 Now, things in Australia have been pretty interesting lately. I think we're running the record on the number of lockdowns and closures worldwide. In Victoria, we're up to our sixth lockdown since March 2020, making it 210 days that we've been in lockdown. And despite this, the number of float centres around Australia have increased. We were less than 20 centres nationally in 2014. And today, if I just get that quick right, and today we're up to almost 200 centres for a population of 27 million. Over the last two years, floatation centre clients have been quietly starting a float movement in Australia. In this instance, the movement relates to carrying out a social change. Clients have been working individually to make float therapy available more broadly and paid for under insurance schemes. This movement has made floating practice available to individuals who can use it for healing and recovery. It's also created a new and real revenue stream for centres. So, just need to click on the right thing there. So, in terms of the client revenue potential, we basically have got examples of centres such as my own making about 25,000 a year, even though we've been in lockdown for most of the last 18 months. Now, one client can generate an average of $1,500 to $15,000 per annum. And in the last year, that's actually been seen to be true. Now, let me explain how we're doing this. In Australia, a jump to our health system, a set of insurance schemes exist. For the purpose of this presentation, I've called them national funding schemes. These schemes support various individuals under particular circumstances and they're funded through tax levies or insurance premiums that are compulsory to participating. So, there are five of them in total and the first one is the national disability insurance scheme which we call NDIS. This scheme is available to people between the ages of 7 to 65 if they have permanent disability. You'll be hearing a lot more about this scheme today. Then there's work cover which is our workers compensation system which is familiar to in most parts of the world. MyHCare is a scheme that basically supports people age 65 plus to remain at home with supports. And Veteran Affairs basically supports return service personnel. While a road trauma insurance supports individuals injured through a motor vehicle accident. So, two years ago the FTA started investigating how these five funds could be applied to float therapy. It gave us the opportunity to bring float to those most in need of recovery or to improve their quality of life. We knew there was an opportunity here but frankly we we didn't quite know how to get started. As each of these schemes they were based in legislation and had complex eligibility criterias. But as so often happens the universe aligns and brings us what we need when we need it. So, Melissa had been attending my float centre for a couple of months and paying for float sessions herself. She let me know that she was in discussions with the national disability insurance scheme to have float therapy included as a paid part of her care plan. This was perfect. We had a real live real-time case study. Now in parallel we began to gather stories from centre owners around Australia about their experiences with having floats paid for through schemes. We discovered that six out of eight states had clients already floating in a paid capacity not just for one scheme but for all five schemes. So these clients there weren't huge numbers but they were significant enough to demonstrate that this was possible. Individuals were successfully advocating for float therapy to be incorporated in their plans with very conservative insurers. Clients were demanding an alternative therapy and they were seeking float to be a complementary modality to their healing and their health. Clients were leading the way here individually, uncoordinated, unsupported. This was happening out of pure need. Need was the only thing that these individuals actually had in common. And remember this was happening in a context where float therapy was poorly understood by health professionals. There were no professional referrals and no coordinated advertising or education about it. Despite this individuals were getting their floats paid for. I honestly can't tell you how inspired and how excited I was by this. So if this is what individuals could do on their own uncoordinated, unsupported, it got me thinking about what could be done if we use the collective power of the FTA to build on the gap areas and support individuals to make it easier. Quite frankly I found an obligation to build on that change and to push the process and the systems to catch up with what the clients needs were. So we actually had to think about how we would tackle this and it was really clear that taking on the five schemes at once would be onerous and highly likely to fail. So the FTA committee took a strategic direction to focus on the National Disability Insurance Scheme in the first instance. As you could see it has a $25 billion scheme fund per annum and it has 400,000 participants who are eligible. This may not sound a lot to some of the people in the audience but in Australia that constitutes 1.5% of our population. So this clearly is worth pursuing. There were individuals in need and they would benefit from float to be incorporated in their lifestyle and their practice. So what we did from there is do some preliminary investigation about what it would take to actually qualify and we found that there were three categories for funding support and we found that we fit into the third one capacity building. Building independence and skill for individuals. This is what had been successful with the clients that had actually gone through the scheme. So we set about unpacking the rules further and we found that there needed to be an eligibility on a service that was to be delivered and there were 15 categories for the service and we found that we fit into number 15, improved daily living. So understanding this categorization helps cement that there was a genuine place for float therapy to fit into this scheme. We weren't trying to force a round peg into a square hole and nor were the people that had been successful just lucky. But just like any system there's always the barriers or the obstacles that make it difficult to progress. So we found that the NDIS personnel experience level in assessing activities that were in the gray zone was really difficult. We found that most of them couldn't really think outside of the really structured supports and systems that were available to clients most times. We also found that there was a bias of NDIS personnel in certain sections, departments and locations towards alternative therapies and most especially float therapy. I had a manager say to me that float therapy will never be included in the scheme even though we had the evidence that it was in other parts of the country. That there was a lack of community education about floating and that we only had a few float centers registered. At the time I think we had less than five actually around Australia and consequently the refusal rate for float was actually really high. The provider registration was also extremely complex and time consuming where applications could take up to six hours to actually do online. We also discovered that there were a lot more individuals that had tried to have float therapy included in their disability scheme and were refused than the numbers that were successful. So unpacking these reasons were really important to understand whether we still could offer something and we could overcome these obstacles and the answer was yes. So the way I'm going to outline what we did from here is by choosing, by outlining it through the eight step change model by COTA. This is actually a very popular model and some of you may have seen it before. So we've scoped the issue, clarified validity, worked out the obstacles. So the COTA model basically offered us an opportunity to step out what we needed to do and to what degree. Now creating urgency step one. Now the urgency was there. We needed to assist clients who were lining up at the door to access floats as part of their care plan and the second was actually creating a revenue stream to meet the demand in the market. The marketplace had a demand that needed someone to support it. Step two was to form a powerful coalition. We had this covered. The FTA was the obvious vehicle to coordinate the change. It was established and had it's all supposed to act and bring people together. Step three create the vision. So make float therapy available to the disabled schemes to support individuals to manage their mental health and pain. The vision of the change had already been created by the clients and it was been client led. There is nothing more powerful for a vision to be born than from that. Communicating the vision to the masses was our next challenge. We wrote to members. We outlined the need, the potential for revenue and we discussed it at the annual general meeting and had unanimous support that we should go in this direction. We also found that there was an increased level of inquiries at a centre level and so we developed an email template so that there was a more consistent approach to the responses. In this template for case managers we made links to research papers to the clinical float website and we also even supplied the code that the case managers could use to claim float therapy. We found that in the majority of cases this template gets people over the line. We also produced seven videos to educate and raise awareness and those seven videos basically were available made available on our website and were available to members to use in any way that they saw fit to generate increased education and awareness about the modality. They have been a great asset and any centre who uses them for their marketing has a direct link to increased bookings when they're actually advertising with the videos. So in power in action we basically unpack the process of eligibility registration and claiming. We systematically removed obstacles that made it harder to apply or accept float into the scheme. So typically these obstacles were about knowledge education and time. This resulted in the development of a how-to guide for the scheme targeted to member centres and it took them through that process of the application how to once you're a registered provider how to claim and then additional supporting material and resources. This basically was born out of a desktop order of government processes supporting documents and recording our lived experience of a handful of centres who registered to become providers and it's proven to be a really powerful tool. It's actually reduced the time for application online from about five to six from five and six hours to approximately two. So create the quick wins. We use the FDA and centre websites to raise awareness. We didn't have the funds to actually run campaigns marketing campaigns at this time and so we basically advertised on our website and centre websites to of the fact that these schemes were available and potentially could be accessed for funding. What this happened in what this created in turn were key words for Google searches around these products. It created interest from disability scheme case managers and clients alike. They would put in a search for NDIS and float and the centres who had this on their website would populate in the Google search. We also increased awareness about the fact that there were registered centres and encouraged people to be checking the registered central disability register where these providers could be found. So building on the change. This is where we are in the process right now. Our goal is to have 20% of centres registered of disability providers to cement floatation therapy in this scheme. 20% will provide precedent and depth that the activity is recognised and credible and the help guide is the tool to support that from to happen. The more centres that register the more normalising floating becomes. The next action to build on the change is to encourage centres to train in mental health first aid. This is a tactical way to raise the knowledge base in the centres and focus on mental health. The next step that we need to look forward to is review and evaluating the process and repeating it for the other four insurance schemes. So this has been two years worth of effort and the results are starting to be seen. The venture is worthwhile with 400 disability participants potentially out there as clients and the demand is real. So in March during one of my rare months my centre was open for six weeks we generated $5,000 in revenue through three clients that month and this was actually made up of cumulative purchases between floats infrared and massage because the other services we offered were then also added to the packages. We always charged at the casual single rate because the scheme actually only pays retrospectively after the client has actually received service and there's also an administrative burden to actually manage these clients and this is actually well accepted. We're not forced into reducing our costs or offering discounted rates. So this takes me to the second part of my presentation in terms of undertaking while undertaking this process for the scheme it highlighted the level of education and awareness we have continuously had to undertake with clients in relation to float therapy. The call on credible and the call on credible and published research was endless and it's never satisfying what we've got didn't seem to satisfy most of the inquiries that we had with the scheme. But float therapy has been in the wellness marketplace for over 50 years but we still talk about it as if it's a relatively new product. We need to better understand why that's so when new activities and products have been other activities and products in the wellness industry have been accepted so much more quickly. For instance Pilates is an example but in the therapeutic stream EMDR and tapping therapies. So they've all been in the market for under 30 years and yet they've got endorsement. We've been in the market for about 67 years since Lily pioneered his pioneered floating in the first instance but really in a commercial way we've been working through things since 2005 with a resurgence of popularity for float therapy during that time. Now in order to understand this I actually turned to ever Roger's research and he basically focused his research on the degree and speed of adoption of an innovation or new product by the overall population and what I found when we need to what he found I should say not me what he found was that there was five groups of people in the population when it came to marketing new products. I'm going to take the first two and deal with them as one innovators and early adopters. I'm calling these guys the enthusiasts they're 16 percent of the population they love new stuff they do not have to be convinced of new products concepts and behaviors they're there these are the people who took on tiktok and new games and they're the first to camp out to get the newest iphone or playstation. They are the first two groups that are the drivers of the new ideas and they take them on board and they want to be part of the story. These typically are the people we attract to float and they've been our mainstay clients for the last 30 50 years. The second group are the early majorities which i'm going to call the pragmatics. These are the people who basically take a look at the enthusiasts and and you know make a bit of an assessment about what's happening for them but in order for them to buy into the new product they have to have their own positive experience and they also need the recommendations of the enthusiasts in order to take it on to see the value that the change will bring. Now in float this tends to be those friends and individuals that members and committed floaters gift floats to or bring along for a float on their credits. Now the late majority they're another large group they're 34 percent of the population but these guys are more skeptical. They need more evidence to adopt to a change and they need all their t's crossed and their eyes dotted. They need to be convinced with evidence and testimonials that this is worth buying into. We don't see many of these people at in floating at the moment unless they're particularly touched personally by an event. And then we have the laggers. These account for 16 percent of the remaining population. This group are naysayers, skeptics, critics of process and need a whole bunch of evidence to convince them to move from the old to the new. These people are likely to still be walking around with their Nokia phones and owning fax machines and it's highly improbable that they're floaters at this stage. But the issue that we have is that we have a chasm where there is this really hard leap between the enthusiasts and the pragmatics. It's it actually takes effort to build a bridge between these two groups. And what we have is that floating is actually sitting here in the enthusiast realm. And it's been stuck there for some time. So in order to understand how we jump the chasm and we move between these two groups we need to turn to the marketer Jeffrey Morse who asserts that we need a disruptive innovation to make this happen to cross the chasm. We need the enthusiasts to convince the pragmatists but it's not until then that the product will enter the mass market successfully and we stop always being at the front end of educating and increasing awareness. For float to be broadly accepted in use and treatment we need to actually find our disruptive element, our disruptive innovation in float. So according to the research it is possible but it needs a concerted effort and I'm sure you have your stories where you've seen your pragmatists bring sorry your early innovators your enthusiasts bringing in the pragmatists. So how do we deliberately do that? So in order to to explain this I'm going to use Cotter's eight-step model again. So creating an urgency. We've got the urgency. It's the mental health recovery from the pandemic. It's across the world and it is here. It is a crisis but it can offer us an opportunity to increase the need of urgency and the opportunity that we shouldn't disregard. Former powerful coalition. We've got this guys. We've got the float collective is a very powerful coalition. We are a collective of collaborators who we're not competitors with one another. We're basically here because we love and we're passionate about float and we want to bring it to the masses. So we need to use the momentum that sits behind us as a collective that we have established globally which a lot of industries can't claim but we've got it. Let's capitalize on it. Let's create a vision for change. Now the vision for change is sitting there for us. The float community can immediately have a single focus on running a consistent global campaign on floating for mental health. Let's focus on one element, one component and one benefit for a period of time. And a long-term vision sits in the evidence. The good quality research organized to tell a story to fix a problem. We need the research that has large participant numbers that it needs to be compelling and it needs to be published in reputable science and medical journals. And then we need to have an intention of who to convince and who we need to convince of those with the highest influence with the greatest reach. And that's the World Health Organization in this field. I know they're not winning any popularity contests at the moment but we can't ignore that their influence sets the standard for treatments and modalities that are accepted worldwide. The treatment that the who endorses are supported by the medical and allied health industries and presently those industries are shy even embarrassed to be aligned or related to floats in any way. So we need to support the establishment of the float research collective to oversee the float research globally. It couldn't have come at a better time. Communicate the vision. This is a large-scale effort that can only occur when massive numbers of people rally around a common opportunity and the opportunities here to heal from the pandemic. And also the bushfires and also the earthquake were certainly going through something as in a global way at the moment. Now we can offer a way forward for people to heal and take control of their bodies and minds. And with focused effort I really believe this is achievable. So empowering action. This is where we need to look at some of the other things that are around at the moment who have seemed to get into the mass market a lot faster than what we have. So the EMDR was developed in 1988. They're endorsed by the WHO by 2013. Tapping therapy only evolved in the 1990s yet they're considered a highly effective treatment in terms of therapy trauma therapy and the not so new meditation. God knows we don't want to be waiting this long for therapy for float to be taken up. But you know they've been around for a while and but they've now been endorsed by the WHO but as a result of MRI and brain imaging machines that basically have convinced the conservative medicos that it actually does have the effects that the yogis and the gurus have been talking about for centuries. We need to learn from these experiences and we need to build this into our research moving forward. Now in relation to the quick wins I'm offering up the disability insurance scheme in Australia. It's an example that funding floating in conservative processes is achievable. I know there are other types of opportunities that you have in your respective locations and I encourage you to try this approach in your part of the world. Now what makes sense for you is going to be different. Maybe it is insurance funding or health schemes, grants, affiliations with hospitals, philanthropic trusts. Now some of these options we don't have available in Australia so you really need to understand and learn what your systems are and how they work locally. This will assist widening the population group that can float but it doesn't take away from clients that we already attract. So building on the change take an idea and expand on it as it relates to mental health in your area and I'm not discounting the power of the individual because God knows in Australia we saw the power of the individual we're here two years later because individuals took up the cause but the collective effort to support the individual can propel outcomes and breach impacts much faster. We need to be relentless with initiating change until the vision is a reality that we are in the mass population and we are understood as a modality. Using your float association in your respective countries a way to do that and if you don't have it form one. So making it stick. Now the way to make float stick globally is to have it acknowledged formally by the health and medical industry. This would propel us over the chasm that we're where we've been stuck for decades. This is the aspiration for the long-term vision. We need to plan it out understand the requirements of evidence and build our research priorities around it and if successful imagine the floodgates of having referrals opened up in the health and allied health fields and the and the platform that that brings flotation too. So let's get recognised and let's jump the chasm. People want to see in their lives we can tell that by the rate of centres opening around the world and in Australia we can tell because individuals are asking for a float in their hour of most need. The need to support mental health is escalating with the pandemic globally and the quietly and steadily won't cut it anymore it hasn't cut it to now. We need the passion and the effort of the float conference out in the world every day. So join me in getting us recognised by the who because individually guys we float but together we are un-stinkable. Thank you.