Building a Wellness Business That Lasts. Rick Stollmeyer

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The next ten years will surely to produce more wellness industry growth than the past two decades combined—regardless of economic recession, social distancing, and virus-related fears. Thanks to COVID-19, wellness has become the largest and most important issue of our age. In the decade ahead, humanity will surely invest and participate in wellness pursuits more than ever before. COVID-19 has in fact ushered in a new wave of wellness, one that will create myriad business opportunities for innovative practitioners and entrepreneurs alike.

      Here's the bad news: Many of the wellness business models that were flourishing in the years leading up to COVID-19 simply won't work anymore. The COVID-19 thunderbolt has suddenly and permanently shifted our reality, and as wellness entrepreneurs we must adapt to that new reality or our businesses will die.

      To understand how to fully embrace the future, we must first travel back in time and perform a thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine traveling back in time 100 years. You are sitting with your great-grandmother at her kitchen table. What would you ask her? Imagine asking these questions:

       “Great-grandma, how do you stay physically fit?”

       “What tools do you use to manage stress and maintain peace of mind?”

       “How do you nurture meaningful relationships?”

       “What are you doing to expand your mind?”

       “What are you doing to protect the environment?”

       “Do you find your work fulfilling?”

       “What gives your life a sense of purpose?”

       “What's the point of these questions, dear? Your great-grandfather and I are trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. We lost one son to World War I a few years ago and the other to the Spanish Flu Pandemic. Our biggest concern now is their younger brother being sent off to another war, or our daughter dying in childbirth. What gives me a sense of purpose? Keeping my family alive! Now, you look hungry. Let me get you something to eat.”

      What we are talking about with our great-grandmother in that imaginary conversation are the dimensions of wellness, and these are the central pursuits that drive most people alive today:

       Physical Well-being: Keeping our bodies healthy and working optimally for as many years as possible

       Emotional Well-being: Having the capacity to cope with the stresses of life

       Social Well-being: Staying connected with our community, having the ability to maintain meaningful relationships, and finding love

       Intellectual Well-being: Keeping our minds sharp and continually enhancing our wisdom and knowledge of the world

       Environmental Well-being: Living in clean, nontoxic surroundings and protecting our planet

       Occupational Well-being: Finding work that feeds our mind, body, and soul

       Spiritual Well-being: Discovering the purpose and meaning of our lives

      These are the Seven Dimensions of Wellness (shown in Figure 2.1), and our questions around them confused our great-grandmother, because she did not live in a world where she could spend much time thinking about them.

Diagram depicting the Seven Dimensions of Wellness - physical, emotional, social, intellectual, environmental, occupational, and spiritual well-being.

       Figure 2.1 The Seven Dimensions of Wellness

      For those whose lives could be cut short by childbirth, war, disease, or famine, the causes seemed supernatural and outside of their control. All of us alive today are the descendants of those who survived those incredibly difficult millennia, and their suffering became our strength. Our adaptive minds, our instinct to create family units, our ability to form functioning societies, and our robust immune systems are all the result of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.

      Despite those inherent strengths, until very recently average life expectancy was only a fraction of what it is today. The average life expectancy of a Roman citizen was 25 years. One thousand years later during the Middle Ages, life expectancy had reached only 33 years. A thousand years after that—around the time we are having that imaginary conversation with our great-grandmother—average life expectancy had reached only 55 years. Through all those eons of time the highest aspiration of nearly every human being was to survive long enough to produce successful offspring.

      Who had the time to think about wellness in a life like that?

      To understand the relevance of this to our lives today, we need to understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

      In 1943, noted American psychologist and researcher Abraham Maslow developed a theory of human behavior that gave us a concise model for understanding what motivates us. Most important, Maslow recognized that our most basic needs for survival and procreation must be met before we can address the higher-level needs most people aspire to in modern society. The relationship of these needs is most often represented by a stacked pyramid, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Diagram of a stacked pyramid depicting the hierarchy of the most basic needs for survival and procreation and the higher level needs of people in a modern society.

       Figure 2.2 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

      Maslow published his landmark theory in 1943 in the midst of World War II, and the huge reception it received was no accident. That terrible war destroyed cities, enabled the Holocaust, and ushered

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