 Hi everybody, my name is Camille and I am the founder of the Float Spa based in Bryson and Hove in the UK. So I'm going to say good afternoon to everybody. It's 4.25pm my time, so I'm not really sure if it's still the morning or the afternoon where you are. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening from wherever in the world you are. So thank you for joining me today. It's an absolute honour to be here today and I'm really excited. So I want to start with a little bit about what the Float Spa is. So for the first time of doing any talk I don't need to explain what floating is, so that is pretty spectacular. So the Float Spa I call it is a well complete wellbeing centre. We're based in the UK in Bryson and Hove which is on the south coast. It's lovely right by the sea. If anyone knows where that is. So I have 3,000 square feet of space which comprises of eight rooms in total. I have three float rooms, an infrared sauna, three therapy rooms and a very large yoga studio. Pre-COVID would take 25 students and in January, so we opened the Float Spa in 2015 and in January 2020 I have created a brand new business and opened just upstairs called Float Training Academy which trains the future, the next generation of wellbeing professionals based in the UK. So I wanted to talk to start with a little bit about who I am and why I'm worthy of sitting in front of you today. So my name's Camille as I've explained I have, I first got involved with floating in 2014. Prior to that I used to work in a very very very stressful and busy corporate job in London. I got paid a hell of a lot of money to work incredibly long hours and be under immense amounts of stress and ever since the age of probably 12 I've always been super high powered, incredibly career driven, super passionate about what it is and what I'm into and it was mainly marketing. So I used to work in marketing agencies managing multiple campaigns, super busy, really really strict deadlines and I thrived and I absolutely loved it until everything changed until I didn't. So I loved my job I used to get up, be out the house six o'clock in the morning, get home, seven, eight o'clock at night, didn't ever think that that was not normal. I had my daughter in 2013, she's the one on the left hand side, Dali and obviously your life does change a bit. Most likely I went back to work a little bit soon and my daughter in 2014 got very sick and I mean very sick. In the UK we say like she was blue-lighted to intensive care and we were told to prepare for the worst. Now when you have an 11th month old baby preparing for the worst that's not great and that's not brilliant but this is a photo that was taken a few months ago and she's absolutely fine now. You would not have a clue that anything happened to her other than what happened. Luckily or unluckily she had three colds, croup, broncolytus, a bacterial infection in upper airway. She was really sick but she bounced back and it's very interesting that we're in Covid because her immune system was hit so badly in 2014 and actually ever since then we've been so obsessed with enhancing immune system so we've learned a lot and hopefully we are fully prepared for any Covid outbreaks in our household or anything like that. But anyway so that's when my journey began. I left work at three o'clock on a Wednesday and I said left everything on the table. I said don't worry I'll be back tomorrow we're just going to take my daughter to hospital, she's not feeling very well. I walked back in the office four weeks later and everything around me in the office was exactly the same but something in me had changed. We just spent all this time in hospital with our daughter being so sick kind of clinging on to her dear life and I walked back into that incredibly stressful busy chaotic environment that was work and that was normal and I'd operated normally for such a long time in that environment but something else flipped in my head and you know stress what I used to think was commonplace but actually the very reality of it that as I know now and as most float centre owners know and post people that float regularly actually that's not good to operate on such high levels of stress all the time and when I went back to work and the reason I chose to go back to work is my husband and I we decided so when my daughter got out of hospital and we were told very specifically she should not be in a public place for at least six weeks she cannot go to nursery she cannot go to the supermarket she cannot go anywhere busy you need to protect her at all times now you need to protect her why her body fully recovers from the trauma it's gone through so as parents we did that and my husband hated his job and in the later towards the end of 2014 we were always planning for him to open his own business and we prepared for it and everything like that and so it was a no-brainer I earned a lot of money and I could sustain the family opening his new business once he had a suitable amount of time with our daughter to look after her and I take him eternity leave so I thought well why not he can enjoy some time with her and that would be great I went back to work and I remember walking back into the office so vividly that day that I went back and all you know it was chaotic and this brain shift something had happened in my head I'm aware of that fully aware of it now but at the time when you're in that midst of chaos you don't really realise that and I went back to work and over the next few weeks I just did something that I's never done before and that was I started failing at work I my concentration was all over the place I kept forgetting things I just became useless and I remember sitting down with my boss and she was like what is going on and I was like oh no you know I've just got I'm just so busy it's just there's so much on and when I looked at the volume of work I was doing then was probably a spec what I was used to doing but I started to spiral very quickly into a very dark place and a few months later my dad came over to visit and turned around to my husband and said to him what is going on with Camille and he said oh this is a really good day she's out of bed on a weekend you know she's normally too tired to be able to function and I also in this midst of crazy as I call it started to reject my daughter I felt that it was my fault that I should have protected her more and I started to reject her and you know become in a spiralling state of depression and a few weeks later I went to the doctors and was diagnosed with PTSD as a relation to my daughter's illness anxiety and depression and as a lot of us know is the conventional recovery from PTSD is either some antidepressants and CBT or therapy or just wait it out and I didn't have much time because it was getting really bad and I have come from a family that I'll have dependency with antidepressants so I knew that that wasn't a route for me so I was kind of like in this cycle of like what to do and my dad sent me this book this book changed my life completely radicalized my life and I don't need to explain what floating is for the very first time but he sent me this book we had a chat on the phone and he said just go and have a float it might really help you while you wait for therapy and so I went for a float I hated it and I didn't read enough of the book before I went for a float and I was like pretty much a lot of people that come to see us at the float bar is they think their life is going to change with one float I mean in a way it did change but I suppose I just expected the magic to happen and the people that come in and that magic does happen on the first float sometimes I have slightly envious but at the end of the day magic didn't happen I just got very bored very agitated I wasn't really very aware of being alone with my own thoughts but anyway I also really didn't like the place that I went to I have major cleanliness standards in this place wasn't very clean and I went I came out my dad went that was useless you know whatever and said please go back for another one just go somewhere else find somewhere else so I couple of days later I went to a different place a place in East Grinstead and it literally blew my mind and for the first time in months I was able to relax and let go and all the benefits of floating that we now find happens the process started in that second float it was clean for a start and then I was completely hooked I floated everywhere I went anywhere in the UK I could find the float just to see what it was like was there a pod that was different was there a cabin what was it what was what was happening to me because something happened and I didn't realize what was happening I had no intentions of ever leaving my job and changing my life but things started to happen and about the third or fourth float and I rang my dad and went I can't work in this job anymore and the job is stressing me out I want to leave my job and he said okay what do you want to do I went I want to open a float center and he said okay you hated your floating the other day and now you want to open a float center and I said yes I think there isn't one in Brighton Hove and I can do it my background was marketing and specifically I used to help people market gyms leisure centers spas hotels so the industry that affected that the floating can sit under I knew I could get people through my door I just needed some money and I needed to find the right location so in the October of that year I decided with great pleasure I handed in my notice in what we call in the UK and I decided to start this journey of opening a float center and in all of this crazy and epiphany I now come to love talking about change and helping people understand why people make such radical changes I love changing things and in I and my husband and I've been together for 12 and a half years I've probably had 150 hairstyles every time I get a head shot and about three or four months later my hair is completely different I change the way I look I change you know the furniture around my house I change everything and I also change the way that we run our business not badly but you know I'm constantly improving I think that if we constantly improve we just get a better version of ourselves so I then started to as well as open the float bar I started to become really fascinated by why people change and my dad ironically is a huge supporter of mine obviously you'd expect that from me father but you know we never had the best relationship growing up and actually in our adult life we've grown this relationship and cemented it and and he would always say to me he hates change so he's had the same hairdresser for 35 years he's actually had the same job for his entire life you know he doesn't really change but then over recent years he's made radical changes he's lost a lot of weight he's drank less he's stopped smoking and together we've I've spoken to him so many times about why he makes that change and actually by him now understanding why he makes that change he actually makes more change so this is one of my favorite subjects and it's very weird to not have people's faces when we're doing it on zoom or an audience feedback but anyway I'm going to hopefully you enjoy it as much as I do so why do people make change now if you think about it I don't think anyone's been to float school after sixth form school or after college in the UK we don't go to school go to secondary school then go to college to study floating and then open a float business it doesn't happen so pretty much everyone might have had their eureka moment or their epiphany of finding floating and then making that decision to change so I listened to Vivian earlier just earlier on I know Vivian she's amazing and listening to her story and her story has a catalyst a catalyst a trigger to change so it's really interesting the more float center owners I speak to or know something forces them to make change so let's look at the start like what types of change are there well we can drink less we can earn more money we could change to start a family you want to have an exercise regime you want a new career for pain relief whatever it is there's so many different types of change so what is that and how does change work now about three or four years ago I found or I was introduced to this model now and this is a behavioral scientist there from Stamford and his name is BJ Fogg and he has created this behavior model and I absolutely love it and when I explain this to clients they really resonate with it because it's actually really easy to do and as a float center owner if you understand why people come to you in the first place it will help you convert them into long lasting clients um when I was approached or when I heard about that you were flipping the conference and doing it uh that we often the option to be digital and also have UK speakers and then you um I was asked if we had any float stories of our clients and it's something we've started to to build up actually and um I've been listening to some of the journeys that our clients have had and some of our clients actually floated for us when we first opened our doors five and a half years ago and they're still part of the journey and listening to their stories is just amazing and the fact that they some of them pick this model out it shows that what we're doing works so BJ Fogg's model believes or his idea and his thought and all the research that he's done states that in order to make behavioral change is there needs to be motivation of course there needs to be motivation you need to be able to do it because some change might not be possible to do you might want to climb Mount Everest tomorrow and change to do that but actually that's not very easy to do so you need to have a level of ability and then the final thing that reinforces the motivation and ability is something called a trigger or a prompt or something that forces you and reiterates the change the motivation and ability so let's look at the next slide because this should hopefully explain it so let me give you some examples if you take the the change habit of you want to change and give up smoking day one right i'm putting the cigarettes across the other side of the room i'm not smoking today you might bin everything wash them down the sink whatever it is so you've got rid of them so motivation is really high i'm really motivated to give up smoking then as the motivation becomes harder to do so day two and day three is that has an inverse reaction so as it becomes harder to do and motivation starts to dwindle it then becomes harder and then most likely you fail so let me just rephrase this example again so a pregnant lady wants to give up smoking so we have something else playing a part in this model so we're really excited we find out we're pregnant yes i'm pregnant now i need to give up smoking okay we've got to give up smoking so now we find that motivation is really high we really are motivated because we want to protect that baby then my unborn baby we need to protect my unborn baby at all costs and it's easy i've washed all the cigarettes away i'm not going anywhere near any of the cigarettes and then we have this trigger i'm pregnant that reinforces the motivation and ability meaning that lasting behavioral change will happen because we have a trigger to do it so how can we improve motivation so we can tackle all the demotivators that's easy as that stress is also a massive one of them this is why floating is so good at helping change because if you make it easier or people's coming into you for for change they come in they you make it easy for people to change you just need to come every week or every month you can make stress easier by floating regularly i want to talk about baby steps at the end if i've got enough time um which i know i'm running out very quickly um and you know floating you helped to calm your mind ability we need to make it easy for for do so we don't want to have something that's too demanding do we think about it you know if it requires a lot of effort then people are going to just fail but floating requires no effort at all so it helps people make lasting change and i want to just talk about triggers because in a world that a perfect world i wish in a way i'd never found oh sorry i wish that i had found floating but i had never had a trigger and i wish that we could live a perfect life when we don't have these triggers or traumatic events or grief or loss and you know the amount of clients that we get in at the float bar and so many of them have gone through such huge traumatic events and the reason they've gone through traumatic events is because life happens could we have you know could i have never taken my daughter to nursery and kept my daughter at home so therefore she wouldn't have picked up any viruses yes i could have done that but because i was career minded and because we needed to have an income coming in that life wasn't an option but the changes that made on the back of it happened and i now spend way more time with my daughter i am way less stressed i am so much more happy so the time that she gets is so much better because of those triggers that have happened also from an owner point of your business owner point of view and a float center owner is seeing an offer or relating offers to help people make change signing up to a newsletter making these things easier joining a program i know there's maximum floats that are here at the conference and they're amazing program consultation model which is just lovely and seeing making things easy making the program easy for people to understand help people make lasting change this is one of my favorite business theories this is a japanese word i've stolen it this is not my word it's a japanese word and i read an incredible book by julian richer and then the book states the book's all about continual improvement and as a business owner i'm continually improving i put in feedback things i want to know everything that my client thinks the amount of time we spend with our clients talking to them through their journey taking them on the next stage of their journey you know when they come in it's like so valuable to understand why they are here and once you understand who they are as a person the next stage of the journey they will become raving fans as people always say they will support you they will help you find the next client they will be there supporting you during covid when you're locked down and they will still keep their direct debit going because they are begging for you to open their email you can do to ask you when you're opening and you know they are the ones that are there and the reason that we're so good at it is because we always improve i love change love it totally i think it's the best thing we can do as human beings and as float zentronas always learn always improve and always connect with your clients it's been an absolute honor and a privilege and yes thank you so much for your time