OK, yesterday in our top subjects for road warrior success, we mentioned taking care of Clients/Customers so we want to finish up today.  The best way we know to take care of Clients/Customers is that you need to take care of your self first.

If you are stressed, chances are your client(s) will be stressed.  So here are 3 simple but key things that help make our projects a success, will contribute to keeping you healthy (minimize stress) and will certainly keep clients very happy because these items help us out in the crucial times:

Contacts Sheet(s)

Even if you have joined a project at the last minute and had to make travel arrangements while racing to the airport, spend a few moments in your company’s marketing applications and get the key individuals’ phone #, positions and email addresses associated with this project and by all means, understand who the project’s sponsor is.  You might have to call an administrative resource if marketing applications are not available but get it done!  And continue to collect this information throughout the project because players will change.

At the beginning of every project, we always set up a contact spreadsheet with appropriate contact info (also make sure you also have cell #s or after hours #s) that somehow I end up keeping up-to-date.  Send this list out to project team members on a regular basis – it has saved us many a time so we keep doing it.

And the most crucial thing is not to just have this Contacts Sheet in a notebook or folder somewhere, but to make sure you input these names, phone #’s and email addresses, etc. into your cell or PDA tool.   It takes some time but in an emergency, you will be glad you have this information available in multiple places.  Save yourself some stress and grief and keep track of everyone.

Project Documents

There is almost always a trail of documents that leads up to the actual “Go” for a project and if you are lucky to receive a copy of those documents at the beginning of a project, you can begin to understand some of the history of why this project is taking place and possibly the deliverables required for success.

If your company doesn’t have a central repository for such documents, obtain them from the key sales and marketing resources and read them all before meeting the client face-to-face.  Even if you cannot locate these crucial documents, hopefully your project upline will fill you in on how the project came about and what the real objectives are.  You don’t want to meet the client for the first time and not understand their needs.  This is a major stressor!

Gatekeepers

Having been a gatekeeper early in my career, I can absolutely say, these are the folks who really run the company on many levels.  They know the politics, they know where all the resources (and bodies) are, they know the schedules, the underground leaders and instigators, they know the roadblocks and so on.  Keep yourself as stress-free as possible and figure out who these key resources are on day One or as early on as possible because they will save you when you least expect it.

Summary

In summary, these items will help you organize and minimize the mundane details that can really cause stress during a project.  You are going to be much healthier if you are not stressed.  This list (contacts, project documents and gatekeepers) is not everything we need to keep ourselves as stress-free as possible and our Clients/Customers happy, just the initial ones.

So, our next subject, air travel of which I am going to do more of today, will be focused on what we need to do to help you through air travel disasters and keep our Clients/Customers happy in that arena as well.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Mel

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, the rest of the holidays are upon us.  Staying healthy while that may not be the top priority for most of us, it can be a concern over the next few weeks.  So let’s explore staying healthy through the holidays (and we hope you don’t mind – we just had to add some color for the season).

Here is the list of what we think are the Top 10 Detractors from Healthy Living during the Holidays (not necessarily in this order):

1. Shopping (a stressor)
2. Family Get Togethers (a major stressor)
3. Eating too much (All those sugary, fattening Goodies)
4. Drinking too much (A problem for some of us)
5. Lack of Sleep (staying up late wrapping presents)
6. Parties, Parties, Parties (what to wear, why not invited)
7. Covering for Co-Workers on Vacation (and still having to do your own work)
8. Holiday travel (some of the worst travel days of the year)
9. Exposure to additional sicknesses/illness (from the above activities)
10. Spending too much (perhaps the worst stressor?)

So what can we do instead or at least think about doing to head off these calamities?  Here are our Top 10 Solutions for Staying Healthy during the Holidays:

1. Shopping (avoid Black Friday and Dec 26^th next year, shop early in the week during mid-day if you can, give gift cards – we love them and they are easy to do and very easy to wrap!!!)
2. Handle Family Get Togethers (hmmm . . . tolerance maybe?)
3. Eating too much (can’t help you here – we like all those goodies.  Perhaps eat moderately but we haven’t had much luck in that department.  Increase your repertoire of making healthy desserts?)
4. Drinking too much (Avoid the spiked punches and overly sweet drinks at least and find a designated driver)
5. Lack of Sleep (stay with your normal sleep schedule and rise earlier rather than stay up later)
6. Parties, Parties, Parties (the little black dress is always appropriate and clothes that can go from day to evening and if not invited, you might be the winner there so have your own party unless that’s a stressor too)
7. Covering for Co-Workers on Vacation (negotiate with your boss about what really has to be done)
8. Holiday Travel (leave a day earlier and stay a day longer to avoid peak travel days + this is also cheaper)
9. Exposure to additional sicknesses/illness (load up on your most effective anti-oxidants)
10. Spending too much (book travel well in advance, consider a holiday savings club for next year and layaway is back and a great way to budget your purchases)

That’s our list of issues and possible solutions.  We hope you have had a bit of fun reading our healthy holiday tips, healthy travel tips and general stress releivers.  Most of these activities cause distress which isn’t fun, so effective ways to handle stress like meditation, getting more rest and even increasing your exercise have been known to help.  So comment below and tell us your Top 10 Detractors from Healthy Living during the Holidays and how you handle them.

We’d love to hear,

Mel

So just how healthy are we going to be this Thanksgiving?  Well, we did go to the special grocery store down the road this morning to pick up a roasted turkey roll that came from a free-range, non-hormoned, not pumped up with solutions bird.  Does that count for healthy?  Oh, and does buying an already cooked roast help classify us as being green as well?

Not really but we’d like to think so.  We are also going to do the pumpkin cheesecake, the candied yams, the sausage-cornbread stuffing with oysters and turkey gravy and that’s all going to have to be heated up somehow.  This may not be a good example of healthy living. But it has to be healthy–we are leaving out the mashed potatoes and all that butter!!!

Well if you aren’t going to have the healthiest of feasts this Thanksgiving, then opt for a great and healthy travel day.

For all of you out there who are traveling this holiday to see family and friends, one of the best travel trips we can suggest is to take some healthy nibble food along because today is one of the worst (longest travel day, mostly late flights and crowded roadways) travel days of the year.  The only day worse might be the Sunday after Thanksgiving because it’s also the start of Hunting Season in many states as well as a major travel day.  Don’t be on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after 12:00pm noon that day if you want to get where you are going.

Now what do we mean by healthy nibble food?  Something we like to do besides take organic fruit is put really raw almonds (not the pasteurized ones), organic raisins and coconut chips, unsalted/raw sunflower seeds – all thrown together to give yourself a great trail mix.  This mix is a good way to curb hunger while flying and driving. 

There are also some great raw cacao bars being made these days (we plan to do a product review soon) that give you so many health benefits (read up on anything by David Wolfe) plus they taste great, impart that wonderful theobromine feeling of being in love and help maintain a high energy level.  Who would have thought there were healthy chocolate bars?  And I just heard about a new product–raw cacao brittle.  Have some of this on order – will let you know how it tastes after Dec. 15th.

And to get you through a long travel day, say your money and remain hydrated.  Checkout our earlier blog on how to have inexpensive and healthy water while in the airport (Click here).  Grab your filtering water bottle, your lemon or grapefruit essential oil and your liquid minerals and off you go.

So healthy flying or healthy driving and enjoy that maybe not so healthy Thanksgiving feast,

Mel

Hello everyone -

Just wanted to let everyone know why my other website disappeared this last week.  It seems that the title of that website interfered with another website’s trademark.  This was never our intention when we chose the site’s name.  And even though they are a clinic and do “doctor” and travel agency things like vaccinations and passport photos and we are nothing like that, rather than battle it out in court, we took that website down.  So we have spent the better part of the last 5 days completely re-constructing this new website.

I hope that all this change has not inconvenienced anyone other than us.  But enough about difficulties, we are about solutions here especially Healthy Living.  It’s another passion of ours that we now have broadened our focus to as a result of the change and of course our original subject Healthy Travel Solutions is still with us because you already know it is something we are totally focused on because we travel so much!

If you have not checked out our new Products page, you might want to see a new feature from Amazon.  It’s called a carousel which is simply another way of displaying healthy living and travel tip items on your website.  We have had selected some great items from all the things that can be purchased through Amazon and displayed it carousels.  We thought it is was kind of clever and searched for things we already own or know to have received mostly 4 and 5 star ratings from other purchasers.  It’s actually our ”Wish List” or list of some “Must Have’s” and over time we will go into more detail about items we have not reviewed yet on this site. 

There are 2 carousels on our Products page for your viewing pleasure.  Check them out here Healthy Living and Travel Tips Recommendations

In the meantime, we would love to hear about your healthy living solutions and anything you have found was a major travel help.  Join us in the re-launching of this site and about finding the best solutions.  We have added Healthy Living into the mix and we welcome your comments.

Thanks for hanging in there with us,

Mel and the Team

P.S.  A couple of other good things came from re-doing the site.  We feel it’s operating much faster and would like your thoughts on that as well, plus we ended up completely retyping the FREE eBook, Dealing with Flying Naturally, that we send you as a gift for subscribing to our healthy living and travel tips newsletter (which also had to be re-done).  The eBook magically went from 8 mb in size and was taking forever to download to about 4kb in size (so much faster).  So if you haven’t signed up for that gift, check it out here or send us a note through our Contact page and we will send you the new and improved version.

Did you know that while we have 24 hours in a day, our biological clock (i.e. circadian rhythm) actually runs on a 25 hour cycle?  I found this out while researching how to handle Jet Lag from crossing 3 time zones twice a week.  You see I was doing cross-country air travel East to West on Mondays and West to East on Fridays every week a few years back.  If you have ever done this kind of travel for an extended period of time (in my case it was for over 2 years), then you know what jet lag can do to your health.

Our circadian rhythm is in tune with the time of day, environmental factors and magnetism of the area and time zone where we reside.  This monitor tells us when we should eat, sleep and be active.  So when we change time zones, that internal clock can become out of sync or disturbed.  For me it was insomnia.

Other symptoms of jet lag can include nausea, fatigue, appetite loss, stress or anxiety and irritability but these are only temporary once you stop traveling.  It can take as many days to recover from jet lag as the number of time zones you cross but you can help to maintain your health and lessen the effects of jet lag by doing some of these simple steps:

• Sleep – If traveling West you can and will probably want to stay up longer, but train yourself to go to sleep earlier on your first night in a new time zone.  It goes back to the 25 hour body clock – we can naturally stay up easier than getting up earlier.  If traveling East, however, you need to go to sleep 1 hour earlier and wake up 1 hour later adding an hour to sleep/wake each progressive day equal to the number of time zones to be crossed.  If traveling across many time zones, I also try to arrive a day early to have time to adjust.
• Meals – Some people adjust when they have their meals to correspond to the new time zone prior to leaving.  A simple diet of fresh fruits (I usually carry-on an orange or an apple to munch on in the cabin) and vegetables chosen over heavy carbs, sugars and fats really helps and eliminate as much table salt as possible.
• Water – Keep yourself well hydrated with healthy water (see Oct 7th post on how to have inexpensive, good quality water at the airport) while in the airport and on the plane.  I also eliminate the alcohol, carbonated and tomato-based beverages which are loaded with sodium to avoid dehydration in the dry cabin air.
• Exercise – While exercise is very beneficial especially on the road, overexertion can add to our jet lag, so easy does it the first day or two in a new time zone.
• Other Remedies – If you are still suffering from physical distress, there are some supplements that can ease your distress (see my next post for a review of several homeopathic and alternative remedies for jet lag)

So by taking some preventative measures before the long trip, we can have healthy travel and minimize the physical distress from jet lag.  Please comment with some of the things you have done to minimize jet lag.

There should be something for just about everyone on this healthy travel blog eventually.  We are going to cover how to be healthy when traveling by cruise line, airline and RV as well as traveling by train or driven vehicle.   Just about any kind of travel you can think of.

Think of us as the BMW of Travel Health Sites–Healthy Body, Healthy Mind and a Healthy Wallet so you may even find ways to save on your travel here.   

But first I want to make sure that you all know this site is not about dispensing medical advice of any kind.  This site is about communicating and exchanging tips and hints of what helps keep us healthy when we travel.  There are excellent travel medical sites out there that do dispense advice but this is not one of them.  We may feature some tips from those medical sites here through links however.  Plus we encourage you to search for the other sites that do dispense medical advice if that is your need.

Welcome to the Healthy Living and Travel Tips blog! Why blog about being a healthy traveler you might ask? And who am I to talk about this subject?

This is my 14th year of full-time travel.  I can hardly believe it has been that long!  I am a business consultant who works everywhere but where I live.  So that makes me one of those road-warriors you see so many of in airports across the country. You know, those people shuffling a big heavy computer bag plus a carry-on, looking haggard and run-down, a cell-phone or two permanently plastered to their head, overweight and wandering around the concourse looking for anything close to fresh fruit.

I didn’t plan on this career, it kind of found me. And it was supposed to be exciting and glamorous!  But folks, traveling full-time is anything but that. It can be hard on your health if you allow it (and I did). If you can make it through security in one piece without losing any of your precious liquids, you thank your lucky stars that this leg of the trip is another one down. You often ask yourself “When am I going to NOT have to do this? How do I regain the health and vitality I had before I started on the road full-time while I am still traveling?”

That’s me. I am someone who has been traveling a long time, someone who will still have to travel for awhile due to the financial crisis and someone who needed to regain their health and vitality. I let some of mine slip away over the years.  But am regaining that health and vitality back!  And that’s what part of this blog is about–helping me and others regain their health and vitality back.

So the healthy travel tips I have learned through trial and error over the years I hope will be helpful for you no matter whether you travel only on occasion or are like me and travel way too much.  And I hope that you will comment and pass along some of your travel tips to the rest of us as we road-warriors (and occasional travelers) both need all the help we can get!