Let’s get together and work on some skills! I love to meet up with people when I’m traveling and share time together building skills and capacity to do the things that matter to us in life. During these workshops, we’ll spend a few hours exploring where we want to go, understanding the challenges that can get in the way, and what supports can help us overcome those challenges and take steps in a direction that we value while having all …
Tag: design thinking
I’m teaming up with Mind Matters to do a workshop at The Drake Hotel in Toronto on May 15th, at 6pm, all about techniques for cutting out online compulsions and learning how to make the internet work for you (instead of you just clicking away on a mouse for little hits of dopamine like you’re in some start-up’s lab experiment). Tickets are $45 and you can get them here: www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1472846?utm_medium=bks Space is limited so grab tickets quickly. I had so …
This past weekend I was at the Toronto Peer Health Network’s annual symposium to facilitate a workshop on peer engagement. There were around 60 student leaders in the workshop who run peer health education programs at universities and colleges around Toronto. They’re working with their peers right around the age when all sorts of mental and physical health issues can emerge on top of learning to live independently and start a career–it’s a complex time for behavior change and difficult to …
Stanford’s Medicine X conference was definitely the best health-related event of any kind I’ve ever attended. Launched by Dr. Larry Chu and an incredible group of collaborators a couple of years ago, it has grown into a special experience bringing together patients, healthcare practitioners, researchers, and technology companies to create change around major healthcare challenges that affect all of us. There were many ideas and experiences from MedX that had a big impact on me but for the sake of keeping this article relatively …
In anticipation of this year’s Medicine X Conference, some reflections on one of the stickiest problems in mental healthcare innovation… In less than a month, the Medicine X and Medicine X | Ed conferences will kick-off in Palo Alto, exploring the intersections of emerging technologies, healthcare, and design, with an emphasis on empowering patients to be active, driving forces in their care. I’ll be participating in the conferences as an ePatient Delegate to share my experiences using technology to support …
When I’m working with individuals on helping them overcome their mental health challenges, I often tell them that it’s okay if doing something healthy makes them feel anxious, to just do it anyway. And that’s also something that successful businesses learn as well, especially entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter whether you like doing something or don’t like doing something, if it’s one of the actions that’s going to make your company healthy, you have to do it. It’s difficult to see …
Especially if you’re ill, being healthy is a transformative innovation. But innovation is difficult. And not because coming up with innovative ideas is tough–just listen to a 3 year old talk for an hour and you’ll probably hear a million innovative ideas about how to get to the moon or defeat ninjas. Innovation is difficult because implementing innovation and getting from Step A (the innovative idea) to Step Z (the innovation as functioning reality) requires lots of collaboration, dedication, and …
When it comes to anxiety disorders, the anxiety often gets blamed as the source of the problem, but really it’s our reaction to anxiety that’s unhealthy. Anxiety is normal. But attempts to cope with, check on, or control uncertainty lead to compulsive behaviors with negative impacts on our health. This is as true in business as it is in our personal lives. When people encounter uncertainty (and the resulting anxiety) at work, they experience a need to be certain, and …