Action's Antidotes

In this digital age where information is widespread, data is more accessible whether in news, reports and research. In our everyday life, decisions we make are always based on information and data we had at that moment. It is an integral part in a rational sense to make sure that information is accurate and values the truth.

In this week’s episode,  Dr. Annette Shtivelband sits with us as she walks us through the phases to make data-driven decisions. She is the founder and principal consultant with an organization called Research Evaluation Consulting and an experienced researcher in her field. Her area of specialization includes research methods, data collection, survey development and validation, and various statistical analysis techniques. Whether you seek insights on how data and knowledge makes improvements in education, entrepreneurship and life, this podcast is for you.

 

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Importance of Analyzing Correct Data, and Critical Thinking with Dr. Annette Shtivelband

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that’s become more and more prevalent in our lives in recent years is data and analytics. A lot of organizations are making the push to become more data driven and I personally have a historic career path in data and analytics and also helping organizations achieve this data-driven state. But, of course, there is the proper balance in how we use our data and what kind of role it is to have in our lives. My guest today, Annette Shtivelband, is the founder and principal consultant with an organization called Research Evaluation and Consulting.

 

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Annette, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you, Stephen, and it’s Research Evaluation Consulting. 

 

Oh, did I accidentally put the and in there? 

 

Yeah, we can start over. And it’s Dr. Annette Shtivelband because I worked really hard for that credential.

 

Dr. Annette Shtivelband. Now, Dr. Annette Shtivelband, your PhD, tell me a little bit about that story because sometimes people see education and entrepreneurship as somewhat different paths so definitely a unique perspective from your end there. 

 

Absolutely. So I think, for me, I have always wanted to be the type of person who could use knowledge to make improvements and make changes. I think a part of me felt that getting the doctorate would help position me well to have the knowledge and the expertise and the technical skills, but I do not think that the PhD program itself helped me be prepared for the entrepreneurial journey. And I didn’t really expect it to, to be honest with you. I think a lot of it is going to be trial and error, but I think that it helped build my confidence and, also, I think that, as I interact with clients, having a doctor before your name is really handy. 

 

A lot of people talk about the manner in which you present yourself and although there’s a lot of people that wish that that was not really a thing, it really is. The first impression, whether it be the name, whether it be the signature on your email, whether it be the shirt you’re wearing, or anything else does seem to make an impact and so you having that doctor next to your name, how do you think that that has impacted the way clients or potential clients see you in your business? 

 

Absolutely. So on a personal level, I’ve always looked relatively young. It’s kind of comical, it’s flattering, it’s annoying. As I’ve gotten older, I like that I look younger, but, for the longest time, I think earlier in my life, people may not have taken me as seriously. When you enter a room or you have a meeting with the client and you speak well, you’re able to answer questions, you’re able to show your knowledge but you also have that credential, I do find that people take you seriously. I’ve even had situations before as a business owner where we might submit a request for proposal or RFP,

Finding a sense of purpose is important to our well-being. As you grow and live your life, your purpose also grows. Following it can lead you to fulfillment. It’s like your roadmap. Think about this: When you have a sense of purpose, you tend to experience joy, happiness, and satisfaction more often. It gives you the ability to become resilient, hopeful, and optimistic about the future.

When it comes to purposes, our guest Ariel Naftali is an expert on that matter. She is an executive coach for purpose-driven leaders. Ariel loves helping people find their purpose and perform at a high level. Let’s hear more about them today.

 

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The Power of Purpose and Why It Matters Today with Ariel Naftali

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the problems that we’re experiencing in the world today, and, in my humble opinion, just from my observations, talking with people, reading things, it seems like what a lot of people are missing are three of the building blocks for a good life: purpose, confidence, and resilience. And what I mean by that is that the purpose to understand, get some grounding behind why you’re doing what you’re doing, making it meaningful; the confidence, of course, is the ability to really execute on it, believe in yourself; and resilience is how we respond to bad things that happen. And I see so many of the less fortunate, less happy things going on in the world today, I see a crisis where a lot of people are lacking one or all three of these particular things. My guest today, Ariel Naftali, is an executive coach for purpose-driven leaders. She helps people find their purpose and perform up to that purpose.

 

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Ariel, welcome to the program.

 

Hi, Stephen. Thanks so much for having me.

 

Ariel, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. First of all, what is the name of your business?

 

My business is Perform with Purpose and, I know, a very cliché title there as a purpose coach, but Perform with Purpose and we are located in Denver, Colorado.

 

And your website brings up both performance and purpose. How do you see these things intersecting with one another and which one comes first and which one’s more important?

 

Great question. I started my work mostly in the performance realm working with athletes and I didn’t realize this emphasis on purpose was important in the beginning of that work. A lot of the work that I was doing was helping athletes with their mindset to perform at a higher level, but what I realized for myself and for them as well is if they’re not clear on why they’re doing what they’re doing, if they haven’t really attached a meaningful reason behind the effort, the work, the energy, their time that they’re putting into something, when they actually reach that goal that they’re setting, that performance metric, it doesn’t end up feeling as satisfying or fulfilling as they thought it was because they didn’t attach it to something meaningful to them. That had me rethink my whole process and my whole focus and wanting to center more on this purpose lens first to figure out what’s actually important to you, what’s actually meaningful to you, and once we identify that, then let’s set goals in line with it and help you perform at the height of your potential in the pursuit of that to ensure that you’re actually setting yourself up for a career, a life that’s going to be more fulfilling and more satisfying on the other side.

 

Well, it’s interesting that this came from the world of athletics because I think a lot of us have in our minds what professions feel like they have a lot of purpose and which professions feel like they don’t, and do you see this as varying a lot? Do you see a lot of athletes that understand, say, you’re running for track, for example, understand like, “Why did I pick this sport?

Like any other city, Denver also boasts a thriving entrepreneurial spirit. As a matter of fact, we celebrate it annually during Denver Startup Week. This one-week celebration shines light on local economies across the world and the inherent role that remittances play in boosting local innovation and entrepreneurship globally. It's a great way to meet like-minded individuals who share the same business interests and passion as you.

Speaking of which, our guest Susana González is here in The Commons on Champa. The Commons runs on shared ownership. This incredible community continues to give expertise, time, funding, and volunteerism to build and support Denver’s entrepreneurial circle. Suzana is spending her time getting involved and continuing her quest to bring Denver’s rich entrepreneurial community to her hometown back in Venezuela. Let's hear from her in today’s episode.

 

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Energizing The Spirit of Entrepreneurship in Local Communities Worldwide with Susana González

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In a recent episode, we talked with Jodi Fischer of the Adelante Foundation about the entrepreneurial spirit in Honduras. The entrepreneurial spirit can be found in a lot of different cities. Blessed to live in Denver where we have a really strong entrepreneurial spirit. My guest today, Susana González, is here in Denver at The Commons on Champa, which is Denver’s entrepreneurial hub and a place that anyone with that spirit can come drop in and work and talk with other like-minded individuals. Susana is here to talk about her quest to bring the entrepreneurial spirit to her town in Venezuela, where there’s a lot of interest in starting businesses.

 

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Susana, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be talking here with you and getting to know the Denver side scenes and the community that I think is very lovely and I like it very much.

 

Yeah, I love our community here too. I’ve said before in other episodes, one of my favorite weeks here is our Startup Week, which is in the fall every year and we have tons of people and it’s the place where you see people that are doing stuff about their problems as opposed to people that are just complaining, which there’s plenty of that elsewhere in the world.

 

I think this is the first time I hear somebody saying that entrepreneurs are those who do instead of complain and I love it. 

 

Yeah, for sure. 

 

I think you have said something mind blowing to me. That’s the spirit.

 

Now, Susana, you notice this spirit in your hometown. Explain the observations that led you to the path that you’re on right now.

 

Well, the thing about Venezuela is that we are culturally in this type of mindset that we like to do things, like if there’s something wrong in the office, we will clean it, we will fix it, we will just do it, it doesn’t matter that it’s not our job to do it but it’s the mindset that people take responsibility of things that are happening around. And then we have this strange political situation, economical decline, and people decided that they needed to do things to fix the reality and I think those two things together created this very entrepreneurial mindset, where everybody wants to start a business, everybody has an idea, because everybody needs money, and seems attractive enough.

 

So you’re observing, and I think most people listening are probably familiar with what the situation in Venezuela is like, this spirit of people, the average Venezuelan, as you’re observing, is someone that’s saying, “Okay, we’re in this tough situation, we had all this stuff happen over the past couple decades, now, I wanna do something about it. Now, I wanna help build everything back, I wanna build something that’s gonna make what I see around me better.” Is that accurate?

 

It is kind of in a way.

When you think about the poor, the helpless, and the one who needs your help the most, what is your compassion that can best help you with? No matter how big or how small the gesture is, one act of kindness can transcend into multitudes. It is true that an individual alone cannot solve the needs of the world. But we can do something together. 

Jodi Fischer, Development Director of Adelante, and her team always look for ways to reach out to people below the poverty line. The foundation’s primary goal is to provide small loans and education to women in Honduras , which is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. They empower these women to achieve self-sufficiency, and that journey is what our talk will revolve around today.

 

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The Tremendous Power of Women Helping Women with Jodi Fischer

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk about helping people help themselves and giving people opportunities. My guest today is Jodi Fischer. She is the development director and a US liaison for a foundation called Adelante and Adelante is a foundation that helps women in Honduras, which is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, get small loans to start their own business.

 

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Jodi, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you for having me.

 

Jodi, first, I want to get the audience oriented by talking a little bit about Honduras. A lot of people know it’s one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere but probably not aware of what specifically is going on in Honduras and what’s actually preventing a lot of people there from having the opportunities to succeed that we enjoy here in the US or whatever country you’re listening from.

 

There’s various statistics that support it’s the second to poorest country, second only to Haiti, in Latin America and that currently means nearly 70 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. There’s a lot of factors that play into that but there are some issues with the government, there is definitely things that happen that make it difficult for people to break those cycles of poverty.

 

Essentially, and 70 percent below the poverty line, for some context, we think about the poverty line, we think about the line where you’re barely getting enough to eat every day and you’re under stress about what shelter you’re going to have. Is that an accurate way to think of it? Because I know that dollar conversions can be different for different currencies in different places.

 

True, yes. It usually translates to living under $1.90 per day.

 

Okay.

 

There are different levels of poverty. I know that with Adelante Foundation, for example, we do not attempt to serve the poorest of the poor because giving them a debt burden would not be appropriate. However, a lot of the communities that we serve, people often don’t have anything but a dirt floor. They don’t necessarily have running water, they don’t necessarily have the ability to send their children to school so there’s different levels within the poverty index and we do measure those things and we do track the progress of the participants of our program over time.

 

Tell me about the profile of a typical participant in your program. I know you provide some loans, you give them some economic opportunity to start something up.

 

Well, 90 percent of the people that we work with are women. We will occasionally work with brothers, husbands, fathers usually recommended by women that have already participated or are currently participating in the program.

 

They are typically considered unbankable, meaning that they cannot get a loan from a traditional financial institution and they have to be over the age of 18.Share on X

 

So there are sometimes younger women who would like to receive support but we do want to make sure that we’re doing everything ...

When you are just starting to take the "healthy route," walking down the grocery aisle can be overwhelming. Protein bars, energy bars, diet bars, meal-replacement bars, gendered bars, bars for your brain, you name it! You may be wondering if there are any potential benefits to eating these health bars, and the good news is, there definitely are.

Laura Harris, founder and CEO of Greens Gone Wild, introduced a new product to the market. An energy bar that incorporates spinach and various greens into one nutritional bite. We invited her on the show today to talk more about the product.

 

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Greens On The Go: The Right Mix of Protein, Calories and Flavor with Laura Harris

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In case it’s not obvious from my other episodes or if this is the first one you’re listening to, I live in Colorado and Colorado is known for being a pretty active and health-conscious state. I think I’ve seen on multiple occasions, maybe not the latest numbers, that we have the lowest obesity rate in the country and that’s something I’m pretty proud of. Now, my guest today, Laura Harris, recently introduced a new product to the market, a product called Greens Gone Wild, which is an energy bar that incorporates spinach as well as other greens for various health outcomes and I will let Laura describe it herself instead of being in the business of trying to translate someone’s business from their conversations and their website.

 

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Laura, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here. How’s your day been today?

 

Day has been pretty good. Weirdly enough, yesterday, I went storm chasing, something I haven’t done in a little while.

 

Very cool. Where was the storm?

 

Near the town --- between the towns of La Junta and Lamar in southeast Colorado, which is a part of the state that a lot of people don’t think about or go to that often. 

 

That’s so cool.

 

I actually submitted a picture of inch-and-a-half-sized hail to the Twitter account of the National Weather Service so I did my part in weather verification too.

 

That’s awesome. Have you been able to submit other photos previously?

 

Yeah, yeah. All you have to do is @ whichever National Weather Service office’s zone you’re in so if you get hail at your house, @NWSBoulder is our local office and you can --- usually I like to put like the hailstone next to an object of known size, like a dime, a quarter, something like that.

 

That makes sense too because then you really get to see, well, just the magnitude of the size of hail.

 

Yeah. And the bonus, of course, is that if you’re at your home and then eventually need an insurance claim verified for getting a new roof, that’s your proof right there.

 

That’s a good call. Now, did you have any spinach packed protein bars with you while you were storm chasing?

 

So, unfortunately, I did not. I made the mistake of relying on gas station snacks, which meant Chex Mix, and, yeah, I could have been quite a bit healthier. But that’s a great segue for us to talk about these spinach packed protein bars that you introduced to the market. Was it last year or earlier this year?

 

It was actually the summer of 2019, so June 1st was our first sales day and we did the Colorado Fresh Market circuit plus Sloan's Lake and it was so exciting, so busy, and we had a lot of great people loving what we were doing.

 

Explain to us a little bit about these spinach packed protein bars that are sweeping across grocery stores in Colorado now.

 

I love that.

At Greens Gone Wild, we created spinach packed protein bars. They’re vegan, gluten-free, non-GMO, soy-free with no refined or added sugars. You’ll get a full serving of spinach in every single shelf-stable bar.

They taste amazing. They’re super chewy.

Every business, every owner, every employee has lots of great ideas. Now the crucial part is how one should nitpick and prioritize their tasks. "Experience" is not getting what you wanted. You can hire seasoned mentors to avoid making mistakes, period. Hiring trained professionals saves you time, avoids costly errors and gives you an edge. If you think that doesn’t make a huge difference, well, think again. 

At Align2Compete, you have access to industry experts who could drive you to your fullest potential. Today, we invited Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins, co-founders of the organization, to give you a run-through and a clear picture of what they do.

 

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A How-to Guide for Expanding Small Businesses with Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. My guests today are Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins who co-founded an organization called Align2Compete. Now, what Align2Compete does, I will let them describe this more in their own words than in mine, but the basic gist of it is marketing for small businesses and solopreneurs or entrepreneurs so they’re the ones that are actually trying to help a lot of you that are out there listening trying to get some traction, get your business going, getting noticed, and getting noticed is something that I think a lot of people oftentimes don’t think of. I know I haven’t thought of it nearly as much as I should have even though that’s a huge part of the battle. It’s very common to think a lot about the specifics of your product, what you want to build and even why, the why is definitely important, but, oftentimes, this goes, for lack of a better way to put it, on notice.

 

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Dave, Mike, welcome to the program.

 

Thanks. 

 

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

 

So let’s start with talking about Align2Compete. I introduced the topic but, of course, you know your business better than me translating a couple conversations we’ve had and what’s on your website. So what is Align2Compete about? What are you doing with your mission?

 

I guess I’ll lead off with that, Mike. In essence, we turn strangers into customers for small businesses. That sounds as a simplistic benefit but it definitely is the essence of what we do and makes our feet hit the floor in the morning. Now, no question, it’s more complicated to pull that off and probably the best question that we could ever have anybody asked us in return, “How do you do that?” And so we are a marketing agency and mainly a service agency that helps emerging small businesses get the word out and boost their familiarity and I think you had touched on that, Stephen, that that’s the biggest challenge, like I go to meetup groups, that’s what we do is, yeah, if you’re going to build a deck in your house, for example, and you could go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy all the wood and buy all the tools and, yeah, you’ll build something that’s a deck but it’s nice to have a contractor, if you will, or maybe a financial adviser that knows how to use the tools and what tools to use.

 

Mike and I talk about it a lot about we don’t lead with product, push product. We worked at organizations that were publicly traded on Wall Street, for example, that what’s the product of the month that they want us to push and I just don’t like to work with clients that way and I know Mike doesn’t either and so we really want to focus on what is that business trying to do and one of the questions that we’ll always ask is, “Stephen, one’s the lowest, ten’s the highest, how would you rate from a 1 to 10 the familiarity of your business?” and it’s always an interesting answer we get. Somebody will say, “Well, we’re a 3,” or, “We’re a 5,” and then we’ll say, “Okay, where do you want to be a year or two years from now?” Because we know a lot can change in even those timeframes. “Oh, I wanna get to a seven.” Okay, cool,

Sometimes all you need is to spend time in the great outdoors, where you soak up the sunshine, breathe fresh air, and commune with wildlife. Getting out for a walk in your local park or even birding alone or with your family can have a powerful impact on your brain.

Birding by itself teaches us patience and gently coaxes us to be calm. It’s a great opportunity to just zone out or have a little reflection and think calmly. Our guest for today will definitely agree on that matter. According to Ryan Dibala of Birding Man Adventures, birding is a great way for people to get outdoors and connect with nature.

 

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Birding with Benefits: How Nature Improves Your Well Being with Ryan Dibala

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to switch gears with you a little bit and I’d like to talk to you about birding. Now, this is a topic that we have yet to discuss on this particular podcast because it’s a type of experience that people either know a lot about or know very little about. Some people get really, really into birding and some people just don’t know much about it. But, in life, there’s going to be a lot of experiences like that and it’s good to be exposed to the large depth of experiences that there are out there. According to my guest today, Ryan Dibala of Birding Man Adventures, birding is a great way for people to get outdoors and connect into nature.

 

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Ryan, welcome to the program.

 

Pleasure to be here, Steve. Thanks for having me.

 

Oh, thank you so much. And, Ryan, tell me about your experience with birding. What made birding be the thing that you wanted to, first of all, do a lot of yourself and also bring to others?

 

Right after college, I was working as a biologist on Santa Catalina Island and we were actually restoring bald eagles to the national park after a massive decline in numbers due to DDT, which I’m sure many people are familiar with DDT and what it did as it worked its way up the food chain, essentially with the raptors, like bald eagles, it depleted their egg shells of calcium so the nesting eagles would crush the eggs and then that would prevent successful recruitment ultimately. So we were actually involved in the direct manipulations of eggs and chicks on the island’s eagles’ nests so, of course, I was around other birders, I had my first pair of binoculars and a spotting scope and I was able to tune into some of the smaller birds on the island. That particular island has several different endemics that only are there, like many islands have, they have species that only can be found on those islands so I think I saw, it was a Hutton's Vireo, a Catalina Hutton's Vireo, and that might have been my gateway bird, I guess you could call it.

 

A gateway bird, never heard it described that way before.

 

So ever since that moment, I’ve really been paying attention to the birds around me. I found that it really slows me down, it helps me focus. We have these weapons of mass distraction in our pockets and we’re always on them, these cell phones that distract us from the world and prevent us from tuning into what’s in front of our eyes at the present moment. And so, as a result, we’ve seen a lot more ADD and NDD, nature deficit disorder, and realizing that going out into nature and slowing down and looking at the world as it is right around me, that’s helped center me and relieve a lot of anxiety that has come about from the world that we live in with so much technology so that’s one of many reasons that I continue to bird today. I can certainly go into more of the reasons why I think it’s an amazing pursuit and something that more people should do.

 

What does birding entail? Like if, let’s say, these podcasts usually come out on Tuesdays and if you’re listening in the middle of the week and someone says, “Alright, this sounds really interesting.

Have you ever felt like you’re in your optimal state? Just in pure bliss doing the things you love minus the pressure. You feel your best and perform your best because you’re happy.This is known as the state of flow, my friends. When you’re in this bubble, you’re just simply in the zone. You are completely present, as if your life is unfolding right now. Often, you even lose your sense of time because you’re just enjoying what you’re doing so much that you forget about the world around you. It's both enthralling and relaxing.

Today’s guest specializes in helping people achieve that mental state, bringing them into harmony so they can be their authentic selves. Arnaud Saint-Paul is the founder of Tapuat and also a two-time author. He taps into the power of the heart with the use of The Heartfelt Method. In this interview, you'll learn about how listening to your heart can change your life.

 

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Creating A Visual Map of Your Heart Through Harmony, Connection, and Unity

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about kind of living your life in harmony, in a state of flow. Now, we've all heard something about a state of flow but for a general synopsis of it, it's the time when you're truly present in the moment. It's the time when you're not distracted. And people often describe it as when was the last time you were so involved in what you were doing that you forgot to eat a meal or you forgot that you had to go to the bathroom or something like that. Not that I'm advocating meal skipping or intensifying the pressure you put on your bladder when you have to go, but it is a really beautiful state and it's often a state when we're at our most content, our happiest, and our most productive getting a lot done. My guest today kind of specializes in helping people bring themselves into harmony, into flow, and getting that authentic life. Arnaud Saint-Paul is the founder of Tapuat and also a two-time author and the inventor of something called The Heartful Method. He just brings people in so many different settings into the state of authenticity, the state of being truly who you are.

 

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Arnaud, welcome to the program.

 

Well, thank you. Hello. Thank you for having me.

 

Thank you so much for reaching out and joining us today on Action’s Antidotes because where the discontent really comes from is the state of not being connected with who you really are. But, obviously, you probably know more than anyone else about this so just elaborate this on where the state of discontent that a lot of people feel, especially in our modern world, comes from.

 

Right. When we observe these troubled times, all the news and you're going -- and plus when we went through, all of us, in the past few years, you obsess with them and, therefore, you forget all the rest. In other words, each time we're obsessing about something, each time we're identifying with something, we lose contact with ourselves, we forget ourselves, and, hence, that discontent that is not really related, per se, to the actual events but more unconsciously, we're telling ourselves we're not going in the right direction. What if a state of presence of harmony, of interconnection, of flow would be our actual essence or birthright and we can actually allow ourselves to live our lives through that? What if, all of a sudden, everything would come to me without an effort because I'm here now and I exist and I am in my state of flow, to take that example, or harmony or congruence or coherence of alignment. And that's what we can all do if we choose to.

The moment we start to become conscious leaders of our lives, of our businesses, etc., then we can jump or, better said, embark onto a journey where this becomes the norm.

And so when you talk about it being a birthright, does that mean that we're all born with it? If we were to observe,

2022 just flew by so fast, it’s as if we’re playing life at twice the speed. At the beginning of the year, we set goals for ourselves. Things that we want to tick off and put a checkmark on, things that we want to accomplish.I would be shocked if "health and wellness" didn’t make it to your resolution list. Because it would be a waste not to prioritize your health, especially in times like this. And our guest for today would probably agree with me on that matter.

Meet the registered dietitian, mother, podcaster, and cancer survivor, Regina Topelson. She enjoys exploring health and wellness from a variety of perspectives and is eager to share her experiences and knowledge with you.

 

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Leaving a Legacy by Living a Life Well-Lived By Regina Topelson

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about our health, because our health is very integral to everything we want to pursue in life. We keep ourselves in good health, well, you know, we’re more likely to be more energetic and we’re actually also more likely to be in good mental health. There’s kind of a connection between the two. And, of course, we must take care of our bodies in order to have the energy to pursue whatever it is that’s inspiring us. My guest today has a perspective on the whole field of health from multiple angles. Her name is Regina Topelson and she is a registered nutritionist, a news contributor as well as the host of her own podcast that features people who have dealt with some tough health challenges, mostly cancer.

 

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Regina, welcome to the program.

 

Hi, Stephen. It’s so great to be here. Thank you. It’s such a pleasure.

 

Thank you, Regina, and first question I want to ask is let’s start from beginning. What inspired you to make this health and wellness, you know, your life’s pursuit?

 

Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, both of my children were born with food allergies. Twenty years ago, that was still kind of an unheard of type thing. It was heard of but it was very rare. What made my kids extra special is that they had multiple food allergies. Prior to that, it was one kid with one food allergy, like peanuts or tree nuts or eggs or something like that or dairy, but mine had multiple all rolled into one child. And so we kind of went down this path in our family where we really had to try to figure out how to keep these little guys alive, you know? 

 

Yeah. 

 

So, when my oldest was eight and my youngest was, I think at that time, five and a half, I decided that I wanted to pursue becoming a nutritionist, what I ended up doing was becoming a registered dietitian, but what I thought of in a broad spectrum was I wanted to follow this traditional kind of path with education and evidence-based practices for health and wellness because what I had was a lot of moms coming to me and saying every time I feed my son bagels, he breaks out in a rash around his mouth and my husband thinks I’m crazy but I see it every time he eats bagels, you know what I mean? And so I thought, you know what, if I’m going to be counseling and helping people in my community, then I really should be well versed at this. I should be a professional, not just a lay mom. I don’t know why that wasn’t enough for me. It should have been enough for me, it could have been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I wanted to have the professional background for it. 

 

How much emphasis should be placed in any pursuit on developing some form of traditional education, whether it be going back to school for a degree or whether it be some sort of a certification program? I guess the question is how much do we need to know what the world knows versus kind of the other school of thought being learning by experience, which is just, “Okay, I’ve observed this, I’ve observed that, I started doing this, I interview people,

"The only thing that will change your life, change your business, change your relationship, is that you must raise your standards."

We have goals in life, and nothing in this world has the power to set us in the right direction more than ourselves. We are the authors of our own book. And it’s up to us how we write it and how we act accordingly. Behavior is always something that we overlook, but it is the most important part of success. Nothing in this world is so elusive yet so powerful as our beliefs. When you surround yourself with positivity, you’re more likely to adapt to empowering beliefs and see life happening through your own lens. To reach new heights of success, you must surround yourself with people who not only inspire you but challenge you. Shifting  your energy to a more positive one. Hannah Gfeller is a behavioral consultant who has mastered the art of connecting human behavior science to our daily lives.

 

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Listen to the podcast here:

Empowering Beliefs and Behaviors To Live By With Hannah Gfeller

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to talk to you about behavior. Now, on previous episodes, we’ve talked a little bit about the idea of personality, the idea of finding yourself. What I envision is that there’s a lot of people out there who have done the work of figuring out, okay, who is it that you are, but then, beyond that, how does that manifest into how you are perceived in the world, how you go about creating what you want to create because once you know yourself, you know what you want but does your behavior line up with that and does your actions bring the right people, the right opportunities to you or are you still acting in a way that’s confusing the people around you? My guest today, Hannah Gfeller, is a behavioral consultant with her own business.

 

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Hannah, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. 

 

Oh, thank you, Hannah. Let’s first start talking about behavioral consulting. I’m envisioning that there might be a couple people out there that aren’t even aware that that’s a profession that someone can pursue. So, describe a little bit what it means to be a behavioral consultant.

 

Yes. Yeah, nobody knows what I do. So, technically, I’m a behavior analyst and a lot of people like to call themselves behaviorists but they’re not board certified. So, just for clarification, you have people who say that they do that type of work but I had to go through grad school and supervision and hours of that and then sit for a massive board exam, but not everyone passes. And so then you can work behavior analytically. And I call it behavioral consulting because I come in as a third party usually. People looking for advice to change habits. And I do it in a lot of different ways. Most people when they hear behavior analyst, they think ABA, and that is synonymous a lot with autism, but it’s not.

 

Okay.

 

It didn’t come from that. The field of applied behavior analysis is what I do and that can go into anything with living humans. We always joke if it’s a dead man, they’re not behaving, so like you just lay there, it’s not a behavior. You got to do something. But I can look at individuals and look at how they want to change their habits or maybe you’re a caregiver and you have a little one that needs to change their habits, for safety or life skills or whatever it is, and I can work in that arena. But then I can also look at massive systems within a company because you have lots of people and, as a big company, in a sense it behaves. It has its habits. But you got to break it down into those little cycles of habits in order to make big change. So I do it in the corporate world and I also do it within the healthcare field as well and that’s, in sum, behavioral consulting.

 

And so, when you’re consulting someone on their behavior,