Healthy Minds @Lullabot

Matt Kleve: For September 29th, 2022. It's the Lullabot podcast.

[Intro music]

Matt Kleve: Hey everybody, it's Lullabot podcast episode 259. I'm Matt Kleve, a senior developer at Lullabot, and today we're talking a little bit about how to work, how to be an employee, how to be a better person. I mean, I guess as we stretch the topics of the Lullabot podcast, one thing I always tell people is that it's about anything that we do here at Lullabot. Lullabot is a strategy design development digital agency that deals primarily with the Drupal framework and building websites and that kind of thing. But today we're kind of going a little different, and it's titled Healthy Minds. We'll learn all about it. First, we have the director of Human Resources at Lullabot from Ames, Iowa. Hi, Kris Konrady, welcome to the show.

Kris Konrady: Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Kleve: Kris, you've been at Lullabot for a long time for never having been on a podcast yet.

Kris Konrady: That's true. I think about eight years now that I've been here, I've successfully avoided doing this. Until now.

Matt Kleve: Well, we're glad you're here now. Thanks, Kris.

Kris Konrady: Thanks.

Matt Kleve: Also with us, we have a lead engineer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Doctor Matthew Tift. Hi, Matthew. Welcome back to the show.

Matthew Tift: Thanks, Matt. I'm glad to be back.

Matt Kleve: And you're also a host of a podcast of your own you can find on lullabot.com. Right?

Matthew Tift: That's correct. It's called Hacking Culture.

Matt Kleve: And there's a bunch of new episodes.

Matthew Tift: So there's a whole bunch of new episodes. Yes.

Matt Kleve: And you should go listen to those if, if you haven't. So check it out. Also with us today we have a senior UX strategist from Providence, Rhode Island. Joining us is Marissa Epstein. Hi, Marissa.

Marissa Epstein: Hello. Thanks for having me as well.

Matt Kleve: Welcome back to the show.

Marissa Epstein: Thanks.

Matt Kleve: And also a newcomer to the podcast. We have a senior front end developer from Northampton, Massachusetts, Aubrey Sambor. Hi, Aubrey.

Aubrey Sambor: Hi! I'm glad to be here.

Matt Kleve: It's your first time too.

Aubrey Sambor: Yes it is.

Matt Kleve: And another not stranger to the podcast, a lead engineer from a word I can't pronounce. Madrid, Spain. We have Juampy. Hey, Juampy.

Juampy NR: Hey, everybody. Yeah, it's been a while.

Matt Kleve: It's, say, the city you wrote down.

Juampy NR: Oh, you know what? I'm actually gonna let my colleague Matthew to do it for me because he did some training.

Matthew Tift: Yes. Juampy is from Cercedilla.

Juampy NR: Yeah. There you are. It's a little bit.

Matthew Tift: No no, it's not quite right there. Cercedilla.

Juampy NR: Yeah. That's better.

[Laughing]

Juampy NR: Hi, everybody.

Matthew Tift: More training is needed.

Matt Kleve: So I know I've seen all of the emails for the Healthy Minds. I don't know, you want to call it an initiative at Lullabot, and I kind of want to know more about it and hear about it. I was actually not a participant, but I'm excited to learn today. So how did this all kind of get started and what's involved? Kind of, Kris, maybe you can give us the overview?

Kris Konrady: Sure. Yeah. So I feel like this all started actually back in 2018 with our mental health initiative at Lullabot. We, we have there are some articles on Lullabot.com where Matt Westgate, our former CEO and founder, went to a talk at DrupalCorn in Iowa and saw JD Flynn give a talk about mental illness in tech called Erasing the Stigma. And from that, we started a mental health initiative at, at work, and we have a working group, and Marissa and I used to co-lead that working group, and now it's Matthew and Marissa co-leading that. And you know, the importance of this for Lullabot was understanding that something like 20% of, of adults in the US experience mental illness at one time or another, and that incidence raises up to 51% when you're talking about the tech sector. So talking about it openly, making sure we have resources and support for our team members became really important. So as a working group, we also kind of took a pause during the pandemic because there was just a lot going on for us, too, and we needed to kind of protect and and our mental health and our available resources to support other folks. And this last team retreat, we gathered back together and said, you know, what do we want to do as a working group? And that's when we started talking about this, which actually was inspired by some research Matthew Tift has done so. I would love to pass the baton to Matthew and have him talk about where this came from.

Matthew Tift: Sure. So I, I guess I was asked by the Mental Health Working Group back in October of last year, about a year ago, to do some meditations, and I am a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher outside of Lullabot, and I personally have found it to be very beneficial in my life. So as a result, I've been teaching in prisons and community centers and yoga studios and all over the place. And then last October, I started leading a meditation group in at Lullabot, a weekly group, and that's been going every week since. And at some point, though, I realized that some people might not want to come to Matthew's meditation group, and after doing it for like eight months, I started to wonder if it was having any other any effect. I heard the personal stories from folks, but then I just looked into other options because I know corporate mindfulness is a big topic in the world, and there's all kinds of programs out there. So then I was looking for something else to kind of expand on what I was doing. And I found this program called Healthy Minds from the center for Healthy Minds in Wisconsin, Madison. And that marked the beginning of me deciding this would be a cool thing for Lullabot and doing a bunch of internal sort of promotion and telling people how I thought it might be good. But the program itself, we started, I think, back in July, and maybe Marissa would like to talk a little bit about the program and what our 30 day challenge that we use to kick things off.

Marissa Epstein: Sure happy to. Thanks, Matthew.

Matt Kleve: You all are doing really great. Like sharing the story I love this. This is this is like the most organized group of people ever. Sorry, Marissa. Go ahead.

Marissa Epstein: We're just going to take turns for the next hour. So jump in on us whenever. Thank you, thank you Matt. So, yeah, the program itself is meant to kick start this program within the workplace. So within the center that Matthew described is an app that they provide called Healthy Minds and a tailored to a professional workplace program for us to work together and collaborate at work. So we ended up receiving a ton of awesome materials that helped us kind of get things started from them and explain the science behind it and encourage the rest of the group to participate. And so we had a 30 day voluntary challenge to try to just do one meditation or listen to one lesson a day. It could be five minutes. It could be more. Some days you would miss. There were a slightly less fewer lessons than there were days in the month. So it gave you a little bit of breathing room. But the challenge was just to have a regular practice, to try to meditate and to as a group, we met weekly and were able to discuss and use that time now to talk about any, you know, trials, tribulations, that kind of thing, and, and meet together. I feel like I'm missing something, but that's the that's the bulk of the Healthy Minds, I think. One more thing I will add is to Matthew's point around not being sure if the meditation was effective. This was not only a way for us to measure and get a little data, and I'm the big data nerd, so I love that. But also we could customize it per person. So if I had a conflict during our meditation meeting, I can still meditate when I need to and have a little flexibility or a woman's voice or a slightly different time. There's a lot of options that we wanted everyone to explore at the company. Yeah.

Matt Kleve: So I guess what's kind of the overall goal then at the company? Why is this something that needed to be introduced and what were we looking to gain out of it?

Marissa Epstein: I'll jump in first to say I mean, you heard Kris's statistic around how high anxiety and burnout and stress can be and different other mental health issues within our industry. And we knew that. And we saw the effects of the pandemic. And so I was so grateful that Matthew was able to leverage the smarts and the experience of somebody else during kind of a trying time to bring us a little bit of that relief. I mean, the "why" really comes back to me, to the working group's mission statement, which essentially comes down to promoting optimal mental health at Lullabot. And so we've broken that down into things like reducing the stigma by talking about and raising awareness about mental illness, providing resources from professionals as we are not the professionals in that way anyway, and increasing support for each other. So I think you can see how this app touches on each of those pillars. We're getting us all, whoever's comfortable, whoever volunteered, getting them talking and improving awareness. The app itself is the resource, but it also comes with support.

Matthew Tift: I would add...

Marissa Epstein: I'd love to hear what others thought.

Matthew Tift: Yeah, I would just add too that part of the the goal with this was to offer something to Lullabots as a way to say we understand that some people are are going through troubling times, or you might be just fine. I say it all the time in meditation groups that this is not therapy. So what we're talking about now is not therapy. We're not here to fix anybody. But the fact of the matter is this Healthy Minds at Work program from Healthy Minds Innovations is they've been studying this using scientific research and, and all kinds of different ways of looking at the program. And they've found that this program decreases stress in organizations, on average, by 28%. It increases social connection. Social connection. It reduces depression symptoms by 24% in the places that have adopted it. So it seemed like something that made a lot of sense to do, especially coming sort of coming out of the pandemic, people that were still feeling some anxiety. So we thought, hey, this is an experiment. This is something we could try. It's not saying this is something we'll do forever, but it's saying, let's let's see what happens. Let's get some numbers. Let's get a get a pulse on the organization. Because our first value at Lullabot is to Be Human. So concentrating on the humans and offering tools for the humans seems like a great thing to do.

Matt Kleve: Our first value you are referring to our the Lullabot core values, which you can find on the Lullabot website. The be Human. Definitely. I mean, I hear it all the time. It's kind of top of mind for a lot of things.

Kris Konrady: I think for for me, one of the important parts about this too, is to say as a, as an employer like this is important enough for you to spend time at work doing because especially those of you on, I mean, all of us, all of us have to interact with with humans on a regular basis. I think it might be especially so for people on project work. There's a lot of of stressful times around working on projects, making sure you meet your deadlines and your launch dates, and there's a lot of pressure from outside on clients wanting to perform well, wanting to do well for your boss at Lullabot. You know, all those things, you know, in addition to outside home pressures and just life. And so if we can say, hey, we want you to be able to have a tool that helps you develop a habit that brings equanimity before you get on a call, increases your patience when you have to deal with stressful situations. Gives you a way to, after a stressful situation, wind down again and reset your your... recenter yourself so that you can keep moving forward, keep being productive and, you know, decrease that stress and everything. All of these tools and habits that they are presenting to us have been shown to help with those things. I mean, I actually got out and did a five minute meditation before joining this call because I was very nervous to be on the podcast, and I was just like, all I did was concentrate on my breath, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh my gosh, my heart rate slowed down and I can be more aware and present and listening to you all. So I think those kinds of things are can be very useful no matter what work situation you're in. And I would love to hear from Aubrey or Juampy about how you know, how they've used it and how if they've found that to be true for for project work.

Matt Kleve: I was going to...

Kris Konrady: Because I'm not on projects, so I don't know.

Matt Kleve: Juampy, I was gonna go in your direction next and Aubrey will follow up, too. But Juampy, you're you're kind of the representative of of somebody who isn't on the mental health working group today, but you're kind of volunteered as somebody who has participated in the Healthy Minds initiative. And what is the process like for you?

Juampy NR: That application is amazing.

Matt Kleve: What is it? Kind of explain it to me. I haven't seen it.

Juampy NR: It's a mobile application app that you install. And then we started with the 30 day program, which is 30 sessions you can set for each session if you want it to be static or if you want it to be an active session. Meaning they say do something that doesn't require much attention, like doing the dishes, going for a walk, things like that. And then you can also set the length by default it's five minutes, but it can go up to 30 minutes. And I think, I haven't tried, but I think that if you go for a longer one, the breaks in between for you to do certain exercises will be longer. That's it. I didn't try, but anyway, initially I thought, I don't have time for this, but then I at that, when I started with that, I had a newborn and and I used to go for walks with her, a typical carry bag. And I started listening to the audios, and I realized after the second one I was like, oh, I really needed this. And so that's how it works. I don't know if you asked something else at all but.

Matt Kleve: And it's audio, right? So it's it's just an audio recording that you listen to and participate with.

Juampy NR: Yeah. Correct.

Matt Kleve: Okay.

Juampy NR: So there are sessions where they are more like teaching or they it's more about you learning about something based on data. They they bring guests sometimes. And then there are others that are actually sessions when, where they go with you and they give you tips to, to try this and that.

Marissa Epstein: The way the app works is kind of nice. I enjoy the way it's organized. It's very structured. So you go from the meditation like Juampy is describing that can be active or still, and then you go to a lesson so it gives you something to think about. And that one also can be done while you're doing dishes or something mindless. And then the other is the meditation and the way that they structured the beginning of the program. It starts with this high level introduction welcoming you to the 30 day challenge, opening your eyes, I think in the way that Juampy described, which is cool. And then they have these four pillars that they describe as these crucial aspects of mental health. So the first is awareness being present essentially. The next is connection. So relationships and compassion for others. Insight is around the way you see the world. If you have a narrative, something like that and then finally purpose. So coming back to values and that kind of thing. So we were all starting from the introduction, but there was more time than that in the 30 days. So Matthew, encouraged us to just follow our hearts. And you could start from the beginning, or I jumped into a pillar where I knew in a self-assessment that I actually had a little gap and I wanted to focus on for me.

Matt Kleve: Aubrey, I threatened you earlier, if you don't mind kind of taking me through through your process of, you know, being involved with the program.

Aubrey Sambor: Yeah, sure. I really liked the application as well. I really liked the program. And it has really, really helped out as someone who works on a pretty, pretty stressful project with pretty tight deadlines having this application that had all these different lessons and different meditations, it has really, really helped. I've definitely felt pretty calm, Especially since I see a lot of my other coworkers who will, this is on my client project, a lot of them will be a little bit kind of stressed out about the project and hitting our deadlines, and I've been pretty mellow about it, I think, because I've been using this application and I've been able to kind of be that grounding presence in my on my team, my client team, so that people don't stress out and freak out about the project. So I definitely feel like that's been really helpful, not just for me, but for the client work I've been doing as well. So yeah, I've been I've been doing something similar to Marissa where I was jumping around a little bit in the app after I finished the 30 days. And I've now went back and started filling, finishing it all. I've been doing a lot of the, a lot of the the lessons and the meditations. I'll usually do one the lesson and then the meditation right afterward. And I've usually done active ones more than the sitting ones. So yeah, it's been it's been a great experience and it's really, really helped with managing my stress at work. So yeah, I appreciate that about the application.

Matt Kleve: I'm sure somebody mentioned it. How long of a time involvement is each one of these days?

Aubrey Sambor: So you can do any time between five like the lessons themselves I think are usually between like three and seven minutes. They're not very long at all. And then the meditations you can do, you can choose anywhere between 5 minutes and 30 minutes. So if you only have five minutes to meditate in a day, you can just do a five minute one. And then if you if you have days where you want to do a longer practice, you can do a 20 or a 30 minute one. I think there's little mini micro meditations too like a one minute of breathe or one minute of I don't remember what the other ones are. I'd have to look at the app, but there's little ones for when you need something right away, right then and there to kind of ground you a little bit more. So there's a bunch of different options for different times depending on what you're what you need in that moment.

Matt Kleve: We're on the Lullabot podcast, and we're talking with a bunch of Lullabots who've been involved with the Healthy Minds at Work initiative, learning all about it. Coming up right after this, we'll feel a little bit more about you know, the process and how it worked out for people and learn about the impact that there was to our company coming up right after this.

[Intro music]

Matt Kleve: Welcome back to the Lullabot podcast. So we're talking about Healthy Minds at work. So sounds like a really cool, you know, mental health positive program going on. So Kris, directing this to you as HR is is work the right location for something like this? It just part of me feels a little awkward about that. I don't know if you had any thoughts about this before starting the program, and thought the benefits outweighed the the cons?

Kris Konrady: Yes. So I think work absolutely is is a great place for it because of, of the I mean, we we did a lot of research first and Matthew did a lot of this and saying like, why this one, you know, compared to other ones? And it was because there was science research backing their processes. And it was set up intentionally, you know, with regards to how this plays out at work. And so, you know, they they talk about productivity. That's always of a business importance to any, to any business.

Matt Kleve: Sure.

Kris Konrady: You know, if we you don't have productive workers who are, who are utilizing paid time to the best of their ability, then that's that's an efficiency problem, right? So, I mean, I don't want to reduce any human to efficiency and how productive they are either. That's, you know, part of our our core value, the Be Human core value is that we all bring our whole selves to work. And that means there are things in our personal lives that impact how we can work and how well we work with each other. And so the connection that it's trying to foster is super helpful, especially for our company who also has Collaborate Openly as one of our core values. So I think it ties in really well with Lullabot's specific core values. And I think that for any other business, you know, you could just look at the science of the, you know, productivity, resilience things like that, that this app is trying to improve lowering incidences of stress and burnout. That means lowering sick days, unpaid leave because people need to take longer breaks. Whatever. All those things. It can help with that from the business side of things too. So yeah, for for us, it was, it was, I think both those things, core values and, you know, there are just general business ways that this could improve, improve lullabot and how we work together.

Matt Kleve: So as I do want to kind of point out and just make the point that as a digital agency, our time at work is billable. And somebody might be saying, what are they doing, doing this tree hugging hippie crap when they're supposed to be getting work done for their clients, right?

Kris Konrady: Right. [Laughing] Well, yes. Well, I mean, this would also make us more efficient during those billable hours, right? We we buill 30 hours a week, not 40, but we do expect a 40 hour work week. And so this would be something that people could do in their their ten hours a week where, you know, we're we're focused on professional development, which also helps our clients. We're we're focused on, yeah, being better humans and, you know, increasing our resilience and productivity and communication and, and patience and all those things which helps us with clients. So all of these things can also be talked about as, hey, this would this would help out on any project and it's worthwhile. And I think that that shows both in our, our team's turnover, we have a really low turnover rate. People seem to be happy at Lullabot and happy to work here. And also our recurring clients. We have a lot of clients who have stayed with us for years and years, and as we finish projects, maybe they don't have anything right away, but they come back to us, you know, in a year or two when they do have another project. So I think that goes to show how important our humans are at Lullabot and how we run our business.

Matt Kleve: Very good. I knew that everybody here together today knew the answer to that question, but maybe somebody didn't, so I...

Kris Konrady: [Laughing] Just had to put me on the hot seat, huh?

Matt Kleve: Yeah. [Laughing] So anyway,

Matthew Tift: I think that...

Matt Kleve: Go ahead. Matt.

Matthew Tift: I think that brings up a good point, though, which for me was that when I was looking into these potential solutions, I was not focused squarely on how can I make people the most productive at Lullabot? And one of the things that was attractive to this particular, this particular approach was that everything's anonymous. We don't know who participated in the program unless they told us just now, like so. I had no idea, Matt, if you were part of it or not. But I know that lots of other people showed up for different, different aspects of this because we also had a group where we discussed our experience using it. People talked about the challenges. They talked about what was going well. They shared their various tips for each other. But I didn't, I definitely did not think it would be appropriate to bring this into Lullabot if it didn't meet a bunch of other criteria, which for me was, do we offer these basic benefits like health insurance, like giving people an opportunity to have a flexible schedule? Or are we paying people enough? All of these things that I think Lullabot does really well. This to me, just seemed like a little bit of extra icing on the cake that was completely optional.

Matthew Tift: So some people that think of it as hippy stuff, that is that is great. I mean, they can they don't have to participate. It's not like we're telling people they have to. And I do say that some of the the personal stories that I have heard since we started are enough for me to hear that I don't I don't want to repeat people specifically, but people have said things like they have seen significant changes in their life just through using this app. And that that kind of warms my heart. It doesn't necessarily mean like, that's that's what we have to have that, that this should be like something that quote works for anybody. This is just, I think something that we're trying, we're looking at and we actually do sort of as a bonus, I would say get to look at the get to look at the numbers as an aggregate. And it was it was it's pretty interesting to we I mean, we can maybe transition to talking about the numbers, but it was interesting to me that 100% of the people that were using this, which was three quarters of our company, 100% of them said that they would like to continue using it.

Matt Kleve: So we're talking, this is anonymous data and any kind of, you know, information that the company gets back is is not anything personal or sensitive. There was an email that was in my inbox from June 1st that talked about, you know, there were possibly some sensitive questions being asked as a part of the process. I don't know if there were surveys or something that was going on, like, what is that? Where did that data go? Like, how does this end up working?

Marissa Epstein: There were two optional assessments as part of the 30 day plan. So the idea is that when you come in, you just draw a line in the sand and see where you are and how your mental health is, so that at the end of the month, you can answer the same questions again and see if there was a change. So each person might have put in some personal answers and information into the app, but it never came back to us. All we ever saw was an anonymized aggregate of the data. So you can't look through one person's individual responses and figure out who they are because we don't have that individual response. We had a handful of quotes that were pulled out. And, you know, we we went through them to make sure that they weren't revealing of who it was. We got some counts and things like that that Matthew was referring to, but nothing that would risk any privacy of the participants.

Matt Kleve: So there's data. This this this part is interesting to me. Did we win?

Marissa Epstein: We're winning. [Laughing] That's good!

Matt Kleve: A new high score or, like. Like what? What did we learn?

Kris Konrady: It's a journey, not a destination Matt.

Matt Kleve: Okay. Okay. That's fair.

Marissa Epstein: Thank you, Kris, for that expectation set. Like, yeah we love numbers and there are points of data. But this is really more of a of just showing that it moved the needle versus it being one and done. My favorite statistics were the ones Matthew already mentioned. There are you know, about 60 of us here at Lullabot, and we had 47 participants. So that's more than 75%, I believe, of our of our company just volunteered and stuck through. We had the pillars that I discussed awareness, connection, insight and purpose. Each got their own score. So at the beginning of the assessment, it was nice to see, okay, I have this weak area and I want to focus there and things like that. And then once you did your second assessment, you personally could see how your scores had changed, but that was not sent to us. So again, we saw the aggregate of how those needles had moved, but not per person. So as the aggregate, we saw at least 2% of an increase in all of those pillars, and I believe one of them was a 7% increase across the company. So like we all had an increase in purpose. Something like that. Yeah. Is there...

Kris Konrady: The things that, yeah, I would love to say like as HR, the things that stuck out to me in our data was a sense of community at work. That score 90% is how our team scores on feeling a sense of community at work. And that just makes me extremely happy that we have that, because, again, you know, community and collaboration really go hand in hand, I think. And also so does that feeling of well-being. It's a huge it's a huge part of that. So that's really cool. The other thing was our a decreased sense of burnout. We decreased by almost 20%. These feelings of of burnout just in a month of using the app.

Marissa Epstein: It's huge.

Kris Konrady: That's huge. If we can prevent burnout as an employer, like, that's I mean, that's it has a big impact in so many different areas I think. So.

Matt Kleve: Yeah, that's that's an impressive number.

Matthew Tift: The actual number is went from 47% of the company said they felt burnout at the beginning of this, and 28% at the end. And I will stress, too, that the 30 days was kind of a random thing. It was a way to get people to try it. We had an incentive for them to try it at that point. But we have a contract, a partnership with Healthy Minds that goes through the next year, and anyone at Lullabot can start this right now. And I'll just say too, before I forget that anybody listening to this can use this app for free. What we got by becoming a partner with Healthy Minds was to be able to look at some of this aggregate data, to get a sense of the pulse of our organization.

Matt Kleve: Matthew, I'm sure you're the type of person that begins with the end in mind. If we're at the end of this 30 days, did we achieve what we were trying to achieve? When you started off looking for something to to help?

Matthew Tift: I would say I wasn't expecting anything really out of this.

Matt Kleve: Really?

Matthew Tift: I didn't know what to expect. I, I, I really like this idea of looking at causes and consequences and not having any expectations of this. It wasn't like a huge monetary investment or something along those lines. It was something that our company could try. And I feel like if anybody got benefit out of this, then if anything, that would be fantastic. And if it gave other people access to these tools that I have found to be beneficial, that'd be great. So like at the beginning of this or earlier in this episode, when Kris mentioned that she used these, you know, a meditation before the podcast? Like, to me, that's enough. Like one person having one, like thing that comes out of it that, you know, gives me a little bit of goosebumps, even just thinking like, oh, now Kris has this new tool in her toolbox that she can turn to. Like, what else in life could we really look for other than people that we care about being able to be a little bit happier? So by that sense, like, I wouldn't say I needed that to happen or was hoping that, but hearing those stories has definitely made me happy and I, I don't feel like that the numbers are as important to me as as hearing some of the stories from people in their personal experience.

Marissa Epstein: I'll chime in that I think that's a that's a concept that Matthew has instilled in our meditation practice here, which is you might have an intention set, but you're not necessarily expecting to get something out of that meditation. And I think in many ways that's what we did here. He said it was an experiment, and it was, and I think to scratch the itch that you're coming at it from, Matt, I think the data was good. We, you know, not only were we happy with the stories and the idea that there was one more resource for people, but we saw an increase in belonging and in well-being and that reduction in burnout. And so for me, I think that's pretty impactful for just 30 days. And imagine as we continue and people learn more about meditation as a practice for themselves in the long term, what kinds of benefits we're going to reap from that. Data nerd again.

Matt Kleve: Do we know how many people made it through 30 days.

Matthew Tift: Maybe? Kris.

Kris Konrady: Yeah, I don't think we did either, but I remember I remember the 47 participants.

Matthew Tift: I thought 47 was the total number that of people that started and finished.

Matt Kleve: Oh, wow.

Kris Konrady: Okay. That might be it. Yeah.

Matt Kleve: So one thing Matthew said was that we have not only I mean, this is not the end of the end, given that we've finished the 30 day challenge that the company was was experimenting with. We have a continued relationship with the Healthy Minds app. And, you know, folks at Lullabot can continue to use it. Is that something, Juampy, you're the you're the you're the token user. Is this something that you think you're going to continue working with?

Juampy NR: Totally. Yeah. It's something that's part of my life already. I like it. I nowadays I check how am I feeling several times a day. And that's something I wasn't doing before. And it's great. And especially when I'll give I'll give you an example like last week, last week it was the kind of a first daycare family event free like one week before it actually started so families could meet, could meet with each other and also the kids and the babies. So I didn't know anybody there, and I was going there with my daughter by myself because Anna, my girlfriend, couldn't make it. And I get stressed when there's a lot of people around. So this time was different because prior to getting there, I was doing breathing, I was checking on how I was feeling, and even while I was there, at times I was like, how am I? Fine. Okay. It makes such a big difference. You know, it's not it's not just that I am going to continue using the app. It's just that the app is part of me already because it has taught me many things. This is just one example that helped me to to live life in a way that I think is better for me and everyone else around me.

Matt Kleve: Mic drop moment. I love it Juampy. That's that's amazing to hear.

Marissa Epstein: You can't beat that. No one can follow Juampy.

Matt Kleve: If someone listening wants to be involved, how would they do that? They they want this for themselves. They want this for their company. Like, what's what's the move that needs to be made?

Matthew Tift: Well, people could go to I think it's HM Innovations or I think it's HealthyMinds.org and they could find it from there. Or just if you Google like Healthy Minds, I'm sure this will come up as one of the top, top results because they are a well known research organizations, in fact, one of the leading organizations in in this area and hopefully it should come up and you should be able to find that or find it on your Android or iOS phone. So that's one way they can do that. Another, another thing that came to mind was, I guess I was curious to hear from Aubrey, I don't want to put you on the spot too much, but I know that you attended a lot of the in-person meditations that we were doing before, and then you have stuck with the in-person meditations as well as the app. And I just wondered if if you might be comfortable sharing anything about how how you might have noticed any differences from being able to do, like a one person in one time a week in-person thing to being able to use an app, or if you have any other insight into how that has changed your practice.

Aubrey Sambor: Yeah, yeah. So meditation is something I had wanted to really make a habit for a really long time. I would do like five minute sits, just like silently by myself for a really long time. And then when the group meditations that Lullabot had put on came like they started I really appreciated it and it was great to do it with a group. I felt very comfortable with doing it with fellow colleagues. I feel like that was a good way to start the practice. It was a good way to make it a habit. So I really appreciated that. I've never done group meditations in a group of people that I didn't know, and I haven't done meditations in quote unquote, real life. I've only really done them on our calls that we have. But I think that that laid a good foundation for when we started the 30 day the 30 days. And so, yeah, I jumped right on it. Went through the 30 days and I've been doing it consistently since. I have a let me see what my, streak is right now. It's like 105 days or something like that. 107 days. I've been doing it. So I've been doing it consistently since the first day of the, of the project. And yeah, I definitely see a difference in especially especially at work. Like I was saying earlier, I work for a really stressful client and yeah, it's like, not, I guess the client the client's not stressful. I'm not saying that, but the, the, the projects we have, the timelines are really stressful and so, yeah it...

Matt Kleve: A really stressful client whom we love, right? [Laughing]

Aubrey Sambor: Yep yep yep. They are fantastic. I love working with them. They're very great. But sometimes the deadlines can be a little a little tight and sometimes there's a little bit of stress. And so yeah, the app really, really helps with that. Just being able to sit and breathe, being able to go outside and take a walk and listen to listening to a meditation, being able to sit and listen to a meditation, because I will do a little bit of both. It's really, really helped a lot with especially the awareness part of the the awareness pillar has been really, really great. I think Juampy was saying that too, about, you know, kind of knowing what's going on in your body, like knowing what's what's going on when you're feeling the stress. And being able to kind of set, like, not set the stress aside, but knowing, oh, this is, oh, this is a thing that's stressful. Let me let me let me think about that or meditate on that for a little bit. Let me do some breathing to, you know, level set myself and things like that. So yeah, I'm going to continue on with the app for as long as I can. Hopefully I don't run out of practices and maybe I'll have to do them all again, I guess. But yeah, I it has added a lot of value to my life and I can I'm hoping to continue to meditate, whether with the app or without because it has actually become a habit for me.

Matt Kleve: So that's actually a good point. You said you've gone for over three months and nothing like you haven't run out of the end of content available to you. So that's cool.

Aubrey Sambor: Yep. And there's there's actually like a whole area of the app that's specific to work related meditations that you'd want to do that I haven't even looked at. So there's a whole other section of things I think those are probably things like if you're if you I don't know if you have a stressful commute, you can listen to this meditation while you're driving. Like, I obviously you through your car and not on headphones, but [laughing] yeah. I think those would be also beneficial to listen to if I get through the entire app. So yeah, there's a lot of information in there, so it's definitely something to check out.

Matthew Tift: I would say just or just add that there are over a year's worth of content on that app. That's how they describe it. And the center for healthy, or I should say, not the center for Healthy Minds, that's the research institution, the Healthy Minds Innovations has all kinds of clients, including school districts, including the military and big, big companies that everybody's heard of. Lots of folks are using this. And there is there's plenty of content that they're putting out for these different organizations. It also includes things like quarterly webinars on various topics related to Healthy Minds. There's there's a lot of information in there. And if you want to hear more about that, I'm just going to plug an interview that I did with Stephanie Wagner from Healthy Minds Innovations. I did that interview recently on Hacking Culture, and you could check that out if you want to find out more about the workplace aspect of this. Like just individuals can use...

Matt Kleve: We'll add a link in our show notes. Yep. Cool.

Matthew Tift: Individuals can use this. And I also would like to stress to if you like, if you use Calm or Headspace or Insight Timer, or you have your own group, you know everyone has their own ways of dealing with stress or burnout. Or if your thing is karate, or if your thing is sports or music or whatever it might be. This isn't supposed to pressure you to do that, but I but we can say now that this has been beneficial for our organization, and that seems to be consistent with what other organizations have found using this program. So I sound a little bit like a salesperson, but I'm trying to stick to being factual here.

Kris Konrady: I wanted to chime in on that, because I feel like I've used this differently than most of the people in this group. I did not use it as much. I went through the 30 day challenge and I just followed along step by step, whatever prompt they said do this one next, I said play. I have not looked around in the app. I've just followed the road you know, that they just placed in front of me so I didn't have to do any thinking. But I've also I've meditated in the past, I've taken a course, I've tried that on my own, and it's not my thing. I prefer yoga or gardening or, you know, something where even mowing the lawn, I don't listen to a podcast or or a book or music even when I mow the lawn, I just, I just mow the lawn with earplugs in and quiet, and I just think and I just that's, that's for me is my meditation. But I still like the app for, for these tools and habits that, that they were kind of teaching. And like I said, I used it right before this call just as a reminder, like, oh yeah, remember when you do that, like just even three deep breaths and then, you know, just observing your breath and taking five minutes to just chill and how much that helps.

Kris Konrady: And so I love being able to just open up the app and say, okay, I need something right now. So I'm going to just play five minutes. And for me, I've done pretty much all of my meditations active because that's what I need. So I'll walk or run on my treadmill and I'll listen to five minutes and maybe I'll actually play three at a time if I want to be on there a little bit longer. So then I get a lesson in there and then two meditations or something like that. So that's how I've used it, which is, I think different than other people, which is fine, right? Like we all get to use it, however, makes the best sense to us. And and then I put it down maybe for two weeks and then I'm like, oh yeah, remember that thing? Let's go practice that again and remind myself, how do I center? What's a new way? What's a yeah, good way to just remind that I'm I'm here and now, and everything right here and now is okay.

Matt Kleve: Very good.

Aubrey Sambor: Yeah. And that's one thing I really liked about the app, too. I liked that it didn't tell you, this is how you meditate. Like you can only do it this one way. There was a lot of. Yeah. You know, if you like, that's okay if your mind starts drifting away, just push, just get it back and that's it. Don't worry about it. I really liked that attitude, because I felt like it was hard for me to get into meditation initially, because I felt like I had to do it one certain way. But this app showed me that there were many different ways, especially having the option to do active meditation. So I really, really appreciated that about the app as well.

Matt Kleve: Juampy is there anything else you'd like to add as we point toward wrapping this up?

Juampy NR: Yeah, I was I was thinking how how these have made some mundane tasks, like doing the dishes or brooming the floor interesting. Because I'm like, oh, you know what? I'm gonna take these five minutes to observe my thoughts and breathe while I'm doing this, or simply paying a ton of attention of what I'm doing at each single second while I'm doing this task. And it builds up doing this, you, you you get to learn yourself way better and understand your feelings way better when they are just starting to happen, not when they are exploding. So it's really, really useful.

Matt Kleve: Marissa, any final thoughts?

Marissa Epstein: Yeah. Thinking back on, you know, why is this at work? I wanted to say it really made sense for me at work, similar to Aubrey, where we have stressful work situations, even with clients that we dream of. And then we get there, and it's just very busy. I found this to, I found that mindfulness really has been a great skill to bring to my work, and I used to feel like when I get really busy and I'm working a lot, I don't have time for this. And it was really easy for me to, you know, miss a meditation meeting. But when the app is on my phone and you start to get into it, what I found was those are the times where you need the break the most. And even if it's a short pause and it's it's really key. And like Juampy said it came most useful for me, not when I was using the app, but when I was reminded of something the app had told me at another time. So I'm rushing to an appointment and I just stop. And I note that I am rushing, and I take a deep breath and I reset a little bit. Or I'm about to go from one meeting to another and I stop and I reset and I take that 90 seconds. And so I find that it's really helped me breathe and that that breathing is really helpful at work.

Matt Kleve: Matthew, any final thoughts?

Matthew Tift: Well, I'll just add another plug if people are into this kind of stuff and you want to hear my voice more. I also have a meditation podcast that I put out weekly called Pretty Good Meditation. It's...

Matt Kleve: I love that name. It's it's so like Midwest of you. Like it's pretty good. Yeah.

Matthew Tift: Yeah. And I am from the Midwest and I'm proud. So I have a pretty good podcast and come check that out. I also have for the end of this year, if you're listening to this in 2022, every Tuesday at noon for the rest of the year, there is an open group, an online meditation group where you can come and listen to live meditations with me. And that is open to whoever they would like. And they can find more details about that at MatthewTift.com.

Matt Kleve: Aubrey, any final thoughts?

Aubrey Sambor: I'm trying to think if I have any more besides what I had just said about the meditation and how I liked it. Like. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to continue on with meditation and seeing what else it brings me and what how else it will help other people. So yeah, I think that's all I have to say about that.

Matt Kleve: Kris?

Kris Konrady: With my HR hat on, I would say that I'm just I'm glad that the team has found this useful. Those the team that wants to use it. It's available. It's available for everybody on the team and will continue to be. So you can start at any time that you wanted to. And it's just it's been neat to see the data, to see that it has been helpful for folks. So I like that. And then as part of the mental health working group, for us, it's been so useful because as Marissa said, it hits so many pillars in our mission statement. And so it just kind of allowed us to to really make sure that our working group time has been effective by implementing this tool. So that's been great to see because we've been working towards something for the team for a long time. We put out a newsletter and and we've tried to do some research into like what all is covered under our health insurance. And and we there are a lot of our projects and ideas become so big. And we do this in our extra hours every week. And so and we all have full time jobs. So, you know, we don't always get that moving along as fast as we would have hoped. So being able to find this tool that was a really easy implementation and could be made available to everyone that didn't have, you know, connotations with any specific kinds of therapy or anything like that, but yet was a really effective and useful tool. Just feels like a huge win for us as a working group, so I'm really happy with that.

Matt Kleve: Very good. Thanks for joining everybody. Really great. And if you're listening, and you wanted something about Drupal plugins or node access modules or something maybe we'll get back to that next week. But we talk a little bit about everything we're doing here at Lullabot. So this was this was good. Thanks, everybody.

Kris Konrady: Thanks for having us Matt.

Marissa Epstein: Thank you.

Juampy NR: Bye everybody, thank you.

Marissa Epstein: Bye all!

Matt Kleve: Bye.

Matthew Tift: Bye.

Kris Konrady: Bye.

[Intro music]