Aesop’s fable, The Tortoise and the Hare, is replayed throughout life in many different forms. Our media-dominated lifestyle seems to be permanently enamored of the flash and drama garnered by the “hares” of life. But, as in the fable, it’s the tortoises—the steady and methodical among us—who usually win the race.
Scratch the surface of many a media-glorified “hare” and you’ll find a tortoise in a hare skin suit. In the stock market, it’s now clear that day traders typically do rather less well overall than the dollar-cost averagers who plod along to eventual wealth and early retirement. Among dieters, the people who eagerly grab the latest check-out line diet program are almost all able to lose 10 to 20 pounds during the first two to four weeks of dieting. But only in rare cases do they manage to keep the weight off. And a multitude of research reports indicate that most flash dieters gain all their weight back plus an additional five pounds! What happened? It’s simple: They didn’t learn how to permanently integrate into their lives the changes necessary to ensure gradual weight loss and maintain an ideal weight.
The parable holds true in its own way for people who aspire toward health and wellness. There are any number of programs in the health-care marketplace that provide fairly dramatic, thematic programs promoting the concepts of health maintenance and wellness. Affluent-yet-time-poor executives can spend large amounts of money on two-week junkets to Canyon Ranch or blue-ribbon, university-based screening programs only to return to the realities of their daily grind entirely clueless about how to integrate newfound wellness dictums into their daily life rhythms, habits and personal coping styles. Like the flash dieter, they usually lose much of the benefit of the intensive wellness “vacation” when they resume a demanding daily routine. A certain background of awareness, perhaps guilt, is then added to the daily burden because they now know full-well that they’re not living up to the wellness lifestyle that was briefly paraded before them.
What’s the alternative for professionals and executives—and also for regular folks—who hope to make lasting and beneficial changes in their lives, and not break the bank doing it?
One answer is to think locally. There are a number of local wellness programs in the North Bay that, while lacking the glamor and flash (as well as the cost) of a Canyon Ranch, offer an important feature often lacking in blue-ribbon programs: easy access over time.
By being local, often lying not far from the beaten commuting path, even the most time-pressured executive can usually find a way to make it to regular classes, talks and workshops. Even more important, what’s learned in a local program can be immediately tested and integrated into the crucible of the executive’s personal life. You can gain an immediate sense of the appropriateness of new ways of thinking about wellness in the context of your own life. More, problems of integration of new skills and perspectives can be addressed in real time by skilled teachers and counselors who can help you devise solutions that work for you.
I’ll review one local program here as an example of how this process might work over time (but remember, it’s just one of several local programs). The Northern California Center for Well-Being (NCCWB), located in Santa Rosa, is a community-based nonprofit organization that was founded in 1996 by forward-thinking local physicians who recognized the lack of resources to which doctors might refer patients for timely and effective positive life-change that could significantly reduce serious medical conditions. In part, it was a response to the growing pressures of so-called “managed care” that makes it very difficult for physicians to do more than simply treat diseases according to an industrial model of medical practice. And, in part, it came from recognition that patients typically seek a doctor’s care after the onset of illness rather than when there’s still time to prevent it.
Though founded by physicians, the NCCWB soon became a community enterprise with a board drawn from the local business, professional and lay communities, and a faculty of non-medical and allied health professionals providing a wide array of health and wellness promotion services. Support for the Center’s programs is diverse and comes from affordable client fees plus grants and donations from a variety of local and regional businesses and local and state governments. Some health insurances, like Sutter Medical Group of the Redwoods and Kaiser, underwrite all or part of the cost of NCCWB programs attended on referral by a client’s primary physician. A growing number of local and area physicians, including family practitioners, internists, cardiologists and others, count among the NCCWB referral base. A large percentage of NCCWB clients also come from self-referral.
The current catalog of NCCWB programs features wellness nutrition, weight management, stress control, meditation, cardiac fitness, rehabilitation programs for post-MI and lung-disease patients, fitness and mobility enhancement, yoga, chronic pain management and self-care, diabetes prevention and well lifestyle training, smoking cessation, healthy sleep promotion (insomnia being the executive disease) and several approaches toward stress management. For executives who cannot devote large blocks of time to intensive residential wellness programs, NCCWB also provides comprehensive wellness screening and health assessment programs in conjunction with local primary care physicians and non-medical health professionals. More details are available on the NCCWB website at www.norcalwellbeing.org.
In addition to individual classes and programs, NCCWB has provided contracted programs to several large local business enterprises and governmental departments for promotion of health and wellness for employees, among them Agilent, State Farm Insurance and the County of Sonoma. As discussed in previous columns, prevention of toxicity in the workplace is a key element of executive wellness. Therefore, the enlightened executive has a clear self-interest in fostering wellness among employees to maintain optimum productivity, workplace satisfaction and employee retention.
NCCWB Executive Director Nancy Masters has declared that the program’s prime mission is to help individuals find their own personal path into wellness. Without that essential guidance, no amount of travel or money spent can help an individual integrate health- and wellness-promoting behavior into their life.
This kind of individual guidance and attention is exactly what’s needed for each person, including—perhaps especially including—busy executives and professionals who are resolved to make healthy changes a permanent part of their lives. There’s a good argument that attending an intensive blue-ribbon wellness program can be an excellent “kick-start” to your personal wellness initiative. But, like the slow and steady tortoise, meaningful and lasting integration of your specifically needed changes is most likely to occur only with regular participation in and the expert support of a local program like NCCWB, or one of the several similar local and regional programs.
