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RHR Podcast: Harnessing the Power of Positive Psychology in Health Coaching – with Robert Biswas-Diener

In this episode, we discuss:

Robert Biswas-Diener’s journey from psychologist to coach

What is positive psychology?

Combining positive psychology and coaching

The fundamentals of health coaching

How health coaching differs from an expert or authority approach

How asking powerful questions shifts the dialogue

Framework for coaches just getting started

What an aspiring health coach should look for in a training program

Show Notes:

ADAPT Health Coach Training Program

Upside of Your Dark Side - book by Robert Biswas-Diener

Robert Biswas-Diener website

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2IjoeEj" title="RHR Podcast: Harnessing the Power of Positive Psychology in Health Coaching - with Robert Biswas-Diener" artist="Chris Kresser" ]

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Chris Kresser: Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. Today I am very excited to welcome Robert Biswas-Diener as a guest. Robert is the foremost authority on positive psychology coaching and has consulted with a wide range of international organizations on performance management and talent development. He conducts trainings on coaching, strengths, positivity, courage, and appreciative inquiry with organizations and businesses around the world and through his own coaching school, Positive Acorn.

Robert has trained professionals in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, and the Middle East. He has a doctorate in social psychology and a master’s degree in clinical psychology and is an ICF Professional Certified Coach. He’s the author of Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching, The Courage Quotient, and The Upside of Your Dark Side, among other books. Robert is also on the faculty of the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program, which is launching in June, where he has created and is going to be delivering the content on developing core coaching skills.

So I’m really excited to talk to Robert about positive psychology and especially its application in a health coaching context—why it’s so important, what the most important skills and competencies somebody needs to be successful as a health coach are, and how effective health coaching can help stem the rising tide of chronic disease. So let’s dive in. Robert, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Robert Biswas-Diener’s journey from psychologist to coach

Chris Kresser: So let's start by talking a little bit about your background, like, how you came to this work, how you came to positive psychology, and then how you ended up working primarily as a coach. Because you have a background in psychology and you chose, at least from my understanding, not to work as a clinical psychologist. So I'm just curious to hear more about your journey.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Certainly. Yeah, it’s a good question. I think, like most people, I come from a family entirely populated by psychologists. Both my parents are psychologists, my older sisters, who are twins, are psychologists, so I was the fifth person in my family to get a degree in psychology. Our parents were very liberal and understanding and open-minded. They said, “You can go into any subfield of psychology you want.”

Health coaching isn’t just providing information or advice, it’s about becoming a “change agent”—helping your clients to discover their own motivation and strategies for change. Positive psychology is a powerful tool in this process.

Chris Kresser: It's amazing that you're so normal, Robert, with all those psychologists around.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Well I don’t make any claims about my normalcy. But I can definitely tell you that psychology was the air we breathed growing up. My father had all these sort of psychometric and psychological measurement devices around. We had a little sort of stuffed bunny that we pet, but it had a meter attached to it to measure how aggressively you were petting it. That’s the kind of thing you were exposed to as his kids. I know this makes my father sound a bit like a sadist, but he would have my sisters and I clean his office as quickly as possible. And whichever of us did the best job could have the thumb of our non-dominant hand shocked in a shock machine.

Chris Kresser: Totally normal, totally normal childhood.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Absolutely. See, we just grew up thinking that people and the study of people is totally fascinating. And more interesting still, my father is one of the people who pioneered happiness studies. So it wasn't just looking at depression or the darker elements of human nature, but we grew up thinking happiness is something worth studying, something you can define and measure. And that's really what attracted me to psychology in general. I, as you mentioned, pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology.

But I knew by the time I got my master’s that I didn't want to be a full-time therapist. I think therapy is great, noble work, but I just knew it wasn't for me, sitting across from one individual helping one person at a time. And I made the tough choice to leave and go study, do research with my father, and I spent about five years traveling the world and studying happiness, which was a pretty blissful five years of my life. And I had the opportunities to visit some pretty extraordinary places, work with extraordinary people. But I did, while doing research, missed that one-on-one connection, that sense that I was doing more than creating knowledge. I wanted to help people make a difference in individual lives. That's when I discovered coaching. This was sort of right around 2002. And I was able to leverage my expertise in positive psychology and my training and coaching into a decent career that allowed me both to continue researching and satisfy my quest for knowledge, while also helping people, to satisfy that aspect of my mission.

Chris Kresser: So what was it about coaching that you decided that you didn't want to work as a clinical psychologist in that one-on-one capacity? But what was it about coaching that drew you to it where the practice of clinical psychology did not?

Robert Biswas-Diener: There a few things. And again, I certainly like clinical psychology, but my sister, my mother, they’re both clinical psychologists and good people. But there’s something weighty about it. The sense of responsibility you have when you sit across from someone who's in psychological distress, that you have to keep your heart pretty open to them, you have to be empathic, compassionate to them, and you're often dealing with trauma, with suicidality, with pretty high-stakes concerns. I'm glad that there are people doing that, but the risk for burnout is high in that function.

Chris Kresser: Right

Robert Biswas-Diener: And coaching, by contrast, just really to me seemed somehow more playful, a little bit more goal focused, that we could be light about it, take it less seriously. People were coming to me because they'd always wanted to write a novel and they'd put it on the back burner their whole life, and they just hit midlife, had their crisis, and they finally wanted to get going with it or they wanted just to establish better work/life balance. Or they wanted to improve their health or they wanted to be a better manager. They had just gotten promoted and they felt like an imposter. And these are not clinical concerns, and it just felt like, wow, this is a bit … the stakes are high here, but they're not life-or-death stakes. And we can kind of have fun, the people who came in felt healthy and resourceful. It didn't drag me down at the end of the day, I guess.

What is positive psychology?

Chris Kresser: Right, and perhaps more compatible with your interests in happiness and positive psychology, which I want to talk to you a little bit more about. Because some of our listeners are probably not that familiar with positive psychology, and it was really, at least from my perspective looking in from the outside, fairly radical. Psychology historically was more focused on the past and what's wrong, perhaps. And here comes a new way of approaching it that is really more focused on what's right and the present. So I'm just curious to hear more about, you know, how you got involved in positive psychology. It sounds like through your family, but tell us a little bit more about the evolution of this approach. Because I think that's an interesting story in itself.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, absolutely. So sort of the nutshell version of the history of psychology is a long time ago psychologists were either philosophers or medical doctors. And they were just trying to puzzle out, why are people doing the things they're doing? And the medical doctors were doing things like, how does the nervous system work? How does the brain work? And the philosophers were asking questions like, what is morality? What is our duty? What's our best potential? And for a long time, even up until sort of the year 1900, psychology did have a lot of emphasis on positive topics like morality, companionship, friendship, support, and athletic performance, even. Winning. And it was really only after World War II and at least in the United States with the creation of the Veterans Administration, that there was a pivot towards a clinical focus. Because clinical issues are pressing, and folks coming back from war time were experiencing what then was called shell shock, we now know as PTSD. And rates of depression and later on anxiety were growing at epidemic rates.

So about half of the psychologists in the United States now are clinicians, and that's a pretty overwhelming amount. But around the turn of the century, that is 1980 or 1998, 99, 2000, there was sort of this reinvigoration that, yeah, it's okay to focus on these pressing psychological ills, but that really it’s only half, or one portion, of human nature. What about people who are generous? What about people who are funny? What about people who are great learners or great teachers? Shouldn't we also be looking at those types of topics? Optimism, savoring, and happiness. And so a group of researchers and practitioners got together and sort of established this new approach. It was an old way of thinking, but it came under a new umbrella called positive psychology.

Chris Kresser: And when positive psychology first was introduced, was it well received amongst conventional psychologists? Was it controversial? What happened?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, it's a really great question and I think that anyone who has probably opened a blog in the last five years has probably come across at least some study suggesting that X makes you happy, whether that's a glass of wine or a little workout or a piece of chocolate or spending more time with friends, whatever it is. So it is part of the zeitgeist, I guess, that just sort of this idea that happiness research is out there, I think, is widely accepted now. But really, there are a lot of stereotypes about positive psychology. There are many skeptics, many critics of it.

Many of the most common sort of complaints, if you will, are folks who think that positive psychology is pollyanna, it's just this naïve science where we only focus on the positive and we would never talk about anxiety or depression or divorce or child abuse or any of these social ills. And say, “Ah but we should all be happy all the time anyway.” And that's not true, actually. There are no researchers that actually believe that. We're just trying to say, “Hey, let's study all of human experience, not just the darker half. And then some folks also criticize it a little bit as sort of a middle-class movement. They say, “Hey, there's folks living in poverty, there’s real injustice going on, and you’ve got these middle-class people attending happiness seminars.” There might be a seed of truth to that, but I don't know that that's necessarily wrong for middle-class people to want to be happier. And nor do I think it's exclusive to the middle class. I think that upper-class and lower-class people, I think across the economic spectrum, folks are interested in happiness.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, so I mean that pollyanna critique is one that I've heard, and I've seen people conflate positive psychology with things like affirmations. Just repeating the outcome that you want to see or the beliefs or thoughts about yourself, over and over again. But there's really actually quite a bit of research supporting positive psychology, isn’t there?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, at the heart, really, it is a robust science. It’s largely happening in universities you've heard of. Places like Stanford and Harvard, as well as others. Very solid researchers using sophisticated statistics, sophisticated measurements and methods, and it's a lot less New Age-y, I guess, than many people might assume. It’s not, let's just reframe every bad thing like, “Oh, I'm so happy I got cancer because this is going to be an extraordinary lesson for me.”

Chris Kresser: Look at the bright side.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, that’s really not what this is about. Really, we’re interested in saying things like, like, just take a concept like savoring that is taking a positive or pleasant moment and extending it mentally. So it’s sort of like, who does this? Are women, are men more likely to do it? Young people or old people? When do they do it? Are they more likely to do it when they are together or when they're alone? Do we do it in different ways? For example, when you get together with your buddies and you tell these kinda good times that happened to you collectively long ago—that's a form of savoring. You’re taking that pleasant moment from the past and dragging it into the present. When you talk about a meal as you sit across from someone and say, “Oh you should try this. It’s really good,” that’s a form of savoring. And so we’re really just kind of interested in kind of describing like, what's going on with these fascinating phenomena.

Chris Kresser: So there's the application of positive psychology in a psychotherapeutic context, like in a clinical context where a client is coming to see a psychologist for anxiety or depression, or any number of other complaints. But then there’s how positive psychology is applied in a coaching context where the focus is more on behavior change. And that might include things like focusing on strengths and leveraging those strengths instead of trying to fix things that are broken or not working as well. So tell us a little bit more about that, how you've combined positive psychology and coaching practice.

Combining positive psychology and coaching

Robert Biswas-Diener: Okay, so, so it's interesting. Some people who have just a passing familiarity with positive psychology will recognize some of these sort of artificial interventions that are often trumpeted as happiness-producing. There are things like, you should write down three things for which you’re grateful each day, and if you do that, that will yield good happiness dividends for you. In positive psychology coaching, we don't really do that because coaching isn't prescriptive. I'm, as a coach, not going to say here's what you should do. I'm not giving a lot of advice. A lot of the positive psychology and positive psychology coaching is invisible to the client. And just to give you a couple examples of this.

One, you already mentioned, is strengths, that we’re interested in clients identifying their strengths, seeing those strengths as actually being strengths, not just dismissing them as ordinary, and using them optimally. So that might be “use your strengths more,” but it might also be “use your strengths less,” or “use them more judiciously” with a certain type of person for whom the strength doesn't make sense. So imagine someone who's great at humor, they might want to use humor with some people but not others. And the coaching process would be reflecting on when this strength, when does this strength of humor go well? How should you best employ it? And through that process, you would be more effective at using your strength.

And another thing we would do in positive psychology coaching would be just to invite people to focus on solutions rather than problems. And I think this is kind of an artful way of thinking because it's a little bit tough. Because people want to complain, and you can't invalidate them by saying no, no, no, let's not talk about your complaints, right? So you let them talk about their complaints, you just don't invite them to do so more than they normally would. Instead, you invite them to focus on solutions. The simple question is, “Wow, that complaint sounds awful. What would you prefer instead?” And it's so, so much of the positive psychology in the coaching is very subtle and it just comes out in the form of very natural questions.

Chris Kresser: So let's talk a little bit more about coaching because this, as I've, we’ve been preparing to launch our ADAPT Health Coach Training Program, have been talking to a lot of people about coaching, both people who identify as coaches and people who are wanting to learn to become coaches, people who are experts in the coaching world. And it turns out there are a lot of different definitions of coaching and a lot of different conceptions of what a coach should do. I mean, certainly for some who might not be very familiar with health coaching or life coaching or executive coaching, they might think about, like, a sport coach, you know, like someone with a whistle around their neck, blowing it and yelling at them. And that’s what they think of as coaching. But what is coaching from your perspective? What defines coaching?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Sure, it's a great question and I think you're right, there are a lot of stereotypes around it, right? Sort of this New Age life coaching kinda stereotype, just like, “Hey, if we could look at your past lives, which of those would you want to use?” And I think that there is some of that in coaching, and there's folks that do coaching that have no training in it, and I think that's a little bit dangerous. This is a profession. It's not just something that you can kinda shoot from the hip. So I believe that coaching fundamentally is a professional relationship where the coach acts as a facilitator. And in the capacity as a facilitator, they work with their client to help the client achieve personally important goals, and they do so primarily through some broad mechanisms.

One, they support the client and they act as a yes-man or yes-woman, kind of saying like, “Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, what would it take for you to try that?” They also provide accountability. “So you want to make this big behavioral change. Great. I'm going to hold you to that. You're gonna let me know exactly the progress you're making and I'm going to hold your feet to the fire if you fall short of that.” They also do a lot of exploration. That makes up the, sort of the lion’s share of a coaching session. And that just comes in the form of questions where you probe the client's life. You have them take stock of his or her identity and resources, challenges, hopes, help them articulate goals. And then the last thing, I think, is just a little bit of challenge too. You mentioned the sports coach with a whistle, and while I wouldn't whistle or yell at my clients, I don't mind occasionally needling them or prodding them, or doing a little bit of that just to improve motivation as well.

The fundamentals of health coaching

Chris Kresser: Right. We’ll come back to that, because I think it’s important to emphasize that there are different styles of coaching and not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. And I know you're a big believer in authenticity in coaching. So I do want to cover that. But before we dive in there, let’s shift our focus a little bit toward health coaching because that’s something that I’m interested in. And something that I’ve noticed as I’ve gone around having these conversations is that some people have the impression that a health coach is someone who requires a lot of expertise and information about things like nutrition and lifestyle, like sleep and exercise. And then their primary role is to deliver that information and expertise to the clients that come to them. What is the problem with that understanding?

Robert Biswas-Diener: The problem with that understanding is that it’s not what health coaching is fundamentally. That is like being an educator, that's a health educator or health consultant, perhaps. That’s saying, “Look, I've got the solution for you. I know it's gonna work. And if only you follow my plan, magically, things are going to go right for you.” But again, going back to that kind of sports analogy, the sports coach doesn't run out on the field and grab the ball away from the players and try and score with it. That is, they’re not playing the game. They recognize the players play the game and they're just there to motivate, encourage, help them see the big picture, help them improve their strategy, help them train. And that's really a better model for a health coach.

So the health coach can go in with a client that wants to make some type of health change, anything from “I want to quit smoking,” to “I need to get into the gym.” And they help the client tease out his or her own solutions that make sense in the context of his or her own life. Because I think we all understand X amount of exercise is pretty good for people and that you can look at exercise in terms of mobility and strength building and flexibility and all these sort of subcomponents of it. But what about the client in front of you? What about this single mom who's stressed out, has a preteen, and a teen kid, is trying to balance work and home life, doesn't have a huge amount of time or money for a gym membership? What's the solution for that person?

And that person gets to be the expert in their own life and a health coach's job is to help them explore what makes sense for them given their circumstances. And certainly a little bit of expertise in diet, nutrition, and so forth might help the coach to ask better questions. But ultimately it's asking and not advising.

How health coaching differs from an expert or authority approach

Chris Kresser: Right. Such an important distinction. And now I've talked about this in other contexts, but there are statistics like the CDC has estimated that only about 6 percent of Americans engaged in the top five health behaviors, like maintaining a healthy weight, and getting enough sleep, and not drinking too much, not smoking, etc. And as you suggested, it's when people are not maintaining these behaviors, it’s not because they don't understand that they’re beneficial, right? It's that there's some obstacle to change or some ambivalence.

And let's talk a little bit more about how a coaching approach is different than the maybe what we could call the “expert” or the “authority” approach in resolving that ambivalence or making progress in terms of behavior change. Because from my perspective, just doing more of the same thing, which is recruiting more experts, more people who can tell patients or just individuals what to do. Which is kind of the approach that we’re still taking both in conventional medicine and I would even say in conventional health coach training programs. Why will that fail?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Well, it potentially could fail for many reasons. I think it's interesting you go in to a conventional doctor, and of course they’re varied, and there's wonderful doctors and there's lazy doctors and there's all kinds of doctors. But let's say you're overweight and the doctor cares about that and they bring it up to you, and they say, “Oh, it would be a good idea for you to lose a little weight and maybe here’s a pamphlet about weight or about diet.” I think we can probably agree that much of the information contained there is probably outdated in its approach.

It would be things maybe like caloric restriction or things that really are not widely accepted anymore, but the real problem there is that they haven't looked at the client's motivation, they haven't looked at the client's readiness for change, they haven't explored who supports or potentially sabotages the client’s diet. They don't understand anything about the client’s pattern of eating, their shopping or cooking behaviors, are they emotional eaters, do they have a sweet tooth, is alcohol a crutch for them in terms of managing stress. How are their sleep habits factoring into their weight? And really that necessitates an in-depth and exclusive sort of coaching-like interview with the client to help tease out really a strategy or a plan that’s going to be effective given all those factors for that specific individual in front of you.

Chris Kresser: I know you’re a big believer in asking powerful questions, and it seems to me that one of the main differences in the approaches we’re talking about now, this expert or authority approach and a coaching approach, is just that. Asking questions rather than providing answers. We know that the average amount of time a patient gets to speak before they are interrupted by their doctor is just 12 seconds.

Robert Biswas-Diener: I've never heard that before. That’s great.

How asking powerful questions shifts the dialogue

Chris Kresser: It’s true. That’s a statistic peer-reviewed study that found where they went around and observed these interactions. And even with observation, that was true. So yeah like, why is asking powerful questions so powerful? I mean how does that shift the dialogue and the outcomes?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Certainly. So let me just preface my answer by giving just a quick example of what a powerful question is. We all understand what a question is, but if I ask you what's your birthday, that's not a particularly powerful question. It's very easy for you to answer that. It takes almost no thought whatsoever for you to provide an answer.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Robert Biswas-Diener: But if I say, “These days, what's most important to you in life,” that requires a little bit of reflection, a little bit of thought. It forces you to make choices and to articulate something that feels weighty. And that's an example of a powerful question. So if you have someone coming in, I'm just going to go back to the idea of optimal weight as an issue. If you ask questions like how important is it to you to change your weight. What do you believe is standing in the way of weight change? When in the past have you had success in this particular issue? Who supports you in this? When you lose a little bit of weight, how does make you feel?

Those are the types of questions that get the client to take stock of her resources, she can take stock of how important this is, what she's willing to sacrifice to make this change, the potential path to getting there. You can set up lots of little experiments. You can say, “Let’s just try this and see. We don’t know if it will succeed.” And certainly that's really important and something like behavioral change around health habits because people often backslide. And when they backslide they end up feeling very badly about themselves. They feel like failures.

But if you just set it up, set client expectations from the get-go, as in, “Hey, behavioral change is hard, sometimes you're on vacation, sometimes it's the holidays. Circumstances are always changing. So we’re always going to be modifying our plan. We don't expect it to be perfect. We’re really just doing these experiments and getting feedback,” that can make the change process a lot more empowering to the client.

Chris Kresser: And I think more effective, certainly. I mean, one of the things that I’m often hearing … I was just at a conference last weekend and a very common topic of conversation amongst nutritionists and also health coaches who I think have not actually been trained in these core coaching skills that we’re talking about is something along the lines of this. Like I was actually asked this, not this year, but last year I was approached by a coach who said, “Where can I find more motivated clients? I'm having a hard time getting people to follow my program.” And she asked me because her perception was that I had the most motivated patients, which is probably true. My patients are generally much more motivated than others because of all the hoops they have to jump through just to get to see me. And she was wondering where she could, how she could hook up with some more motivated people who would follow her programs. And I don’t say this to be critical of her at all and or anyone who has the same question. Because it can be really frustrating when you feel like you have a lot of knowledge and expertise that could help your clients, or your friends and family members, but they're not acting on it.

So where do these core coaching skills come in, in dealing with this? And maybe you could talk a little bit about ambivalence and what it is, and how coaching can help coaches, practitioners, and clients, patients that find themselves in the stuck place.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the great elements of coaching is just this fundamental attitude that you have about your clients. That whether your client walks in overweight, or with diabetes or with any number of things that society might judge them for, it's important for coaches to just kind of keep, I guess, an open heart or an attitude of acceptance towards their clients. And so you don't start seeing your clients as resistant or unmotivated. Instead you're curious and you try and figure out what’s standing in the way of your motivation. What would boost your motivation? What's one small change we could make that might sort of shift you a half step up in motivation?

I’ll give you just a very quick example of this. I was speaking with a health coach yesterday and we were talking about a single mother. This is the example I gave before, who gives sugary cereal to her children. And it was sort of driving the health coach crazy because everyone in the world knows that you shouldn't load up a bunch of milk on sugar cereal, give it to kids, and expect them to learn for the day. And really what the single mother was saying is, “Yeah, you know that and I know that. Everyone knows that. But I have a million battles that I have to fight throughout the day. I have a million things on my plate. I’m trying to balance my own health, fitness, and well-being with a heavy workload at my job, with raising these children with no support from my ex-husband, and sugar cereal is not the battle I choose to fight. And I just need help prioritizing which are the battles that are perhaps the ones that are better to invest in.”

And I think that's where this kind of open-hearted attitude ... You don't say, “Oh, this client doesn't get it. They're resistant to my anti-sugar cereal protocol and they’re not following my guidelines.” But instead they’re reaching out and they're smart and resourceful, and willing to make change. They just want your help figuring out how best to do that and it’s probably not during breakfast. It might be something else. They might prioritize dinner or grocery shopping, or figuring out ways to have the kids contribute to the meal prep, or any number of solutions. But we don't know what that solution is. Only the client ultimately understands what's in their context.

Chris Kresser: And when the client discovers their own solution with maybe the support of the coach, what do we know about how likely that is to be successful over the long term versus a solution that comes from the coach or somebody else?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Here's what I think about it. I would guess that you want me to say, “Well, when the client comes up with her own solution, she's going to be more successful at it.”

Chris Kresser: No, I’m just asking you a powerful question, Robert.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah okay, good, good. Because that is not my answer. I think that when clients come up with their own solutions and they're willing to commit to them and try them, I think their motivation is up. I think they're more likely to follow through on the behavior change. Ultimately, we don't know if that's going to lead to more success. Because maybe the idea wasn't a good one. Or maybe the kids don't accept the change, to use this recent example. Or maybe just bad luck and it just fails.

Like, we don’t guarantee success, but what we do know is that the client feels better about it. They feel empowered, they feel motivated, they're more likely to follow through. They’re probably more likely to persevere, even if it doesn't go well the first time. And those things might be related to more success overall downstream, but I think even those things like motivation and perseverance are major wins in and of themselves.

Chris Kresser: Absolutely. So we have a number of people who are in our audience who are health coaches, or seeking to become a health coach. And I know another thing that I've heard, especially for new health coaches or people who are just learning about this, is it's a lot. They’re studying positive psychology and character strengths and things like motivational interviewing and the transtheoretical model and stages of change and building trust and rapport and empathic forms of communication, etc. I mean, it can be a little bit overwhelming. So I know from our previous conversations that you have a, what I think is a really great framework for coaches that are getting started, like what they should focus on first as they begin to get experience with clients.

Framework for coaches just getting started

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're right. There is sort of an overwhelming amount of skill and knowledge to be learned. And everyone thinks all of it’s equally important and it all needs to be frontloaded. It's just, it can be a real burden for a new student of coaching. I believe that if you could just sort of, like, really strip down coaching to its barest bones, kind of like if you had a car that just had wheels, an engine, and the steering wheel, like just its basic bits, it didn't even need lights or seats or anything to still work, that for coaching that would be what I would consider the bookends of coaching—that is, how do you start and stop a coaching session?

And you start by setting a really sophisticated agenda. Just kind of shoot from the hip and say, “Hey, what do you want to talk about today?” Because that's a little bit like taking off in an airplane but having no destination in mind. It might be an enjoyable flight, but how do you know when it's over? Is it just when you run out of gas? So I really think that setting an agenda, it's quite masterful. People often say, “Oh, it seemed so easy, and then I started trying it, and it was really difficult to master.” So making sure that the agenda is really specific, really pointed, that it's something that can be accomplished, something that the clients bought into.

And then the other bookend is setting up accountability, extracting some type of behavioral promise related to a goal from the client and creating a plan by which they are accountable to that. And then basically the stuff in the middle, the third skill, is just asking those powerful exploratory questions. There are loads of other skills that you can season a coaching session with, but I think those are sort of the core elements.

Chris Kresser: So I want to talk a little bit about what an aspiring health coach should look for in a training program. You train coaches, we’re setting up to train coaches, and you and I have talked a lot about what should be present in a training program. You've been in education for a long time yourself, and I know you have a lot of thoughts about that. So I’d love to hear what would be the most, what are the most important things from your perspective?

What an aspiring health coach should look for in a training program

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah, that's a great question, and I think you could find a difference of opinion on this. But I have some pretty strong opinions. First, I think that an emphasis on effective pedagogy, that is, how is the program delivered, is really crucial, and I actually think that it's a fairly overlooked element of most coaching programs. Most coaching programs operate like, “Hey, why don’t you fly into our city for the weekend? We’ll just load you up in the quickest time possible with tons of practice, we’ll write you a certificate at the end,” and that's highly appealing to people because they can get a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Unfortunately, it's not really good for learning. You can't cram information like that, and it's a terrible way to learn skill, because to learn skill effectively, you need to space out, practice over time, and to get feedback on it.

So I think really high-quality coaching programs occur over periods of time, not over periods of weekends. They really think about effective communication. So they're balancing a little bit of lecture with lots of demonstration, practice opportunities, feedback, discussion groups, so that you're really getting the information from multiple channels. And to some extent, I think that that's almost more important than what the content is itself. So I would definitely look for that. I think that the programs that have some type of official affiliation, that is, they could provide you with some kind of institutional affiliation and say, “And look, there's an ethics code that goes with this. And even we have oversight in what we, there's oversight on our program. Someone is checking in to make sure that our program is high quality.” I think that's a great thing because I think there's a lot of sort of coaching programs popping up, just, you know, “Acme Gold Standard Coaching Program” that’s just some guy in his basement that decided to offer something online.

And I also, like, I'll just say this as one last consideration. I really like what I think of as a generalist model. I'm deeply skeptical when a coaching program has their own sort of proprietary model. “Come to our Interchange Academy where you can learn the interchange method that includes six levels of listening and seven levels of leadership and eight levels of change.” And you only get taught our model and exactly our formulaic steps, and they’re taught as if they’re the laws of nature. And that doesn't describe every coaching program. Some coaching programs are like, “Hey, whether you're doing executive coaching or life coaching or health coaching, really kind of just here are some general skills that work. Here are some ethics that you should build on as a foundation. Here are some practice opportunities and some feedback.” So I really like the generalist approach rather than trying to get you to buy into, like, a particular orientation or philosophy.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, that's, I mean, that’s really helpful, and I know you and I have talked about the learning theory and pedagogy in the past. And I really scratched my head over that one because I talked, I've written and talked a lot over the years about the disconnect between the most recent nutrition research and medical research and what the standard of care is in the conventional model. How disparate, how much of a gap there is between what the research shows now and what's actually being done in conventional settings. But I think that gap is even bigger when it comes to learning theory.

There's so much research on how humans learn most effectively. And it's really, at least from my perspective, doesn't seem to be very controversial at this point. And yet the way that the vast majority of not just health coach training programs, but any educational programs are structured, even medical training programs, is completely at odds with this modern learning theory.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Absolutely, yeah.

Chris Kresser: It seems to shoot these programs in the foot from the beginning. I hear from so many people. Actually, I just got an email yesterday from someone who's, I’m not going to name the program specifically, but a highly regarded integrative medicine training program, he actually sent me a video of what is inside of the training portal, and seriously, it looks like it was designed in 1978. It’s just all text, no case studies. It’s just like a textbook kind of barfed out online, right?

Robert Biswas-Diener: Right.

Chris Kresser: And he said it’s just all 100 percent passive learning. They’re just meant to read the slides, all the slides just have text on them, and he’s miserable. And he paid a lot of money for this program.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Absolutely. Well one of the things that’s happened sort of broadly in the training space is a lot of it is market driven, and that is, customers are asking for more passive learning opportunities for chunked learning. Give it to me just in a weekend. But it turns out that these same consumers, that's convenient for them, but they have never studied effective pedagogy. And oftentimes they don't even realize how much that by demanding this type of product, they are shortchanging their own ability to truly absorb information and master skill.

As a quick example, I was just in Manila in the Philippines last week and I was training psychologists and executive coaches. And I was just training them in one particular skill in a day. And I said, “I won't be using PowerPoint today.” And exactly, that was the collective gasp. They said, “No one has ever tried to stand in front of a group in a hotel ballroom of more than 100 people for a day without PowerPoint.” They were like, how could that be possible? And people came up to me afterwards and they were surprised. They said, “Wow, you held our interest despite not having PowerPoint.” And I think it's just interesting.

Chris Kresser: I would say almost because of not having PowerPoint you were able to hold their interest.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Well, exactly. Like, yeah, let me guess, you weren’t looking at the screen and you are now focusing on the presenter.

Chris Kresser: Exactly, yeah.

Robert Biswas-Diener: But it is that they’re not bad people for being used to PowerPoint; they just have never studied this or had opportunities to engage with high-quality training modalities.

Chris Kresser: So we’ve covered a lot of ground today. It’s been really fascinating conversation and I would love to just hear … We talked about some of the things that you would look for in a training program for coaching. What are some of the pitfalls or things to watch out for, for someone who's thinking about becoming a coach, or what’s your kind of top-of-mind best advice that you would give someone, if someone came to you like a family member perhaps, and said, “Robert, I'm thinking about becoming a coach”? What would you say to that person?

Robert Biswas-Diener: The first thing I would say is listen to your instinct. If you have a conversation with someone at a coaching program or you're looking at a coaching program, and there's just some kind of yellow flag, treat it like a red flag. If there's something about the way they’re self-promoting or talking about their success that just sort of rubs you the wrong way, I say absolutely listen to that because that's not just the pitch, that is who they are.

So really look for a fit with something that just feels good for you. I know some of the people that come to me, they say, “Oh, you don't mind challenging us. You don't demand that we agree with you, but you're also going to say things that other people aren’t saying. And that’s going to sound fresh and challenging, and we’re going to have to wrestle with it.” And for people who have that orientation, that’s going to be a great fit for them. The other thing that I worry about, and I did kind of allude to this before, sometimes when someone has just too glossy a package, when they say, “This is our perfectly copyrighted material and it’s the seven steps or the three ways, and you’re going to do it in this very formulaic way,” it doesn't feel very natural to me. It’s sort of a one-size-fits-all solution. And I am generally skeptical of that.

And then the last thing I would say, just be on the lookout for people who may not themselves have obvious research expertise, but who are touting the research. And they’re saying things like “this study proves that,” and so first of all, studies don’t prove things. They just offer a bit of evidence for things. And a single study is just a single study. You get 10 or 20 studies together, and it starts pointing towards a reliable conclusion. And people with true expertise speak in those more measured terms. They say, “We have mounting evidence for.” And when you start hearing these sort of grand research claims, I would also treat that a bit like a yellow flag.

Chris Kresser: Right. Cool. So where can people learn more about your work, Robert? You’ve written several books, a couple which I’ve read for coaches. Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching is a fantastic book. You've also written The Courage Quotient, The Upside of Your Dark Side, and then a book on happiness. I think that was with your dad, right? That one. So yeah, tell us a little bit more about this and where people can learn more about your work.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Yeah. I think The Upside of Your Dark Side is my most recent book. That’s the one I would recommend to people. It basically looks at, hey, good stuff is good, the happiness is pleasant, it’s associated with all sorts of benefits. But it’s also okay to occasionally be angry or guilty or sad. Let yourself off the hook for that. Mindfulness is terrific; occasional mindlessness has some benefit as well.

So it’s just looking more holistically, if you don’t mind the word, in trying to sew back a little bit of that shadow onto the Peter Pan positivity. And people can also find me at RobertDiener.com. It's my website. It has some of my published academic articles on it. Or you could just really just find me out there on Google. I write blogs and there's all sorts of stuff out there. I'm not hidden.

Chris Kresser: That is D-i-e-n-e-r, RobertDiener.com. You can also find Robert in the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program because he is, I'm very excited to say, that he has created the core coaching skills content for the program. And not only did he create that content, he’ll also, true to our focus on pedagogy and continuous learning and the importance of experiential and practical learning, he will be also providing support, demonstrations, and feedback in a live seminar format with that content as coaches move through the course.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Of all the programs that I've worked on and all the projects I’ve worked on in the last year, I’ve got to tell you that it's this that I'm most excited about, to be honest. I'm thrilled to be doing it.

Chris Kresser: Oh, I'm so … I'm flattered and happy to hear that. I'm excited about it too, and I think we have an incredible team. We’re going to be talking with Ken Kraybill from t3 about motivational interviewing in the next podcast, which is another, essentially, a way of asking powerful questions. A specific kind of approach to that, and I can't wait to get going with this because I think the, with the rising rates of chronic disease and what we talked about, doctors are not, and more experts are not what we need. We need people who can actually facilitate behavior change. And that's what this is all about.

Robert Biswas-Diener: Absolutely.

Chris Kresser: Thank you so much, Robert, for being with us today. And again, RobertDiener.com. Check it out. Upside of Your Dark Side his most recent book. And for those of you who are joining us in the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program in June, you will be seeing and hearing more from Robert in that program. So thanks for listening, everybody. Keep sending your questions into ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion, and we’ll see you next time. All right.

The post RHR Podcast: Harnessing the Power of Positive Psychology in Health Coaching – with Robert Biswas-Diener appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com May 15, 2018 at 01:16AM

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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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Black-Owned Restaurants in Detroit Are Hard Hit by the Pandemic

Inside Norma G’s, which remains open for takeout in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood | Michelle and Chris Gerard/Eater Detroit

After decades of structural racism, Detroit’s Black restaurateurs are facing both health and economic crises

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

In late February, Lester Gouvia was looking forward to transitioning out of the slow season and seeing business pick up again. The owner of Norma G’s, a full-service Caribbean restaurant with 113 seats, a full bar, a menu that includes beef patties, curry goat, and jerk chicken, Gouvia says things were on track at the beginning of March. But in the second week of March, as coverage of the coronavirus picked up and Metro Detroit confirmed its first two cases, Gouvia noticed a sudden slowdown.

“Normally, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are busy for us,” he says. “When I saw that Thursday slow-down, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a problem there.’”

Gouvia’s suspicion was confirmed the next day when 90 percent of the restaurant’s revenue dropped. Three days later, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order closing public establishments to prevent the spread of the virus. For restaurateurs with a dine-in model, that meant making an urgent, difficult decision: convert to carry-out and delivery or close the doors completely. Gouvia chose carryout.

“In the Caribbean, food and drink is an important part of our culture,” Gouvia says. “I wanted people to come and have an experience.”

As the first sit-down restaurant to open in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood in 30 years, Norma G’s was also a part of revitalization efforts for the east side neighborhood.

“Many Black businesses don’t have the agility to pivot to a different business model.”

For all these reasons, Gouvia found the switch to carryout especially challenging. But, for now, it’s keeping the doors open.

“I look around by myself and I think, ‘All the work I put in, it wasn’t for this.’ But in order to keep my brand and stay in business so people don’t lose track of me, this is what I have to do.”

The coronavirus has hit the Black population in Detroit especially hard — in health as well as economic impacts — but that’s not where the racial inequity ends. While many Black restaurateurs like Gouvia are hanging on, Devita Davison, executive director of the FoodLab, an organization that provides incubator space and other support for food businesses in Detroit, is concerned about what’s to come.

Black restaurateurs have long struggled with the racist structure of the food world, and that is most evident in the vast differences they often experience when it comes accessing capital. Therefore, they are often less equipped to weather a storm this big. And Detroit, which has seen a boom in restaurant culture in its downtown area in recent years, is a stark example of those disparities.

“Many Black businesses don’t have the agility to pivot to a different business model,” says Davison. For that reason, she worries they may be less likely to see their restaurants standing after the economy reopens.

So far, Ima, a casual full-service restaurant serving Japanese-style noodles and rice bowls, and Detroit Vegan Soul have both temporarily closed one location. However, the Block Neighborhood Bar and Kitchen — a casual gastropub — has permanently closed.

Pivoting, Trimming Hours

Like Gouvia, Nya Marshall decided to invest in the under-resourced east side of the city when she opened Ivy Kitchen and Cocktails at the end of 2019. She wanted to hire folks from the neighborhood, and she was driven by feedback from neighbors who wanted to see a fine dining restaurant in the East English Village neighborhood. The 60-seat Ivy Kitchen offered small plates such as buffalo cauliflower and mezcal wings and entrees like farro etouffee and short rib stroganoff. There was also a 12-seat bar.

“We are offering an elevated dining experience to Detroiters because I felt like we were left out of that experience from a cultural perspective,” says Marshall.

“The social component of the dining experience was what the [business] model was predicated on,” she adds. “Carry out and delivery was never a component.”

Marshall hadn’t been open for 90 days when the coronavirus forced her model to change. The business went from serving what Marshall estimates to be 800-1,000 guests a week to between 30 and 50. She had to furlough most of her employees, going from a staff of more than 20 to just three people.

At first, she maintained her normal business hours, but it was so slow that she cut down to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Her menu changed, too, converted into what Marshall describes as “comfort and family style” meals such as fried chicken with roasted red mashed potatoes.

A Beacon of Light

Since mid-March, Detroit has become a hotspot for the coronavirus, which is disproportionately impacting the Black community all over the country. The city’s population is nearly 80 percent Black, and that group accounts for approximately 65 percent of confirmed cases and 77 percent of deaths. The three counties that make up metro Detroit account for a significant number — 80 percent — of the state’s cases.

Now, restaurateurs like Gouvia and Marshall, who chose to open their business in neighborhoods that have long been disinvested in, are operating in the epicenter of the virus. So, there’s also an added risk to their staff members.

In the second week of March, Sam Van Buren, co-owner of Detroit Soul — a counter service restaurant offering soul food classics with a healthier twist — fell ill. He didn’t know whether or not he had the virus. Van Buren’s wife ended up staying home with him.

The restaurant was left “kind of flying on one engine,” says co-owner Jerome Brown, whose wife was the only cook remaining.

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This is the #NormaGsCuisine crew ready and waiting for your arrival. Hope everyone is safe and doing well! Shout out to Renee our kitchen mom for making our cloth masks...Angelo left his in the wash today... lol.

A post shared by normagscuisine (@normagscuisine) on Apr 21, 2020 at 1:47pm PDT

Eventually, Van Buren was tested, and his results came back negative for the coronavirus. Still, the co-owners had to decide how to proceed in the current environment. They didn’t have to alter their business model but did see a small decline in business, and decided to stay open for their community.

“Our core mission kicked in [because] we wanted to be a beacon of light in the neighborhood from a health and economic perspective,” Brown explains.

They retooled the menu by giving customers the chance to buy larger portions at a time, and they only allow five customers in the building at a time. But they’ve kept the days and hours of operation the same, for the sake of maintaining a sense of normalcy for their customers and their employees.

“We want to be a symbol of stability in the neighborhood,” Brown says. He adds that Detroit Soul wants to be healthier option against fast-food options that “contribute to the continual decline of health within our ethnic group.”

“We talk about people needing to keep their health and immune system up and be as healthy as they can be during this time,” Brown says. “So we were real pressed, like, ‘We gotta be here with these greens, we gotta be here with this cabbage, we gotta be here with this baked chicken.’”

Black Business Owners at a Disadvantage

FoodLab’s Davison is monitoring the impact of the virus on the restaurant industry. She says Black-owned business and businesses owned by other people of color are being hit the hardest.

Not only has the coronavirus brought to the forefront the racial, gender, and economic disparities in the restaurant industry, it’s exacerbating them. High-profile restauranteurs and hospitality groups backed by wealthy investors are leveraging public relations firms to frame them as the heroes on the frontlines to save the industry, despite closing restaurants, furloughing and laying off workers.

“It may seem absurd that the vast and varied ecosystem of American restaurants are represented by celebrity chefs and fast-food executives who are exclusively male and overwhelmingly white, but not really when you understand that in this capitalist system resources flow in the direction of power,” explains Davison.

Recently, when the Trump administration announced the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups, the executives and industry leaders named to represent the food and beverage industry included high-profile chefs Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck, and chains and restaurant groups such as McDonald’s, Darden Restaurants, and YUM! Brands.

“Where are the women? Where are the Black people? Where are the queer [and] nonbinary folks?” Davison asks. “Who will advocate for immigrant and undocumented workers? The restaurant industry is nothing without all of these people, yet all you have in the White House economic group are white men?”

The latest blow to neighborhood restaurants came from the Small Business Administration’s $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), created to offer businesses with fewer than 500 employees a loan to cover payroll costs for eight weeks. Many small businesses scrambled to apply to the first round of loans only to learn that but large restaurant groups were awarded with multi-million-dollar loans. The chains Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Potbelly, and Shake Shack have since announced plans to return the money. And while a second round of loans opened on Monday, Ashley Harrington, of the Center for Responsible Lending told CBS News, “that upwards of 90 percent of businesses owned by people of color have been, or will likely be, shut out of the Paycheck Protection Program.”

In Detroit, dozens of restaurants have set up GoFundMe campaigns to raise money to help their employees. Last month TechTown Detroit, a tech startup and local business incubator and accelerator, offered an emergency fund to provide qualifying small businesses with grants worth up to $5,000. The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, in partnership with the City of Detroit, recently created a $3.1 million COVID-19 for eligible small businesses ranging from $2,500 up to $10,000.

Marshall applied for all of these forms of support, but has yet to receive any funding. Gouvia applied for the TechTown and DEGC grants and was awarded both. Brown applied for four grants and loans, including DEGC and PPP, which he was approved for, but is waiting for funds.

Davison says that Black-owned businesses are often missing a component that could help them to weather this storm: a marketing and communications strategy.

“[If] you haven’t even built a [strong] communications and marketing infrastructure, you can’t communicate with your clientele that you’re pivoting,” says Davison. Restaurants need to be able to tell their clientele, “here is what our menu looks like, here’s how you can reach us, here’s how you can order delivery, here’s what our hours are,” she adds.

Marshall, who does her own PR, agrees. “If these stories and initiatives aren’t being pushed, if no one is advocating on your behalf, people are not aware that you exist,” she says.

While many restaurants have relied on delivery apps like Grubhub and UberEats, much has been reported on their predatory practices, squeezing neighborhood restaurants out of 30 percent of commission from each order (Neither Gouvia nor Marshall use them for that reason). However Black and Mobile, a black-owned food delivery service launched in February 2019 in Philadelphia has recently expanded to Detroit, is working with up to 20 Black-owned restaurants from midtown, as well as the east and west sides of the city.

When the virus passes, Davison says she also hopes to see discussions take place about crisis management strategies.

“When we get through this, I’m judging our impact and our successes on how many Black and brown entrepreneurs’ doors were we able to keep open,” she says. “And then we can start having conversations about how we help them to recover and how we help them to become resilient.”

• Black-Owned Restaurants in Detroit Are Hard Hit by the Pandemic [Civil Eats] • COVID-19 Shows That It’s Time for the Hospitality Industry to Listen to Black Women [E]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2YkJbWd https://ift.tt/3aTFwBA

Inside Norma G’s, which remains open for takeout in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood | Michelle and Chris Gerard/Eater Detroit

After decades of structural racism, Detroit’s Black restaurateurs are facing both health and economic crises

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

“Normally, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are busy for us,” he says. “When I saw that Thursday slow-down, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a problem there.’”

“In the Caribbean, food and drink is an important part of our culture,” Gouvia says. “I wanted people to come and have an experience.”

As the first sit-down restaurant to open in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood in 30 years, Norma G’s was also a part of revitalization efforts for the east side neighborhood.

“Many Black businesses don’t have the agility to pivot to a different business model.”

For all these reasons, Gouvia found the switch to carryout especially challenging. But, for now, it’s keeping the doors open.

Pivoting, Trimming Hours

“We are offering an elevated dining experience to Detroiters because I felt like we were left out of that experience from a cultural perspective,” says Marshall.

“The social component of the dining experience was what the [business] model was predicated on,” she adds. “Carry out and delivery was never a component.”

A Beacon of Light

The restaurant was left “kind of flying on one engine,” says co-owner Jerome Brown, whose wife was the only cook remaining.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by normagscuisine (@normagscuisine) on Apr 21, 2020 at 1:47pm PDT

“Our core mission kicked in [because] we wanted to be a beacon of light in the neighborhood from a health and economic perspective,” Brown explains.

Black Business Owners at a Disadvantage

FoodLab’s Davison is monitoring the impact of the virus on the restaurant industry. She says Black-owned business and businesses owned by other people of color are being hit the hardest.

Davison says that Black-owned businesses are often missing a component that could help them to weather this storm: a marketing and communications strategy.

Marshall, who does her own PR, agrees. “If these stories and initiatives aren’t being pushed, if no one is advocating on your behalf, people are not aware that you exist,” she says.

When the virus passes, Davison says she also hopes to see discussions take place about crisis management strategies.

• Black-Owned Restaurants in Detroit Are Hard Hit by the Pandemic [Civil Eats] • COVID-19 Shows That It’s Time for the Hospitality Industry to Listen to Black Women [E]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2YkJbWd via Blogger https://ift.tt/2KQnVjb

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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paponikablog · 5 years ago

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About a three-hour drive from north Korea's capital, Pyongyang, lies what might be the world's most isolated ski resort. Masik Pass offers 11 runs and 4 lifts plus a gear rental shop. The attached luxury hotel features 120 rooms, complete with a swimming pool, sauna, bar and karaoke room.

Snowmobiles were imported from China and chair lifts from Austria, after a Swiss company refused to sell them, which North Korea called a “serious human rights abuse”. The resort has four and a half stars on Trip Advisor from genuine, happy tourists. Most of its visitors, however, come from within North Korea. While the country is almost exclusively portrayed as a poor, starved relic of the past, recent reports from defectors have begun to paint a much more nuanced picture. In reality, Pyongyang cafes are filled with patrons reading from tablets and teenagers making phone calls, some driving BMW's and Mercedes. The key to understanding who is really in charge, whether a revolution will ever occur, and what daily life is like, is to see how North Korea - both the state and the people within it - make money.

After Swiss cheese, bad haircuts, and empty buildings, North Korea is best known for seemingly wanting to end the human race in a giant nuclear explosion. When Kim Jong un-finds his country unusually hungry or one of his yachts, in need of repairs, the country turns into that annoying kid on the playground who will not shut up until you share your hot Cheetos. Insults are hurled, threats made, and missiles launched.

Inevitably the U. S. sees no choice but to respond, agreeing to ease sanctions or grant food aid in exchange for a return to normalcy. Now, with their mouths freshly fed, Kim and his compatriots will suddenly turn from murderous dictators to charming, levelheaded, although admittedly, stylistically eccentric diplomats. Then the six, twelve, eighteen months later, like clockwork, we’ll all have Deja Vu. But while Kim’s seeming obsession with nuclear toys attracts nearly all the media attention, in reality, it's just one of many strategies the world's most secretive regime has for accomplishing its much larger goal: staying alive. The fundamental challenge for North Korea is that it cannot truly, verifiably, and permanently give up its nuclear capabilities Without becoming, at best irrelevant. At the same time, it cannot truly thrive with the level of international sanctions that come with threatening to sink an entire U.S. state. Thus, all three generations of leadership have been forced to master the art of negotiation: to extracted just enough aid to stay afloat well never actually giving up its one and only source of leverage.

Before founding the democratic people's Republic of Korea Kim Il Sung was an unlikely leader. Having fought alongside Chinese communists and later in the Soviet army the first Kim with well-prepared, militarily, but lacked the softer skills considered necessary to oversee a communist Republic. His education was poor, Korean mediocre and understanding of Marxist theory deemed insufficient. Despite this initial hesitation, he was eventually selected to lead the new state, although, with much oversight. Soviet advisors drafted north Korea's constitution and approved all its major speeches in advance, making it a near-perfect puppet state, or, in gentler terms, a “Soviet Satellite Regime”.

By the end of the Korean War, Kim Il sung had become a national hero and icon - praise which fueled grander ambitions. His devotion to socialism soon morphed into a strong sense of nationalism - a desire to be more than Moscow or Beijing's puppet. Many Soviet officers were purged from government positions and for several decades, North Korea intentionally positioned itself between the Soviet Union and China, realizing it could play them off each other. Whatever Moscow gave or promised, Beijing was sure to match, and then some, and vice versa. Both countries knew they were being played, of course, but preferred this to the far worse alternative: ceding influence on the other. This dynamic of reluctant support, in fact, has more less continued to this day. Conventional wisdom portrays China as North Korea's only ally, or even puppet state. The reality is North Korea hasn't been a true puppet state for many decades, and with China, it has less a marriage and more an opportunistic relationship. China’s strategic interests overlap with north Korea's continued existence, not necessarily success or prosperity. At the base level what Beijing wants is nothing – stability. By far, its worst-case scenario is a dissolved or failed North Korea, after which, up to 25 million, unskilled, culturally dissimilar refugees will flood into some of its most economically weak North-Eastern provinces. Even worse would be the accompanying advance of American forces on China's doorstep.

The north, in other words, acts as a nice buffer from U.S. troops stationed in the south. As long as the North doesn't push tensions too high, China is happy more less maintaining the status quo. Ideally it would like to see Kim Jong unfollow its own example of economic reform and opening up, making it less dependent on nuclear threats for survival, and potentially justifying a retreat by American forces. Realistically, though, China also knows its influence is limited. China is indeed North Korea's largest trade partner, by a mile, but it's easy to overstate the leverage from trade with a country whose propaganda can offset almost any internal challenge.

In simple terms, Beijing could destroy North Korea - militarily or economically. It almost certainly also has a plan for regime change should it ever be deemed necessary. What it lacks is the fine-grained ability to influence it. And because China wants stability first and foremost, it has no reason, currently, to use its blunt weapon, leaving it with limited leverage. So, while there exists a clear power dynamic between the two nations, neither is likely to do anything too dramatic.

When Kim met with Xi Jinping in 2018, the supreme leader was seen obediently taking notes while the Chinese president spoke. China has historically condemned its missile tests and voted in favor of UN sanctions. And yet Xi recently made the first visit to Pyongyang by a Chinese leader in 14 years. North Korea, for its part, understands the need to, at a minimum, not anger the closest thing it has to a friend. It's all too familiar with the cost of losing an ally. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea suffered a devastating famine which ultimately killed somewhere between 200,000 and three million people. Before this, food was distributed via its Public Distribution System - PDS - which had formers surrender their harvest to the government, who then allocated it amongst the population. This model worked well during the 50s, 60s, and 70s even making Chinese towns on the border jealous. In the 80s and 90s, however, the system came violently crashing down. 450 grams of food rations per day in 1994 became 128 grams by 1997. Soon only six percent of the population received any food from the government who promised to feed it. This, arguably, was the most pivotal moment in the nation's history, alongside the deaths of its first two leaders. The PDS has never fully recovered, leaving most of its 25 million people to fend for themselves. Officially, Capitalism doesn't exist here - private property and trade are both highly illegal. In practice, however, it can be seen everywhere - from those in poverty all the way to the highest levels of the regime. Almost everyone is assigned a government job, and yet 62% of defectors surveyed in 2010 say they had worked unofficial, gray market jobs. Married women can register as full-time housewives rather than work an official job - giving them the freedom to start a private enterprise. Across the country, women can be seen in roadside markets selling food, and homemade or imported goods like Russian cigarettes and Chinese beer. Ironically, Because of this women's rights are surprisingly strong in North Korea, where they tend to make many multiples of their husband’s income.

As expected, the government is aware of this illegal activity and could, in theory, eliminate it entirely. But having never recovered from a now-three decade-old famine, most of the population has come to depend on private markets for basic survival. Additionally, the majority of this trade is conducted purely for material, not political, reasons. The poor simply wish to get by and the rich only seeking more luxurious life - not an end to the regime.

So the state simultaneously manages my markets through selective enforcement and also sometimes even encourages it. The “August 3rd rule”, for example, allows one to pay a fee and be exempted from official work - essentially profiting from instead of cracking down on private enterprise. Still, there are limits.

North Korean bank notes were ordered to be exchanged in 2009 with a limit of 100,000 won per person - wiping out many family savings and causing the closest thing North Korea has likely ever seen to a protest. This taught north Koreans not to trust their own currency. So, today, most unofficial transactions involve a foreign currency - usually the Chinese yuan. And just as individuals resort to capitalism - so do government committees and departments.

For decades, many offices have been given limited or no resources, forcing them to generate their own. Anyone with any authority, therefore, is likely to use their influence to start a business, sometimes using the national military as workers. Those who bribe the right people and play the game well can become fabulously rich - even by international standards. These newly wealthy families drive luxury cars, own cell phones and eat western food in Pyongyang, which some jokingly refer to as the “Dubai” of North Korea.

In this way, and many others, North Korea is two very different countries: the north Korea seen by the outside world, and the one that lived by the vast majority of its population. The North Korea of tall buildings and bright lights you see in tours and pictures, and the one, only minutes away, of sprawling fields and flickering, if any, electricity. The famous monument to socialism, and the private shops selling Western clothes only blocks away.

And finally, an unwavering ally, on the surface, who, in reality, is, at best, ambivalent. For now, the system works. Inevitably, though, someday in the future, like the Soviet-era machines on which its factories run, North Korea will simply stop working - for any number of potentially trivial reasons.

In truth, it’s remarkable how long it has worked. But, for the time being, this tapes together, occasionally in need of kicking, jury-rigged machine keeps slowly, inefficiently chugging along.

For all its strangeness, the genius of North Korea, the reason for its survival - is its relative self-sufficiency. It knows how little say a small nation like itself has in the larger world.

#PapoNika PolyMatter

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csrgood · 4 years ago

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NRG Women Making History

As we embark on a new decade, we would like to take this opportunity to recognize women whose efforts have led our company to its current success. We wish to recognize five powerful women essential to breaking new ground and making history both at NRG and in our sector. Continuously improving our business, these women solidify the importance of placing inclusion and diversity at the center of who we are and what we do. Please join us in recognizing the amazing strides they have made and the path they are laying towards a more inclusive industry.

Andrea T., Director of Product Innovation, Green Mountain Energy

Our industry is very complex, and impacted by many variables, some predictable and others, like weather, unpredictable. This also means the opportunities are endless. NRG, fortunately, has built a strong foundation that fosters a diverse, strong and creative workforce. Over the nine years I have been at NRG, I’ve experienced that no matter how big or small an idea is, it is always heard. Also, I have seen the company encouraging women like me to leverage our strengths in order to be a strong player in this dynamic market. We are natural multitaskers, strong communicators, nurturing, empathetic, motivated by big challenges, we dream big and focus on teamwork and collaboration. All of these are greats skills to get things done effectively, but are also needed to develop and offer amazing products, best-in-class customer experience, and a sustainable future.

At NRG, I have found my passion for addressing some of the environmental issues we face as a society. The company has given me the opportunity not only to develop initiatives with strong quantifiable results, but sustainable programs and products that fulfill me as a customer, employee and mother. My position as Director of Product Innovation for Green Mountain Energy has allowed me to be creative, help customers meet their sustainability goals and to impact our communities in a positive way. I have learned that no matter where our customers are in their sustainable journey, they always want to do more to reduce their carbon footprint. This inspires me to continue to figure out more ways to make our planet a better place to live. With the support of an amazing and creative Product Team, I have developed solar programs and products that address different customer needs – from virtual solar products such as Go Local Solar to rooftop solar offerings. Today, Green Mountain Energy is considered a leader in sustainability and I am proud to be part of this journey. We are in the middle of an exciting and challenging time, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for NRG.

Donna B., SVP, Chief Program Officer

Women at NRG shape the future of the corporate world by bringing diverse viewpoints and creating a tone of teamwork. This helps teams work together through change and complex work efforts in our industry and within NRG. Since women represent nearly half the U.S. workforce, but significantly less than that in the energy industry, women have an opportunity to expand in the energy workforce, offering their valuable skills and viewpoints. At NRG, women bring in extensive experience from internal and external energy careers, consulting experience and a wealth of coordination and communication skills to move the company forward. We see women in all departments who are actively committed to achieve our goals and values. They are often key facilitators, communicators and planners for the teams that they are a part of.

The contribution that I bring to NRG, and to other women at NRG, is to foster opportunities to grow, learn and apply skills. Some of the strongest project and program managers are women with strong leadership, management and organization skills. I work with, mentor, and support many of them in their careers. I also value the attributes of all team members working together toward common goals with a meaningful purpose. I strongly believe each team member brings unique skills and talents, and our job as leaders is to make sure we provide clear goals, then coach and support our teams to be successful. This ‘servant leadership’ has been proven to be especially successful for women leaders, now we just need to get more women into those energy leadership roles.

Outside of work, I am an active Girl Scout leader, encouraging girls across our region to get involved and develop leadership, science and communication skills. This is part of preparing our next generation’s workforce and encouraging the women of our future by both example and involvement.

Kimberly C., Director, Customer Experience

Traditionally, energy has been a male-dominated industry, but forward-thinking companies like NRG realizes it’s not only the right thing to do, but essential for its success to include top female talent. Integrating women is vital to having a broad perspective at the decision table.

When women are exposed to powerful female role models and mentors, they are more likely to see themselves in leadership roles or see a path for advancement. As I continue to grow with the organization, my goal is to serve my internal and external customers. As a brand, I want every single customer interaction with NRG to be the best experience they’ve had with any company. And internally, I want to continue to align with my colleagues across the company and serve as the voice of the customer, as we push ourselves to continue to deliver a best-in-class experience.

Judith L., Senior Vice President, Asset Management

As the SVP of Asset Management, I’d like to acknowledge the women I work closely with at NRG; four others in my immediate group, and several others throughout the organization. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that I’m in the company of great women who have impressive accomplishments in their own right. If I think about what these women have in common, it is their complete commitment to their families and their professionalism. Perhaps never has this been more apparent than it is right now as we try to maintain some trace of normalcy in our lives in the midst of a global pandemic.

Over 20 years ago, I made a career change, from consulting engineering to business management. With my engineering and new business degree, I applied for a job with a small independent power producer called United American Energy (UAE) to be the general manager of their hydroelectric power plants and later, of their cogeneration projects. While I had experience designing power plants and other large civil works, I didn’t have business management experience, or plant operations experience, or direct knowledge of hydroelectric power plants for that matter.

But the owner and founder of UAE was David Goodman. The Goodman family dedicated their lives to removing barriers and promoting social justice in honor of their son and brother, Andrew Goodman—one of the three civil rights workers that were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during Freedom Summer in 1964. While there were several men at UAE in identical roles for which I was applying, there were no women. Having grown up in a home with no bias, David took a chance on me and I became UAE’s first female General Manager of Hydroelectric Projects. I had to earn respect being a woman in a position that until me was always held by men. I had everything to learn but there was absolutely no way I was going to let David and his brilliant Executive Management team down.

Going on my 19th year at NRG this June, I have a unique perspective having witnessed the company mature from the early days of competitive markets and evolve along with the industry, adapt to an unforeseen shale gas revolution, and deliver more savings to customers through innovative products and services than perhaps anyone could have imagined.

As the head of Asset Management for one of the largest competitive power companies in the US, our Asset Managers have tackled just about every aspect of managing the life cycle of a power plant: commissioning new units integrating portfolios, repowering, converting to cleaner fuels, installing emission controls, capturing carbon and enhancing oil recovery, contracting plants needed for reliability, and transitioning plants that have reached end of their economic lives. It is rare to experience such diverse accomplishments over one’s career, it is even rarer to have done that as a woman.

What’s left to do? Plenty. On top of mind is to ensure that we can achieve clean energy goals, including NRG’s to be net zero by 2050, and preserve reliability through a competitive market process at a price our customers can afford. It’s likely I won’t be the one to deliver these results 30 years from now but will gladly pass the torch to the next generation pioneers.

Elizabeth E., Mergers and Acquisitions Director

NRG is incredibly fortunate to have so many intelligent and inspiring women contributing to the advancement of our company and the energy industry as a whole. Women at NRG have led the company’s most important business initiatives, solved our most complicated challenges, and fostered a collaborative environment where inclusion and representation are our norms. As NRG continues to evolve and sharpen its focus as a customer-focused energy company, our full diversity of perspectives and experiences will be an especially valuable asset. I’m particularly grateful for all the opportunities I have had at NRG to work alongside impressive and accomplished women, and as a woman in the energy industry, I’ll always be on the lookout for ways to pay it forward throughout my career.

We recognize the importance of showing appreciation for those pushing us toward a brighter future. Do you have women in the energy industry—or any industry—that you look up to? Join us in recognizing the contributions of powerful women by sharing stories about those who inspire you on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook and by using the hashtag #WomenEmpowerment.

source: https://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/45666-NRG-Women-Making-History?tracking_source=rss

#CSR #corporate social responsibility #social good #philanthropy #employee engagement #workplace givi

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nojokemarketing · 4 years ago

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How Connected Are You to Your Audience?

Today’s topic is all about connection and community. Lockdown, crisis, COVID or not, life is really all about making the most out of every moment.

Now, as strange as that says, I never want you to let a “good crisis” go to waste. And what I mean by that is not that this is a great crisis by any means I mean, this is been horrific. It’s destroying businesses, families, and lots of people are losing their lives. It’s absolutely scary and insane out there.

However, what I’m starting to look at and I’m starting to realize is that a lot of local businesses are not only struggling, but they’re missing the point out of everything that’s going on. It’s almost as if they’re living in a little bit of a bubble and not understanding the simple art of human connections and most importantly, the community.

Let me kind of dissect this a little bit and give you some practical examples. What does this actually mean for you and how do you pivot on an as-needed basis?

So, if I look at Facebook, which has actually been one of the best places to get a pulse on what’s going on with the local businesses such as the restaurants, cleaners, catering places, or the hotels. These businesses have actually more up-to-date information on their actual Facebook pages than they do on their websites and what I’m seeing are two very, very different narratives.

The first narrative that I’m seeing is kind of a survival narrative. It’s “Hey, we’re open, and here’s how to process an order. Here’s how to do business with us.” Now, I’m not saying that one’s wrong, but I’m going to give you the opposite end of the spectrum and tell you what else I’m seeing.

On the opposite end, they’re talking about the fact that they’re open, but that’s really the secondary or the piece that’s kind of weigh-in in the background. They’re talking about why they started the business in the first place. They’re talking about all of the customers that are visiting their place of business and calling some of those particular customers out right on Facebook. They’re leveraging whatever assets, people, and technology that they have to do some additional good.

There’s an example of a local business that does brewery tours and they have a bus. As of this time, I believe every single brewery is still closed, at least locally to Western New York and the Buffalo area. So rather than just having the bus sit there, and rather than just finding ways to make a profit, they started having the bus for birthday parties. They had a certain donation amount, but all that was going to charity where they then would announce over a loudspeaker that has a thing that says “Happy birthday”, they’d play a song, and it just was a lot of fun.

If you’ve got a new business and you can’t weather the storm, then obviously it’s going to be a little bit of a scarcity mentality. However, as most businesses are starting to open up, there’s this piece that I feel that you’re missing of having to push the community element more, and just the element of human connection.

Now, what I’m encouraging you to do is to look at the content that you’re putting out there on your website and/or on your social media. Look at the images, as well as the little pieces of paper that are hanging on your wall (if you have a physical location) as someone walks in. Yes, you can have a sign that says must “wear a mask and social distance and all of that kind of precautionary messages.”

But why not take a step back and look at how can you help spread human connection? What can you do that’s different than you’ve never been doing before that would help?

What if every single time someone spent on those nurseries that are opening or that are already open, let’s say I don’t know $100, for example, that they were then going to go and plant a tree for XYZ community or in front of schools. Or they were going to put money into a pot and then they’re going to go help people that are disabled or elderly that can’t do their landscaping. It could be anything that definitely has the charity component, but has that art form of connection.

People are craving a connection, now more than I’ve ever seen before. They don’t want to just keep sitting behind a computer, their iPhone, or their Android. It’s not because they feel that they’re locked up and all of this, they just want to bring some normalcy back to their lives and you do that through connection.

I want you to just look at what stuff are you putting out to the universe? Are you simply talking about something every single day that you’re open and here’s how to order? Or are you mentioning that but then you’re also mentioning some of the fun customers that have frequented your business, the goodwill that you’ve created in the community, your origin story, your employees and team members, and talking about why you started the business in the first place. All of that stuff will go a much farther away in the coming weeks and coming months because there’s always an emotional piece to the selling and the buying process.

Your customers, they’re not buying based on logic. They’re buying based on emotions and they want to feel good. They want to feel that they’re visiting a business and frequenting a business that has that desire to connect with them, but also to do some good in the community.

I felt like today was a little bit of a soapbox, but I hope that you listen to this. And then you really listen to it to really make sure that you grab the concept. Because I promise you and myself included, I have not done a good enough job at pushing this and telling the stories and showing all of the goodwill that we’re creating to further build those connections.

Get out there, make some connections, and do some more good in your community.

The post How Connected Are You to Your Audience? appeared first on No Joke Marketing.

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#IFTTT #No Joke Marketing

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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There’s no shortage of vaccine news lately, from breakthroughs to break-ins. As we all await a vaccine that many hope will kickstart the world’s return to normalcy, geopolitics is increasingly spilling over into the vaccine race, seriously complicating matters. Welcome to vaccine nationalism.

Why It Matters:

Discovering a COVID-19 vaccine is the world’s #1 public health priority; governments and pharmaceuticals around the world have joined forces to discover and develop a vaccine at breakneck speeds… costs and safety protocols be damned for some. Reports have emerged that scientists in Russia have tried experimental vaccines on themselves, and that well-off members of Russian society have received early test versions of a vaccine as well; China has approved a vaccine candidate for its armed services. In normal times, these would all be considered highly unethical and actively dangerous to public health. But these are not normal times—and being the first to find a vaccine isn’t just a matter of national pride or the first step to unlocking pre-pandemic levels of economic activity. In today’s world, being the first to a vaccine means critical geopolitical leverage over both allies and enemies alike.

As the world entered the teeth of the pandemic, there were three basic scenarios when it came to the discovery, manufacturing and distribution/uptake of the vaccine. The first scenario is the most optimistic—upon discovery of a safe vaccine, world governments work together to coordinate the manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine to get it into the hands of as many people around the world as possible. The second scenario is that once the vaccine is found, certain countries get first-access to the vaccines based on their investments and political maneuverings, but once that happens, multilateral institutions like the UN and WHO help facilitate distribution and uptake as equitably and quickly as possible. Scenario #3 is that each country takes an “every nation for itself” approach to securing vaccines and treatments as they are developed by private companies at high price points (effectively reducing access for poorer countries); in the worst case, countries use access to the vaccines and treatments as bargaining chips in broader geopolitical disputes with other countries. The world is currently somewhere between scenario 2 and 3. Not good.

What Happens Next:

The U.S. has been one of the most aggressive pursuing scenario #3 (an instance where “America First” most clearly translates into “America Alone”), already making moves to lockdown much of the world’s supply of remdesivir and, most recently, striking a $1.95 billion deal with Pfizer and a German biotech company to purchase 100 million doses of a vaccine already under development (though pending FDA approval). Traditional US allies with the resources have been making their own bets and locking in their own stockpiles; U.S. opponents have attempted to do the same, and have shown an increasing willingness to resort to medical espionage, not just to speed up their own vaccine development progress (critical as that is) but as a hedge against potential blackmail down the line.

This week we saw the most overt crossover into the diplomatic world, as the U.S. ordered the Chinese consulate to close with accusations of medical espionage (amidst other allegations). As the race to a vaccine intensifies, the worlds of politics, medicine, diplomacy, and economics are closing in on one another.

Yet vaccine development continues apace, with various countries promising accelerated timelines impossible to meet while ensuring proper safety protocols. India is a prime example, with pronouncements claiming a public vaccine rollout by mid-August. Other governments are wading into the biomedical sphere with promises of millions in exchange to access to vaccines down the line. This is uncharted territory for the “medical industrial complex.”

There are real concerns with rolling out vaccines too early, and not just to those who have received early versions of the vaccines themselves. Announcing the rollout of a new vaccine—whether proven effective or not by independent and objective medical authorities—creates pressure on other countries to speed up their own trials to satiate public demand, pushing for quicker and riskier manufacturing and approvals. Who gets the vaccine within countries that have secured a major supply of the medication will also be complicated—frontline workers are an easy consensus choice for those first-in-line, but after that becomes messy. And then there are those individuals who were against vaccines well before the coronavirus pandemic emerged; these groups are already actively attacking both the vaccines and the funders, and once a widely-available vaccine is announced, you can be sure they will be screaming from the social media rooftops. And should a not-thoroughly tested vaccine be rolled out to the public only for serious health effects to emerge later, anti-vaxxers will have more ammunition than they know what to do with. Vaccines don’t only need to be medically effective, but the public also has to have confidence in them to take it, not yet a foregone conclusion. A messy rollout will undermine that, not just in the countries affected but around the world.

All this is before we get to the geopolitical ramifications of being a country that knows how to make the vaccine (or is home to a pharmaceutical company that does) and has the resources to produce and distribute the vaccine not just to their own populations, but to the broader world. Who gets access to that vaccine, how much they are willing to pay or make in geopolitical concessions, will drive much of international relations over the next 3-5 years, and will boost scientific and production powerhouses like the U.S. and China even further. If you thought that discovering a vaccine would be the end to all our pandemic troubles, think again—those problems will just change shape.

The Key Statistic That Explains It:

According to the New York Times, there are currently more than 165 vaccine candidates around the world, 27 of which are currently promising enough to have entered human trials. Plenty of fodder for political drama ahead.

The One Major Misconception About It:

That discovering a vaccine will be the hardest part—“Recent polls have found as few as 50% of people in the United States are committed to receiving a vaccine, with another quarter wavering. Some of the communities most at risk from the virus are also the most leery: Among Black Americans, who account for nearly one-quarter of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, 40% said they wouldn’t get a vaccine in a mid-May poll by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago. In France, 26% said they wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine.”

The One Thing to Say About It at a Dinner Party:

When it comes to vaccine nationalism, worry number 1 is that none of the vaccines work.

Worry 2a is that the only vaccine that works is controlled by an unfriendly government.

Worry 2b is that more than one vaccine works, but it’s not clear which one works best, the sum total of effects isn’t well understood, and desperate populations force governments into making unsound medical decisions.

Worry 2c is that a vaccine/s work and are widely available, but people are too scared to take them.

The One Thing to Avoid Saying About It:

You know the expression “the cure is worse than the disease,” right? Applies to geopolitics, too.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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riichardwilson · 4 years ago

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The Five-Step Guide to Reopening Your Local Business During Covid-19

As lockdown measures begin to ease, many businesses across the US and globally are being allowed to reopen. While this is welcome news for business owners, the world has changed. Companies will be reopening to a climate where strict health measures are in place, and most transactions are taking place online.

The upcoming reopening period will be unlike anything we’ve seen since the Spanish Flu. According to a report by PwC, 54% of business owners reported that the pandemic has negatively impacted their business:

Source: Facility Executive

Similarly, BrightLocal’s study on how local marketers are dealing with the business consequences of Covid-19 showed that 35% of marketers were losing customers and 27% were temporarily closing.

This is hardly surprising when you consider the sharp rise in unemployment rates, meaning services are less in demand than ever.

Luck and hard work alone will not be enough to keep your business afloat in the new normal. You’ll need to be smart and strategic about reopening. Here are five steps to consider as you set about reopening your company for business.

1. Track your position vs search volume

While businesses are beginning to reopen, people are still encouraged to stay at home as much as possible. Therefore, your online presence will be more critical than ever.

Since the start of the global outbreak, search results have seen huge fluctuations. Some industries have seen a huge dip in traffic. Travel is an obvious example, but it’s not the only industry by any means. This decrease in search traffic most often correlates with a significant loss of revenue.

For businesses impacted by this sudden loss of revenue, it’s clearly been a challenge.

However, from an SEO Company perspective, a drop in traffic isn’t always caused by a drop in demand from consumers. For example, a Google update, like we saw in May, can have a massive impact on how SERPs are decided.

To determine whether you have an SEO Company issue or a demand issue, you need to compare your traffic figures with search volume trends. If the trends are similar, the problem is a lack of demand for your product or service. If not, the problem is with your SEO Company strategy.

As you prepare your business for the “new normal,” it’s important to track any upswing in traffic against search rankings. An uplift will be indicative of interest in your field from potential customers increasing.

A careful analysis of these search trends is one of two things you need to be tracking. However, this is only the beginning of the story.

2. Plan your marketing agency budget according to conversion rates

If you’re one of the millions of business owners who have lost money due to the pandemic, you’ll need to budget strategically to survive. marketing agency is critical, but you must be wise about how you spend your marketing agency budget.

Source: VentureHarbour

When assessing your marketing agency budget, it’s important to review your organic conversion rates. You need to understand to what extent Covid-19 has impacted your conversion rates from organic and local search. The easiest way to do this is by setting up conversion tracking on Google Analytics.

With this data, you can see if your conversion rates have dropped since the Covid-19 outbreak. Equally, you can see when conversion rates start to improve and return to normal. If this aligns with an increase in traffic, you can then start to allocate a marketing agency budget that is in line with your expected revenue.

You have historical data that infers what “normal” looks like for your business based on search volumes from the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, or this year against the same time last year. Use this data to make informed business decisions.

This approach of aligning your marketing agency budget with revenue will put you in the best position to grow as a business. From an agency standpoint, this approach aligns with your client goals, ensuring you have a marketing agency strategy in place that can help them succeed.

3. Find new customers to make up for demand shocks

The reality is that you may have experienced huge losses this year, and possibly will next year, too. Most people have less disposable income, so chances are you’re going to find the demand for your product or service isn’t what it was a few months ago.

The earlier you acknowledge this reality and incorporate the lost revenue into your business plans, the higher your chances of emerging from the crisis in one piece.

You can’t control the situation or many of its implications, but you can act to mitigate damage. This starts by undertaking a considered business development strategy. Below are some concrete steps you can take to mitigate the impact of a drop in demand.

Boost visibility

The first thing you can do is find new customers for your existing business model. One easy way to do this is to boost your visibility on local SEO Company. Luckily, in many cases, there are some quick wins available.

One strategy you can implement quickly is leveraging common customer questions and queries.

This will allow you to feature in Google’s Featured Snippets, which is crucial for finding new local customers via inbound search. On top of this, this is a really good strategy for getting new business from voice searches on smart speakers and voice assistants.

To leverage these, simply identify common local-based questions, and create content that provides valuable answers to these.

Secondly, you can begin to request reviews from your customers. Reviews are a key ranking factor and are vital to build consumer trust, so having a good quantity and quality of reviews will likely increase your local search visibility.

You can also work to gain exposure locally by reaching out to local publications about your upcoming reopening. Not only will this provide your business with some relevant exposure, but you could also build local links in the process – again, helping you to rank in local searches.

Seek out new opportunities

Sometimes simply finding new customers for your existing offering won’t cut it. If this is the case, you’ll need to make up for lower demand by moving into other products or services. In the post-Covid era, successful businesses will be the ones who were quick on their feet.

This starts by identifying your main business assets, and considering how you can put them to different uses.

For example, people will be less likely to attend crowded spaces for years to come. If you run a nightclub, you’re in real trouble. However, you have a Covid-friendly asset in the form of a big empty room.

This means that it would be easy for you to move into a different events business model, like movie screenings or small concerts, while still maintaining social distance among your customers.

4. Create a communications plan

Covid-19 has impacted businesses, and your communication plan should reflect this reality. If you had a business communications plan before the pandemic, it’s time to revisit your approach. If your business doesn’t have a communications plan, start creating one right away.

Here are the three characteristics your communications plan should have:

Transparency

Your customers, employees, stakeholders, and partners are all understandably on edge as a result of the pandemic. The worst thing you can do is give them unclear messages that are open to misinterpretation.

The CEO of Airbnb provides a nice illustration of a struggling company that has put transparency into the heart of their communication strategy. The CEO has received a lot of praise for this approach, and rightly so.

I’ve taken a screenshot of the opening paragraph of his message to the staff. I recommend you take a minute to read the full letter.

Ensure that your internal and external communications are clear, transparent, and accurately reflect the current reality. If you try to act as though nothing has changed, your stakeholders will wonder what you’re trying to hide.

Painful decisions like laying off staff or reducing the scope of your operations might still need to happen. A lack of transparency regarding your approach could backfire. Moreover, you can create lasting reputational damage to your company through such missteps.

Expectation-setting

At the start of the pandemic, many businesses made the mistake of issuing statements that promised too much. They are now being forced to take back their words in the wake of layoffs, plummeting sales, or disruptions to their supply chains.

While it is good to be optimistic, you should also be cautious, and acknowledge the difficulties people and businesses face. If you expect order fulfilment to slow down, you need to communicate this to your customers. If layoffs are on the table, your staff need to know as soon as possible so that they can plan accordingly.

Frequency

As your business reopens, your customers, employees, and suppliers will expect regular updates. A “we’re back in business” email is a great start, but don’t stop there.

Regular communications will reestablish a sense of normalcy and help your customers and stakeholders navigate this new business landscape with you. They will also help maintain brand loyalty. Remember that your customers and employees stuck with you through these tough times and so you should do the same for them.

Therefore, your communications must do more than announce that you’re reopening. It should keep everyone informed about what’s going on with your business and what to expect from you.

5. Announce a sale or promotion

One logical way to connect with consumers as you reopen your business is through the launch of a sale or promotion. You could create bundles that combine older items with new products, or offer old stock at significant markdowns, free shipping, a percentage discount, or a buy-one-get-one-half-price deal.

Be strategic about what you offer. Studies have shown that percentage discounts generate more conversions than flat-rate discounts. A 5% discount on a $100 product will result in more sales than reducing the price by $5 – even though the actual reduction is the same.

The best place to announce your promotion is through your email list. Clean up your mailing list using an email verification service, then use your email list and social media accounts, combined with custom landing pages, to announce a reopening sale or promotion.

If you have a lot of surplus stock, you can also consider donating products to people in need (such as by giving one unit for each customer purchase). This not only encourages sales but also builds your reputation as a caring, community-minded business.

After the lockdown, you urgently need to shift products and get cash flow moving again. Holding a special promotion will help solve both problems. Don’t be afraid to test different promotions and see what works best.

Weathering the Covid-19 storm

Experts believe we are not through the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, with many predicting a major recession lasting well into next year. How you respond now will determine the survival of your business.

The way you do business will need to change. Your customer acquisition, communications, and marketing agency strategies will need to adapt and continue to respond to changing circumstances. If you stay adaptable, you will make it through this crisis and come out stronger on the other side. Until then, stay afloat!

The post The Five-Step Guide to Reopening Your Local Business During Covid-19 appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/the-five-step-guide-to-reopening-your-local-business-during-covid-19/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/623316608827424768

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scpie · 4 years ago

Text

The Five-Step Guide to Reopening Your Local Business During Covid-19

Source: Facility Executive

Similarly, BrightLocal’s study on how local marketers are dealing with the business consequences of Covid-19 showed that 35% of marketers were losing customers and 27% were temporarily closing.

This is hardly surprising when you consider the sharp rise in unemployment rates, meaning services are less in demand than ever.

1. Track your position vs search volume

While businesses are beginning to reopen, people are still encouraged to stay at home as much as possible. Therefore, your online presence will be more critical than ever.

For businesses impacted by this sudden loss of revenue, it’s clearly been a challenge.

A careful analysis of these search trends is one of two things you need to be tracking. However, this is only the beginning of the story.

2. Plan your marketing agency budget according to conversion rates

Source: VentureHarbour

3. Find new customers to make up for demand shocks

The earlier you acknowledge this reality and incorporate the lost revenue into your business plans, the higher your chances of emerging from the crisis in one piece.

Boost visibility

One strategy you can implement quickly is leveraging common customer questions and queries.

To leverage these, simply identify common local-based questions, and create content that provides valuable answers to these.

Seek out new opportunities

This starts by identifying your main business assets, and considering how you can put them to different uses.

This means that it would be easy for you to move into a different events business model, like movie screenings or small concerts, while still maintaining social distance among your customers.

4. Create a communications plan

Here are the three characteristics your communications plan should have:

Transparency

I’ve taken a screenshot of the opening paragraph of his message to the staff. I recommend you take a minute to read the full letter.

Expectation-setting

Frequency

As your business reopens, your customers, employees, and suppliers will expect regular updates. A “we’re back in business” email is a great start, but don’t stop there.

Therefore, your communications must do more than announce that you’re reopening. It should keep everyone informed about what’s going on with your business and what to expect from you.

5. Announce a sale or promotion

Weathering the Covid-19 storm

The post The Five-Step Guide to Reopening Your Local Business During Covid-19 appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/the-five-step-guide-to-reopening-your-local-business-during-covid-19/

0 notes

laurelkrugerr · 4 years ago

Text

The Five-Step Guide to Reopening Your Local Business During Covid-19

Source: Facility Executive

Similarly, BrightLocal’s study on how local marketers are dealing with the business consequences of Covid-19 showed that 35% of marketers were losing customers and 27% were temporarily closing.

This is hardly surprising when you consider the sharp rise in unemployment rates, meaning services are less in demand than ever.

1. Track your position vs search volume

While businesses are beginning to reopen, people are still encouraged to stay at home as much as possible. Therefore, your online presence will be more critical than ever.

For businesses impacted by this sudden loss of revenue, it’s clearly been a challenge.

A careful analysis of these search trends is one of two things you need to be tracking. However, this is only the beginning of the story.

2. Plan your marketing agency budget according to conversion rates

Source: VentureHarbour

3. Find new customers to make up for demand shocks

The earlier you acknowledge this reality and incorporate the lost revenue into your business plans, the higher your chances of emerging from the crisis in one piece.

Boost visibility

One strategy you can implement quickly is leveraging common customer questions and queries.

To leverage these, simply identify common local-based questions, and create content that provides valuable answers to these.

Seek out new opportunities

This starts by identifying your main business assets, and considering how you can put them to different uses.

This means that it would be easy for you to move into a different events business model, like movie screenings or small concerts, while still maintaining social distance among your customers.

4. Create a communications plan

Here are the three characteristics your communications plan should have:

Transparency

I’ve taken a screenshot of the opening paragraph of his message to the staff. I recommend you take a minute to read the full letter.

Expectation-setting

Frequency

As your business reopens, your customers, employees, and suppliers will expect regular updates. A “we’re back in business” email is a great start, but don’t stop there.

Therefore, your communications must do more than announce that you’re reopening. It should keep everyone informed about what’s going on with your business and what to expect from you.

5. Announce a sale or promotion

Weathering the Covid-19 storm

The post The Five-Step Guide to Reopening Your Local Business During Covid-19 appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/the-five-step-guide-to-reopening-your-local-business-during-covid-19/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-five-step-guide-to-reopening-your.html

0 notes