success metrics?

Not a single hand went up. At one level, this didn’t surprise me. Brand value isn’t necessarily easy to measure. And if strategists aren’t usually asked about ROI, why should I expect tactical marketers to be concerned with brand value? Still, I was disappointed. I was hoping for at least a hand or two. I dream of finding proof that such a connection exists, that it’s worth making. 

Fifth question: “How many of you consider yourselves storytellers?

About one-third identified themselves as such. Apparently, storytelling covers a lot of different kinds of activity at a lot of different levels. The person creating a single piece of content is a storyteller. The person responsible for overall content strategy is a storyteller. The person who marshalls activity across the sum of communications channels is a storyteller. The strategist responsible for shaping overall brand expression at the highest level is a storyteller. More than once, this realization is what’s led me to speculate that some set of tools or methods must exist for the strategical and tactical sides of the business to optimize each other. 

Last question: “How many of you know your company’s vision statement?”

Just one person raised a hand. This really threw me. At the level of strategy, I can’t do good work without a good vision in hand: The vision is something like the plot line of the overarching story we set out to tell. But okay, maybe, in the tactical trenches, knowing your company’s vision isn’t of practical value. Beyond that, what does this say about a company’s efforts to build a cohesive culture, a team that’s pulling the same direction? 

I had always assumed that marketing strategy and tactics generally informed each other and worked in close coordination. Hannah, whose time ran short because mine ran long, remains firm in her conviction that strategy and tactics do work that way, or at least can. In her position at Directive, she’s someone who bridges the two. She can connect the dots in a pretty convincing way, and in a future post I hope to share how she does it. 

In the meantime, to judge by the show of hands at the summit, I’m having my doubts that most of the rest of us really see the connection. And, hmm, maybe doing so isn’t as important as I’d thought. 

→ read her


Typical Wellness Blocks

by Sally Boynton Brown
 
Checking up on my small garden boxes recently, I saw it had been overtaken by aphids. I started asking myself why I didn’t check it sooner. How I could let this happen? What was I thinking? As I was mentally bashing myself it occurred to me: the way I was seeing my garden was a good metaphor for how so many of us view our own wellness. We often spend a lot of time blaming and shaming ourselves for when our health goes awry. But what my garden really needed was not self-degradation but rather a little TLC.
 
If we beat ourselves up over our lack of wellness, that only compounds the situation and potentially makes it more challenging for us to heal. What is productive, however, is to make a plan for wellness. In future blog posts I’ll get more into mindsets and practices we can adopt to support our wellness and well-being. First I want to point out some typical wellness blocks I see, which tend to fall under the following three themes.
 
Some people think wellness is not possible. Many people don’t realize that they can play a role in their own wellness. (After all, if we can blame ourselves for our illness, then why can’t we impact our healing?) Believing they cannot attain wellness, some people aim for merely minimizing pain or discomfort, or at worst, they resign themselves to simply learning to live with it. Others might think they’re already so unhealthy that their actions toward healing won’t make any difference. Whatever your reasons for it, the belief that wellness is not within reach literally keeps it out of reach!
 
Many people blame themselves for their own lack of wellness. Sure, sometimes we do unhealthy things that have a negative impact on our bodies and minds. But shaming and blaming ourselves mostly just makes us feel worse. If we spend time dwelling on what we did “wrong”, didn’t do “right”, and why, we’re wasting energy that could otherwise be used toward supporting and ideally expediting our own recovery.
 
Many people are only focused on their physical wellness. When I use the term wellness it encompasses physical, psychological, financial and spiritual wellness. It’s a wholistic concept. Due to our society and its focus on looking outside ourselves for contentment, along with its emphasis on physical attractiveness, many people take wonderful care of their bodies and still don’t feel good, still find themselves in misery. They don’t factor in the wholistic element of wellness. Unfortunately, focusing on only one part of anything is a very narrow focus. The bottom line is, we can never really achieve optimal physical wellness if we’re hyper-focused on only one area of wellness.
 
In my upcoming blog posts I’ll be helping you identify your wellness blocks and offering tools for overcoming them. And hopefully, as we go, I’ll help you reframe the concept of wellness in a way that allows you to achieve more of it!
 


Mitochondria and Your Immune System

By Dr. Pejman Katiraei

We’ve all heard it before: the gut is the foundation for overall health. Treat the gut and the immune system will heal and strengthen. While I still believe this, one of the things I’ve learned in my years of practice is that gut health is not the whole picture. I’ve treated the gut for a quite a few kids whose symptoms just didn’t get any better.

So why is it that some kids respond to one treatment but others don’t respond at all? Why does someone like Elon Musk rarely get sick, only need four hours of sleep, and have the energy of an ox, yet other people his age are always tired and seem to get sick every time they open a window? It all has to do with the mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells.

Our mitochondria give us vitality, energy and resiliency. They’re primary to our state of health and long term ability to fight disease. In short, when your mitochondria are functioning at the highest levels, your immune system is at its strongest and your vitality soars.

If you do a search for “mitochondria” and “vitality”, you’ll find article after article explaining how these little suckers in our cells are profoundly connected to immune system functioning. One example has to do with your dendritic cells, which give marching orders to all the immune cells in our bodies. When dendric cells go haywire for whatever reason, your mitochondria get wonky. Then your dendric cell behavior begins changing in irregular and abnormal ways. The end result? Massive immune disregulation (even if the gut is in good condition)!

When your mitochondria are dysfunctioning, other organs systems besides your immune system go a little haywire too, and your whole body starts acting in an erratic fashion. The way I treat this (and any) condition is to address it at the cellular level: by working to maximize mitochondrial health. In short, what I aim to give my patients, in addition to relief from symptoms, is increased personal vitality.

The healthier your mitochondria are, the more energy you have. The more energy you have, the more electricity you can produce. The more electricity you produce, the stronger your immune system becomes. So the next question is, how can you optimize your mitochondrial functioning, particularly with Covid-19 out there? Stay tuned for future videos in which I’ll offer ways to do this, which will have the added benefit of revving up your overall vitality as well.

Story-Based Strategy Meets Growth Marketing Tactics: A Missed Connection?

In April, I had the privilege of speaking at the Activate 19 Growth Marketing Conference, hosted by Iterable, a company that has created a popular, AI-powered cross-marketing platform. Joined by my friend Hannah Mans, Director of Marketing at Directive, a search engine marketing agency based in Irvine, California, I gave a talk called “Stat Meets Story. The talk’s central question: Where is brand storytelling going in these increasingly digitally-driven times?

Within that larger question lurk smaller but still very big ones: What exactly is the relationship between marketing strategy and the tactical end of marketing, where so much digital innovation is happening? How are these two ends of the marketing spectrum talking to and informing each other? How do strategy and story influence and shape the creation of marketing collateral? You get the idea.

As someone who mostly creates and shares strategy with company leaders, I’m always interested in how that strategy plays out—or trickles down—in the implementation of marketing communications.

On stage at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, in a room of about 50 mid-level marketing managers, I realized I had an opportunity to unearth this kind of information directly by starting things off with a snap, show-of-hands poll. 

I was rather surprised by the answers I got from the six questions I posed. The talk itself made me question at least some of the assumptions I’ve been making about how brand storytelling is translated from the communications platform to the marketing funnel on its way to the end customer. 

First question: “How many of you have played a major role in a strategic brand initiative such as a repositioning or a comprehensive brand refresh?”

About 10 hands went up—10 out of about 50 marketing managers. Fewer than I would’ve thought, but okay, the big initiatives don’t come around every day, or typically even every year.

Next question: “How many of you have referred to a ‘strategic brand foundation’ (brand platform, brand guidelines, communications platform, etc.) —the output of a strategic brand initiative—in fulfilling your marketing responsibilities?

About 5 hands went up. The response caused me to wonder about the extent to which the kinds of things that are central to strategists (positioning, promise, personality, etc.) actually make their way to into the hands of technical marketing managers.

Third question: “How many of you are responsible for reporting Marketing ROI?” 

About a third of the hands went up. Fewer than I would have thought, but not surprising: Growth marketers’ activity tends to generate lots more in the way of metrics than strategists’. At times, we’re held accountable to KPIs but we’re almost never asked to demonstrate ROI in dollars and cents. Our clients are content to understand that we’ve helped them achieve strategic objectives, or what Gartner, who introduced the concept, has called VOI, value on investment. If they have a way of translating this to ROI, that’s their business. 

I continued on. “How many of you factor brand value into your success metrics?

Not a single hand went up. At one level, this didn’t surprise me. Brand value isn’t necessarily easy to measure. And if strategists aren’t usually asked about ROI, why should I expect tactical marketers to be concerned with brand value? Still, I was disappointed. I was hoping for at least a hand or two. I dream of finding proof that such a connection exists, that it’s worth making. 

Fifth question: “How many of you consider yourselves storytellers?

About one-third identified themselves as such. Apparently, storytelling covers a lot of different kinds of activity at a lot of different levels. The person creating a single piece of content is a storyteller. The person responsible for overall content strategy is a storyteller. The person who marshalls activity across the sum of communications channels is a storyteller. The strategist responsible for shaping overall brand expression at the highest level is a storyteller. More than once, this realization is what’s led me to speculate that some set of tools or methods must exist for the strategical and tactical sides of the business to optimize each other. 

Last question: “How many of you know your company’s vision statement?”

Just one person raised a hand. This really threw me. At the level of strategy, I can’t do good work without a good vision in hand: The vision is something like the plot line of the overarching story we set out to tell. But okay, maybe, in the tactical trenches, knowing your company’s vision isn’t of practical value. Beyond that, what does this say about a company’s efforts to build a cohesive culture, a team that’s pulling the same direction? 

I had always assumed that marketing strategy and tactics generally informed each other and worked in close coordination. Hannah, whose time ran short because mine ran long, remains firm in her conviction that strategy and tactics do work that way, or at least can. In her position at Directive, she’s someone who bridges the two. She can connect the dots in a pretty convincing way, and in a future post I hope to share how she does it. 

In the meantime, to judge by the show of hands at the summit, I’m having my doubts that most of the rest of us really see the connection. And, hmm, maybe doing so isn’t as important as I’d thought. 

→ read here