Guest guest Posted January 7, 2005 Report Share Posted January 7, 2005 An Ethnographical Perspective For the Alternative Health and Wellness Community Ethnography is an international, interdisciplinary forum for the ethnographic study of social and cultural change. It bridges the chasm between sociology and anthropology. It fosters work that pays equal attention to the minutiae of experience, the cultural texture of social relations, and to the remote structural forces and power vectors that bear on them. In general terms the study of what motivates specific behaviors and actions. Why apply Ethnography to the Alternative Health Community? There are new social and cultural forces that are aligning to this sector. The question is why. If we learn the answer it will most likely altered the approach to the market in dramatic ways. A Sector In Transition The greatest challenges facing the Alternative Health and Wellness Community today is understand why the enormous interest emerging from the mainstream audience. When any segment of society experiences a run up of interest, it is critical to understand why. The time is perfect to reexamine practice development strategies intended to position to align with the social and cultural forces, and take advantage of a pending market move. Move Equates To A Significant Cultural Shift What are the underlining social and cultural forces that have reawakened the primordial urge to tap into the holistic and esoteric modalities? All segments of the alternative health and wellness community have experienced an increase in interest and activity over the past five-years. Many segments have experienced huge economic gains most notable is the rise in Yoga, Spa Cultures, Healthy Living Segment etc. These huge increases are early metrics of a much larger move the general market is getting ready to make. When asked why the sudden move towards alternative health and wellness, no one seems to really know. Some believe that the shift is a direct result of an aging Baby Boomer generation fearful of getting older. Others simply define it as fashionable, or the latest trend. Still others believe that it is a result of a failing general health system. I would agree that the markers are real but I firmly believe there is something much deeper going on. Terms Related To Consumer Behavior Terms like Lifestyle Enhancement, Living Well Principles, Better Living, Performance Enhance, and Lifestyle Enhancement, resonate with the mainstream audience as these terms connote idyllic solutions. We have become a solutions seeking society. Specialization is critical in order to drive home the service features. The market is receptive if the service providers learn to align and democratize their message to fit the buying psychology. The critical link is to meet baseline needs that resemble real promise of a solution, while meeting the underlining social and cultural factors. As a society we are far more skeptical today, yet are receptive if we trust the source of information. Kinsman linkage is a term that defines how goods and services really sell today. A Kinsman is a trusted peer, mentor, ally, friend, or family member who has direct personal knowledge. The marketing industry has begun in earnest to capitalize on this anomaly by employing stealth marketing and stealth operatives in the market. How this impacts the Alternative Health Community is already in play. A full 86% of all new clients and patients come from a referral system. New practice management designs must be forthcoming if the market is to be positioned for dynamic growth. Understanding what motivates the buyer is mission critical for the Alternative Health Community. The way in which alternative health and wellness service will be presented in the near future will be far different than what you expect. I will share with you how we apply the art of Predictive Modeling to gain unique strategic perspectives. I have only enough bandwidth to define the broadest market characteristics in this writing. Change What if I told you everything you once believed about marketing in the alternative health marketplace was suddenly obsolete. What if I told you the mass market was moving directly towards your practices, yet a large percentage will miss the move. Conventional wisdom would tell you I am off the mark… that you are following your profession best practice principles…. What if conventional wisdom was wrong, what if the truths supporting the conventional model were suddenly different!! Change… is no more optional for the alternative health practitioner than it is for any other segment of society. Everything is in constant change. Status quo is a death sentence for anyone faced with the challenge of providing goods and services for the mass market. Unless you gain the key strategic insights you will develop blind spots, which will foster flawed truths and stymie your ability to navigate into the future. Flawed intelligence is far more fatal then poor cash flow. Alternative Health Care In The Greater Social Context The mission is to draw you away from the obvious and push you in the direction of the unseen. The purpose, methodology is simply known as “future proofing”. To provide you with critical social and cultural intelligence that will enable you to plan for reinvention. Exploring the unseen The future is hidden, much like the puzzle embedded in the Magic Eye graphic patterns that swept the country a few years back. What is curious about the Magic Eye puzzles is the image is always there to be seen, you just have to learn a different way of looking at it…and when you do, it is amazing how exciting it becomes. So it is with the future, it is there to be seen, if you have a way of looking at it. Man is not a finished product Strategic perspective emerge from researching how mans adaptive nature is influenced by measuring factors that shape their values, beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews and ultimately their behavior! What is clear is man is connected to the planet and its energy…mans evolution reflects the power of adaptive energy. In a society the size of ours, Mans collective energy becomes to the Country, what the mind is to the body. The body is tangible, the mind is intangible. If everything is alive, then everything will change. The cycles of nature and the energy of the planet are unrelenting, evolution moves forward ready or not. Core Beliefs and Values The rate of change prior to 1900 was slow. Man had a predictable sense of stability in everyday life, as time was measured differently than today. Time was based on for the most part by the agricultural influence of a society that heavily relied on it. Adapt to change or perish Case in point when we apply the change meter to business we can see it clearly. The business landscape is littered with thousands of companies, products and services unable to react, and adapt to change. · It would not have been a great idea in invest in the Buggy Whip business in 1900… Is it possible that great companies with the best and brightest minds simply were collectively asleep or just poorly managed… I think not, what happened to these companies, products and services is they simply failed to evolve at the rate required to survive. In short, it was their inability to move beyond conventional thinking and their preexisting paradigms to make the critical moves required. They were collectively locked into their success paradigms, trapped into believing that everything was staying the same. Today the entire Alternative Health Community is in transition; there is a new set of forces beginning to reshape its reality. There is an emerging new climate, one that will redefine your role in society. Rational Context Webster defines “Culture” as the arts, skills, knowledge, beliefs, and values of a given people in a given period…cultures are not forever. Man is adaptive and these adaptive forces are always in transition. Every society on the planet is comprised of what we call a S.T.E.E.P. model: Social, Technological, Economic, Ecological and Political. These five aspects are interchangeable in any society and they are a constant set of metrics by which we can measure and predict change. Through major seminal events the ordinary becomes shattered by an event in a sector that alters the norm. If a shift accurse in any sector it destabilizes the momentary prevailing culture and a new culture emerges. A critical insight!! Since 1900 the rate of change on the average American has been the equivalent to drinking from a fire hose. Every sector is in transition and the impact on man will be as significant as fire, wheel, farming had done to our ancestors. Only in the case of fire, wheel and farming there were millions of years in between the events. The Quickening: Speed has become a central metaphor around which our society has been reformed. Instant gratification has defined the competitive playing field by a consumer who expects and demands free, perfect, and now. Unable to meet the demands of the market and the market, “Chi moves away”. Speed…has altered old core values and assumptions. We have entered a time and performance compressed society. We make more decision in a month than our Grandparent made in a lifetime and that’s just with the remote!! The impact on human physic is enormous. If Speed was the metaphor for the second half of the 20th Century, and speed increased performance demands and expectations, the costs on man are clear and apparent. Life in is about multi-tasking. How many things can we get done in a day? Performance is the critical mandate and it matters not who you are. Our children are faced with huge significant performance pressure from the time they emerge from the womb, and the stay- at-home Moms have responsibilities that would make the typical CEO quake. Performance and productive living is magnified by an open capital based society where access to wealth is not restricted to a select few. We have a culture where Speed and Performance matter most! If you disconnect from that energy, you fall away from the human potential movement quickly. Stress related disorders are by far the most common emerging from the new competitive and new highly charged speed economy. The stressors are fears based of under performing and being left behind. Stress weakens the mind and kills the body. The Awakening So what’s really happening! Has anyone asked the question…why has alternative health and holistic practices suddenly become more mainstream. Is it just now that millions of people have suddenly awoken to the possibilities or has something else happened, something soft, culture, hard to define…something tacit. Like the magic eye if you look at the center of it you can’t see it, but if you look away and alter your gaze it becomes crystal clear. If I help you discover the truth you will be mandated to shift your perceptions. Man and his quest to survive As speed accelerates mans value and belief system begin to shatter. Old beliefs, values and worldviews morph into new views with foster new behaviors. My supposition is grounded into the fact that on some instinctive level, man still gets his adaptive signals from nature. Through the twentieth century, man began to experience a significant cultural polarity. Caught between the values of the past and the energy of the future. Man struggles to adapt to the performance mandates of today. Mans baseline behaviors comes from the last most significant social event… farming. 10,000 years ago man exchanged the thrill of the hunt for the security of the harvest. Mans technology of controlling agriculture outcomes by apply the laws of nature enabled them to settle down and take roots. Farming stabilized and civilized man. The effect on the nature of man was aligning man with the natural cycles of the planet and so there was a time to plant, a time to grow and a time to harvest. A complete social, cultural and religious calendar was established in support of the crops this culture has become pervasive. Man adapted. When Speed is introduced into the farming ecology stuff happens. Before man was the Farmer and he was a Hunter!! Mans deepest and most prevalent DNA is to Hunt. What is emerging is a society that better fits the Independent, Self-Reliant, Core Competent Hunter….he was hard wired to compete, and…. crop’s are not cunning. If you alter the conditions of survive the species will evolve Speed defines the new economy and speed has initiated man to tap into their ancient DNA of Hunter…. Hunters are wedded to their quarry; they most posses the physical, mental and emotional competencies to compete and survive or they perish. The Hunter understands innately the Mind, Body, Spirit connections. If Hunter was not Mind Body competent, he was eaten! And so we have it, the new energies on the planet are performance driven, that is not going to change anytime soon. So how do we care for a Hunter society that struggles with the performance mandates and how does the Alternative Health Community recognize and support a hunter culture? .. Now what does all this mean to the Alternative Health Care Provider? A lot. If you look at the man Hunter model you will see how this has manifested in society. You recognize that men are now directly competing for themselves. Independence, Self Reliance and Core Competence are not optional in today’s society. They are impacted by Hunter related maladies; winning and losing are always in play. There is no security but the security one can create by being competent in the moment. Hunter’s live in the impact zone! The hunt is demanding physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Man is seeking on a basic intuitive level, the comforts of realigning back with the forces of nature what resonates now is ancient natural Mind Body modalities Shaman and Healers were critical to Hunter societies. They provided the health care and well-being context that enabled the Hunter to perform. Today the Alternative Health Practitioners represent the potential to become the Performance Enhancement Community for millions of new Hunter types exhausted and disconnected from their core. The stresses of life in the 21st Century require ancient knowledge applied and delivered in a contemporary system. Today the Alternative Health Care Providers must support the unrecognized demands of the Hunter Society. To learn more about the Hunter Society and its implication to the Alternative Health and Wellness Community and the new best practice models you can to the Rosetta Newsletter or contact Lee Embley www.lee52245@... or directly 805-688-1484 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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