What is Global Wellness Day and how can you get involved?
Paul Gerrard, Happy Paul founder, Gerrard International director and Global Wellness Day ambassador, shares the importance of the day and how your business can get involved.
What is Global Wellness Day, and what are the main aims?
Global Wellness Day was started 11 years ago by Belgin Aksoy in Turkey. To put it simply, it’s a day you dedicate to wellness. The day is about concentrating on the simple things and spreading the message about self-care.
I think in recent years wellness has grown an association with being a luxury commodity and being inaccessible. Global Wellness Day really brings wellness back to the masses, sharing all the different areas of wellness that people around the world can tap into.
There are seven quite basic pillars: walk for an hour, drink more water, don’t use plastic, eat healthy food, do a good deed, have a meal with loved ones and get an early night, which are easy little changes in life that show how one day can make a huge change for the better, which you can then take forward.
For me, Global Wellness Day is not just one day, it is a marker for the rest of the year that shows how easy it is to incorporate wellness into your day.
This year’s Global Wellness Day theme is #ThinkMagenta. What does it mean?
Magenta represents positivity. It’s the official colour for Global Wellness Day and is supposed to help all focus on the positives rather than negatives.
#ThinkMagenta is meant to help us make little changes and look at the positives surrounding us all in what can, at times, be a negative world.
How can people learn more about the day?
There are some great resources available on globalwellnessday.com, which also has our manifesto, and brand identity and visual identity guidelines, which you can use to incorporate in to your own GWD promotion.
You can also visit @globalwellnessday_uk on Instagram, where we’re pushing out all the events that are happening and sharing how you can get involved.
How can UK spas and salons get involved?
By putting on their own events, and taking it out to the people that wouldn’t normally be within their four walls to show them that wellness is something everyone can take the time to do, whether that be sharing nutrition and healthcare plans or putting on an event everyone can get involved in.
You can do yoga or something involving food, but even things like decluttering are a great way to clear your mind, or even just going for a walk.
It’s not just for your clients, Global Wellness Day is a great way to build your team by doing a group activity like a staff walk, for example.”
Why should professionals get involved?
We’re in the wellness industry, it’s the space we occupy, and I think we have a responsibility to put that out and show that wellness is accessible without it costing the world.
As people who have been trained to perform certain treatments and methods that can make such a difference to people, it’s our job to make sure we’re putting that out there.