Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining. I'm just gonna wait a few seconds before getting started to let people in. Welcome. Welcome. Happy Thursday, everybody. I'm gonna go and get started since this is a quick 20 minute presentation. So welcome.My name is Sonia Hunt and thanks so much for joining my session. I wanted to thank the Women Tech Network for having me speak today at the global conference about a subject that's so near and dear to my heart, which is designing a well-being playbook to thrive in life. So I wanted to kick it off by just giving you a little background on myself. I am a health and wellness global speaker, an author and a marketing advisor. I work with organizations on their workplace well-being initiatives to help people get healthy and thrive. But the most important thing I wanted to share about myself is that I've had a very long health journey that led to transformation. And I'm happy to say that today I'm thriving and I'm gonna share a little bit about my story soon. So I wanted to start off by saying that I think we're in very interesting times and I believe we're at an inflection point in life. Over the last three years, almost every market has shifted and business models are breaking wide open and in the workplace.

And the blurring of those lines between work and life has caused such a tremendous amount of uncertainty for most of us. And that's led to a lot of worry and anxiety and chronic stress and other physical health issues. The rates of chronic conditions and disease and autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing out as a result. And so as we're trying to get our hands around with like, how do we deal with all of this? How do we manage all of this in order to thrive? I believe that we are looking for some guiding direction. And even though there's much uncertainty, I feel very confident that this is a very exciting time for all of us to regroup and reset and consider redesigning our futures in the ways that we always wanted to so that we can experience all the wonderful things that we all want to in life.

And in order to do that, our health and our well-being must be of a top priority. And that's something that I know all too well after a lifetime of being sick. So I just wanted to take you back a little bit and share a brief about my personal health story. When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with severe chronic conditions in the form of severe allergies and asthma and environmental allergies. So my parents who came from India had no idea that people could be allergic to food and there was no one in our immediate family or extended family, uh, or even in the neighborhood who had these issues. And for most of my life, my protocol from my doctors was only to focus on physical health. So that meant I was not supposed to eat the foods that I was allergic to, which sounds much easier than it is. And I was also prescribed very strong medications to suppress symptoms in case my body, uh, in case I had another food allergy attack so that my body could withstand it. So for decades, I always say that I was surviving or barely surviving and I was never thriving. But over the course of my lifetime, then there was uh another 18 times over 18 times that I found myself in the hospital in emergent situations and four times I was in anaphylaxis and almost dead.

The last time being in 2008 and that 2008 incident was so traumatic and toxic. It left hives all over my body for a year of my life. And that's when I really realized that a high had hit rock bottom. And I spent three days in the, er, and so during those three days I had a, like a lot of me time to think and when I was thinking it was that I didn't know why these emergent situations kept happening to me. But I did know that if there was 1/5 anaphylaxis incident, I felt like it would be game over and I wanted, and I needed healing in my life, but I just wasn't sure where to begin. And at the time in 2008, the icing on the cake was that I was also working for a very toxic company which only exacerbated the toxicity that I felt in my health and in my life. So as I was saying, this is a very like traumatic time period in my life that I felt like required immediate prioritization and change in direction. So rock bottom led to revelations. There were revelations at this time that I want my health protocol was all about consciously suppressing symptoms, but it was not about getting to root cause. And then I was also unconsciously repressing my thoughts and my feelings about everything that I was going through.

And I wasn't sharing this with friends or or even with coworkers at the time because I carried a ton of shame just around my health issues. And I didn't come from a culture that openly spoke about how we felt our therapy wasn't anything that was promoted in my culture. So I realized how much detriment there was to my whole body health. So there was compounded detriment to my mental, emotional and spiritual health as a result of my physical health issues and just in general, being unhealthy and unwell affected every single area of my life. From my health to my career, to my finances, to my social life and relationships.

But these revelations did, they were great because they led to having this tiny little spark of empowerment that started and it grew over time, which then became this journey of transformation that positively affected not only my health but affected my life. So it was back in 2008, that I made this decision to start digging into all these areas of holistic health. And when I say holistic health, I mean, physical, mental, spiritual and emotional health to find out and figure out once and for all what was going on and why and how could I do things differently to start healing? So I always say if the definition of insanity is about doing the same thing over and over with no new results, then that's exactly what I wanted to change. And so the opposite of suppressing is healing. And this is what I was focused on. Now, there's a new lens of healing in my life. And I began defining what healing meant to me and what I defined it as was it meant that I wanted to feel good and look good and eat safely and not have all this chronic stress and anxiety and brain frog.

But it also meant that I wanted to age healthily while uh you know, without all of the issues. So being empowered meant that I needed to take charge and own my own power and build a skill set that allowed me to maneuver, you know, these ups and downs of life and ask for the help, you know, and the resources that I needed for support whenever I needed that. And this is when I realized that I needed a marketing playbook. So I've spent a long time as a chief marketing officer in tech. And one of the main tools I've always had in my arsenal to grow the business was a marketing playbook. And a marketing playbook defines those key messages and best practices, right? And optimization techniques that the business is using to maximize Roy for different marketing objectives. And that playbook to provides guidance and direction for anybody involved because we're working toward the same outcomes.

So taking a page from my day job, I created this notion of a well-being playbook and so utilizing these similar principles of a marketing playbook, I saw this well-being playbook as a document as a guide that provides information on how to improve physical mental, spiritual and emotional health.

But across all areas of life, it's a personalized framework that can dig into certain areas that you're struggling with at the time to understand why you're struggling about them and identify how to start the healing. And it's something that includes strategies and actions and tips and resources to better help you take care of yourself and reduce stress and build resilience so that you can be your best and you can feel your best even in times of uncertainty. So why do you need a well-being playbook? So well-being playbooks are all about going inward and healing, I believe, always begins with you. So a well-being playbook really helps you understand your body as a system and how it operates across those holistic health areas. It's a, it's a living document as I was saying, so it can actually evolve as you and your health evolve over the years. And it's a great tool to actually help you age healthily. So in my example, with food allergies, when I began creating my well-being playbook and understanding my body as a system, I began to understand how food was interacting in that system and then how stress was that I was carrying for managing the food allergies was also interacting with that system and then where things were going wrong.

So then I could begin working on each of those areas one by one. And finally, I wanna say is that a well-being playbook is really about your journey to healing and through getting to root cause. So let's jump into it now because we didn't have much time today. I'm only gonna dig into the structure of your well-being playbook document. And then I'm gonna give a tactical example so that you can get started on your own after this session the strategies that I'll be covering today are all rooted in science. And I wanted to say that I personally created a well-being playbook uh after my 2008, an flax incident. And that helped me really, you know, it led me to tremendous uh health and healing and, and actually life transformation because I was looking at being healthy across all areas of my life. And so what I love about this is, it's a little bit nerdy. Um But I love that it can kind of dig into that level of health and we can begin, you know, to, to the road to real transformation. So as a foundational step zero, I want to start by saying, I encourage all of you to view getting healthy as your life's work.

I feel that we're just so consumed with this lifestyle of hitting goals and we feel a tremendous amount of stress if and when those goals are not met and even during the process and then sometimes what we do is we end up giving up because we feel like we can't achieve the goal.

And that's exactly what the opposite of what getting healthy is about. So, if getting healthy, you know, is essential for living a long, productive and happy life, right? And it's the foundation of holistic well-being, getting healthy is your key to preventing disease and optimizing energy and performance and improving the quality of life. Then it's the one area that we really can't neglect or de prioritize. So to view getting healthy as your life's work is important because it helps you focus on your health as a priority and you're making that commitment to incorporate lifestyle changes that will last a lifetime rather than temporary solutions or quick fixes. So think of getting healthy as your life's work as a theme in your life and not a goal. Now, we're trained to think of our health primarily in the physical health area. But that's so it's so much more than that well-being actually comprises of eight mutually codependent dimensions, physical, intellectual, emotional, mental health, spiritual, environmental, financial, occupational and social. And if any one of these dimensions are off or neglected over time, it will adversely affect your health, your well-being, your quality of life and your longevity.

So for example, if you think about all these recent layoffs that have been going on which would affect occupational health, they also cause stress and anxiety and financial issues which are part of emotional mental and financial health. So it's all connected. Again, if any one of these dimensions are off or neglected over time, it can aver adversely affect everything else. So when you're designing your well-being playbook, I want you to think of these eight dimensions as eight chapters of your well-being playbook. The next step is what we're gonna do in each chapter. So just like in a marketing or sales playbook in a well-being playbook, we're defining your health problem or problems, why it's a problem, you know what an optimal state looks like to you and then what the steps are to getting there. Sort of keep this. I just wanted to keep this very simple today. And in each dimension or chapter, you're only gonna do three things, define and implement and analyze. So define means that you're defining the key challenges that you're struggling with and that you wanna remedy or heal implement is about implementing a set of strategies or tactics that you can put into action every day to begin getting healthy and heal and analyze means that once you've put those actions into place, you're gonna track the data, you're gonna analyze it and then you're gonna tweak those actions to hit your desired outcome.

Now again, this formula holds true for everything we do in business, whether you're in marketing or operations or sales or engineering. So we do this to run a daily business. Now, we need to really consider doing this to get healthy. So let's take a look at an example. And I wanted to use an example from the chapter or the dimension that I call emotional mental health and something that I just feel like we're all struggling with today. Uh So the key challenge I wrote is stress, I feel stressed often, but I don't know how to reduce it, right? So that's your current state. The next row is your optimal state or your outcome. So think about what you're trying to achieve in the future. So you're trying to achieve two things. Awareness, I know when I, you know, I want to know when I feel stressed and then the management piece is when I feel stress, I want to know what the actions that I are to reduce stress when it comes up. OK. So the next stro which is the strategies, this is a very important part because it's about the strategies or the tactics that you want to take to get healthy but across your whole body. So this is why I broke it out into 44 columns. So what I mean by that is stress affects our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. So what you wanna do for strategies is think about what you can do in each of these areas to reduce stress.

A key point that I wanted to make here is when you're building your well-being playbook. If you feel like you need help thinking through strategies, there's so much research online that you obviously can do, but you absolutely can seek out a practitioner or a health coach to help guide you here. So I'll come back to the strategies, for example, in the physical area, I have nutrition. So there's a ton of research out there that tells us that eating processed foods can cause stress. So strategy that might be that you're gonna take a deeper look at your nutrition to reduce stress from a mental health perspective, just like physical health, fitness, there are mental health fitness activities that we can do to incorporate to reduce stress. So that might be an area that you're gonna look through on the emotional and spiritual health perspective. Again, there's research that says that meditation and self-care activities are known to reduce stress. So perhaps those are some strategies or tactics that you're going to consider, right?

So, in this step, that's what we're defining is, what are the things that we're going to create actions for the next step is implementations. What are the actions you're gonna take in each of these areas to try to reduce stress. So for example, for nutrition, rather than eating processed foods, you might want to start eating more plant foods a few days a week and on the weekends have time to enjoy what you want. Similarly, in the mental health, the action you're taking is maybe a morning visualization, which is a mental health fitness exercise. From an emotional perspective, perhaps you're gonna try a 10 minute daily meditation and from a spiritual perspective, perhaps you're gonna read 10 pages daily.

Now, there's so many actions that you can take. So this is about figuring out what you like to take because then you'll actually do them regularly and testing, tracking and tweaking is all about um tracking the data and then analyzing it and making adjustments. So you can hit your desired outcome. I will say that over the years, I've used all kinds of trackers and mobile apps and journals and I still love a good spreadsheet. But tracking what you're putting into action is key to understanding what's happening. And it helps you understand if you're getting close to that desired outcome. So for example, if the three months of eating plant foods is reducing stress, then do more of that. But let's say you realize the meditation is just not for you, then you can roll that activity out and think of another activity to do to reduce stress. So the main structure. So what I wanted to present again here was just this main structure and set of actions that you can take easily to create a well-being playbook. And think of again, the dime eight dimensions as eight chapters and all you're doing is defining, analyzing testing, tracking and tweaking.

And I wanted to say in summary that every person on this earth has a unique health journey, there's no one size fits all. So well-being playbook gives you this personalized framework to help you understand your body as a system, your whole body health and start to create the positive, you know, beliefs, habits and patterns so that you can get healthy and thrive. And this is all about going inward being curious about your health and really taking small, small actions on a daily basis so that you can get healthy. I'd love Thank you so much for being here. I'd love to connect to you on linkedin if you have any questions. Um And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your session. Thanks so much, everybody.