NWC 2017: Great Conference, Great Experience!

As always, I had a great time and learned a lot at the 2017 National Wellness Conference.  It was in St. Paul Minnesota at the River Center.  It is a good conference, different than when it was in Stevens Point Wisconsin, but still amazing.  Amazing because of the people.

This year we saw great presentations and I met amazing people.   Sunny Grosso of Delivering Happiness opened the conference powerfully with her keynote, “Cultures that Flourish: Applying the Science of Happiness and Human Sense”.  In her presentation she  confirmed the benefits of doing more good.  Paul Scalia, of International Well Building Institute, provided a keynote that outlined the value of creating built spaces to enhance our well-being.

Both demonstrated the benefits these efforts have on personal, economic and planetary well-being.  Beyond the presentations and catching up with friends and colleagues, I especially had great interactions with the international group. The international group has become great because of the amazing work Bob Boyd and Thomas Cuddihy do to bring these people together.  Their efforts have enabled all who attend the conference an opportunity to learn about wellness efforts in the Phillipines, France, India, Israel, England, and many more places and provides people from these countries opportunities to learn from us.

It is exciting for me to learn about wellness around the world and to talk with them about how we can all move forward together so everyone and everything benefits.  I look forward to learning more from them and possibly doing some work together.  With technology, we are all staying in touch through a WhatsApp group.

I did a presentation, A Wellness Cultivating Culture Does More than Reduce Risk, which seemed to be a summary of my career and ends by using the Paneugenesis Process as a method to create a culture that creates more good, not just less bad. (it is linked)  Some of this work and the model will be shared in an upcoming issue in The Art of Health Promotion section focused on “New Measures for New Directions” of the Sept/October issue in American Journal of Health Promotion.   I will post about it when it is released and will also provide a video.

Lets all learn from each other as we do at the National Wellness Conference.  Share your efforts about how you are generating comprehensive benefits by creating selfish, selfless, synergistic, pervasive, reciprocal, interactions so everyone and everything benefits.

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