Alexandra Davids from Inside 80 has created a unique energy improvement system, not only good news for your work but great news for your home and social life. She teaches people about their personal physical profile and how to use it, like a professional athlete, to build to key moments in their business year without having to give anything up in their lives.
In part two of this three-part series, Alexandra explains the pitfalls of peak performance and gives tips on how to strike that magic balance.
Alexandra Davids of Inside 80 'The Performance Zone'
Personal boom and crash cycle
Most people know that overdosing on adrenaline at work and then expecting a holiday to repair the damage doesn’t work. How many of us have longed for that break, only to fall ill while we’re “relaxing”? Although we know this adrenaline-crash-adrenaline cycle doesn’t work, many of the services on offer continue to reinforce our patterns of behaviour. This means performance sustainability remains a dream rather than becoming an everyday reality for most busy and stressed executives.
Sustainable performance needs to start in the workplace and is rarely achieved by focusing only on fitness. Instead of improving efficiency at work or becoming healthier, we need to take an “and” approach that delivers both parts of the sustainable performance goal.
When faced with the suggestion of doing both, people generally tell us: “I don’t have time to fix my health because I’m so worn out from work!”
In this common chicken and egg conversation, where should people start?
Spiralling up or down
We suggest clients fix their work situation first, which will reduce their stress levels. This first fix saves time and creates the headroom to improve an individual’s health. Better health in turn provides more energy to work even more efficiently. The individual ends up in a positive spiral instead of the negative spiral of over-work interspersed by inadequate recovery periods.
True work-life balance only comes from getting your body into balance at work and therefore our solutions apply health concepts to the workplace. We don’t rely on encouraging people to get fit and hope this somehow reduces their stress at work.
Combining the approach to “work” and “fitness”, instead of keeping them in separate boxes, is what delivers sustainable performance.
Using our Inside 80 indicator, we help clients understand their body’s natural pace. Do they tend towards the fast (100) or slow (0) end of the pace spectrum? For example, do people prefer to complete each task in sequence (slow-paced), or prefer to work on several tasks at the same time (fast-paced)? Neither approach is better because both individuals will finish the whole job at the same time. They just go about their work in different ways.
There are fabrics that make you stop in your tracks and make you want to rip them off someone else’s body. Others just make you think of childhood memories, dreams and things left behind. Some creep up on you, bringing up sensual thoughts of textures that have only been imagined and are somehow brought to life and become art.
The emotional and narrative qualities inherent in the creation of textiles is something that Arantza Vilas, London-based textile maker and founder of Pinaki Studios, has carefully woven into a successful design career. Stiglitz caught up with her and asked a few questions about what inspires her and some of the incredible projects she’s brought to the big screen, catwalk, storefront and so much more.
Stiglitz: You’ve taken textile to a whole new medium. Tell us how your work can be used in three-dimensions, or beyond just fabric for the sake of itself. How are you breaking the traditional textile mold?
Arantza: Textile is a huge field, it can cover surface decoration, material development or more traditional uses as fashion or interiors. My approach looks at all those other possibilities and in particular how textile that is part of a particular narrative can inspire more practical uses. So an installation piece can be the inspiration for a collection, fashion props, or bespoke fabric for a costume.
To give you a more concrete example, I am currently preparing a project where my conceptual 3D textiles have inspired a collection of pleated fabric for luxury interiors.
Specialist textiles for Skellig, by A.K. Hankel, a film produced by Nick Hirshkon for Feel Films Productions. Costume design by Phoebe de Gaye.
Stiglitz: Tell us what it was like to work on the film Skellig. It must have been great to make costumes for such an accomplished actor. Did you have contact with him whilst making the textiles? How did you make them look so worn in? How is the medium of creating textiles for cinema different than fashion, because you are making something that is meant to be seen in two dimensions, on the cinema screen, as opposed to real life?
Arantza: Skellig was a great project. It’s exciting to think that my work has helped a great actor to create his character.
I was given a brief and discussed the script with Phoebe (the costume designer). She had a clear vision and some technical challenges that we had to resolve (such as the visual and tactile quality she was looking for), and there was some time for research and investigation on the fibers we wanted to use till we achieved it and tested it.
Costume designers have different criteria than fashion in their design process because they have to respond to a story, so it’s not just how the fabrics are going to be seen but also how they are supporting a character. And then how the scene is going to be filmed, whether there are close ups and what quality the textures offer … in film the criteria is different to theatre and different to fashion, the subtleties are fascinating.
Collaboration creating experimental interior surfaces for Based Upon.
Stiglitz: Talk about your collaboration with the luxury interiors company Based Upon. How do you intend your fabrics to be used inside the home, and how do you approach designing or decorating that space?
Arantza: I collaborated with them given certain aesthetic similarities and we developed some work together. We worked together on some experimental textiles and they made a surface with one of my fabrics. Apart from that collaboration I have developed some panels to be used in interiors. My aesthetic tends to be a bit theatrical and I am interested in adding some drama to spaces some touches of richness, contrast of material and visual qualities.
Presentation of Souvenirs Entomologiques, gigantic textile insects invaded the B Store boutique on Savile Row. Photograph by Michele Panzeri.
Stiglitz: Souvenirs Entomologiques is a project that is at once fragile and strong. Tell us about the inspiration behind this design, why insects, and the fabrics used, and colours and patterns?
Arantza: Souvenirs Entomologiques looked at the lifecycle of insects in parallel to textile processes (the rough spun of caterpillars that transform into delicate butterflies). Insects are very inspiring creatures, they have exoskeletons and their structure informs directly upon their visual aspect, and I find that very inspirational and interesting, and the colour are so amazingly rich: iridescent, metallic, they are like armour in miniature.
Edition of textile envelopes for the University of the Creative Arts.
Stiglitz: Did you always know you would be a textile designer, and when is the first time that you really fell in love with fabric?
Arantza: I studied Fine Art and the Textile design at Central St. Martins, and I have always been interested in textiles. When I was three we used to go camping I would get very excited when we had to set up the tent because “we were putting the cloths up!”
Stiglitz: How does London as a city inspire you to create, and how does your identity and cultural background inform upon your work, and what else inspires you to be a creative maker on a daily basis?
Arantza: London grabbed me at the age of five when I first came with my parents. I like its intensity, its multiculturalism, its complexity, it keeps you on your toes, as tiring as that might be sometimes. My cultural background I suppose has an indirect influence on my work, but I am not that conscious of it. It is all the other things I am interested in that inspire me: cooking and food and the chemistry behind it, architecture, people, my friends and family, the sea, markets, quiet backroads, my colleagues, theatre, science, cinema and dance.
Sustaining Your Performance ‘Inside 80’ for Better Health
Alexandra Davids from Inside 80 wants you to stop feeling too tired for family, fun and business. That means that performing at ‘your best’ does not mean running around at 100 miles an hour. Her company helps people with work-life balance, and she was kind enough to talk to Stiglitz about peak performance and when to naturally speed up or slow down.
In this three-part series, Alexandra will explain the pitfalls of peak performance and give tips on how we can strike that magic balance.
Alexandra Davids of Inside 80 'The Performance Zone'
Many of our clients come to us looking for answers to the tough question: “How do we sustain performance in our business?”
Either/or approach
Most people know how to work at a high level of energy, commitment and effort. But we also know that we can’t do that consistently day in and day out. Today’s world is moving so fast, how do we sustain our performance?
Companies tend to take an “either/or” approach to this two-part question of “sustainability” and “performance” by focusing either on people’s performance or on their health. Some companies will redesign the organisation, its processes and procedures, and perhaps introduce better time management to improve work efficiency.
These tactics may succeed at lifting performance, but rarely deliver the combined goal of performance that is also sustainable. When companies realise the gain is only temporary, they often shift their focus to people’s health instead.
These companies share a common belief that if people become healthier, they’ll automatically become more efficient at work. This concept seems to make logical sense, which is why a whole new lifestyle industry has recently sprung up around the idea.
Try and keep up!
Many of these lifestyle firms employ ex-sports people to help promote personal health programmes. But trying to apply an athlete’s understanding of their body to the typical busy executive can be difficult. The difference between the super-fit sportsperson and average executive, with a packed business schedule and family commitments, is often far too great.
In spite of the difficulties, many executives try valiantly to become fitter because they know it makes sense to keep in shape. But this exertion can come with associated personal costs.
The executive eventually reaches burnout if they’re only improving their fitness to push themselves even more intensely at work. Getting healthier doesn’t fix their underlying problem of over-work.
The exercise feel-good factor creates a false sense of extra energy, which the individual uses to work even harder. At such an intense work level, they can’t sustain their performance in the long term.
There’s something magical about a couple that is perfectly in-synch. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it. It’s a certain comfort level, an easy exchange of ideas and inspiration, and they just plain work.
New York City’s got Raylene and Mike, and I was lucky enough to catch up with one half of the couple (Raylene) about how life (and love) feels from up there, and how that translates into art, cooking and karaoke.
Stiglitz: You quit your jobs and spent your savings to open up Baby Grand, a gem of a karaoke bar and tiny art gallery in downtown NYC. Is Baby Grand your baby, and what made you take the leap of faith to realize your dream?
It was a combination of things really. On the one hand, most of our friends are having human babies and we almost never see them after that. On the other hand, we were using the karaoke experience as cheap therapy to let out all the tension of the professional city lifestyle. There’s a deeply seeded human desire to invest in a project outside of oneself and put it into the world. Whereas many find this satisfaction in reproduction, we offered up our bar Baby Grand to the city as another valve to let off some creative steam…and meet new friends.
Stiglitz: What inspires you, what gets you up out of bed in the morning?
Getting out of bed in the morning isn’t exactly my forte. I’ve always been a night owl and find myself up into the wee hours of the night all too often. Either the quiet little hours of artistic focus or the exact opposite with the Baby (Baby Grand) up all night laughing + singing. It’s usually Mike’s fantastic morning energy that pulls me from the slumber…and the smell of sweet coffee he puts by my bedside.
Stiglitz: How do you work as a couple, and how is being a couple part of your work?
Neither of us felt compelled to get married as part of our life plans. This changed when we met and dove into an intense inspiration exchange. We knew we wanted to work together in some fashion. Mike may have had multiple careers as mathematician, programmer, lawyer and finance guy but he’s always been, at his core, a creative holistic thinker with a gift for analogy.
My role as an artist may be more readily apparent, but he has contributed to every architecture, design and art project to suss out the most elegant solution. It’s a balance and spark kind of relationship.
These days we mostly take turns at the Baby, have wonderful “Babysitters” and split behind the scenes duties. Since they rarely see us together at the bar, some folks worry that we don’t spend time together. We spend all day together! …which is part of what inspired Mike to take up the creative kitchen tools.
Stiglitz: What sort of art are you making these days?
My art is undoubtedly influenced by my architectural background. For years, it depicted fantastical urban scenes wherein nature, animals and wild style colors overtook carless streets. In the past year, I’ve been taking these themes and translating them to building scale. Vividly colored geometries have been creeping up the windows and walls across NYC.
Each installation has grown in scale. I have a studio in our heroic tiny apartment which I use to plan my attack before renting the use of a silkscreen studio as needed. As the last one covered 165′ x 16′ of window across the street from MoMA, it absolutely required the generous help of an All-Star Assembly Crew. I laid out one of the 33 panels in my living room as a mock up and we were stuffed into the edges of the room.
My dream projects involve interjecting the experience of art onto unusual everyday canvases – redressing the windows of a banal condo building, creating an inhabitable billboard garden or curating an art train. I may one day paint the whole town red if they let me.
Stiglitz: Tell me about Mike’s famous and fantastic breakfasts.
He’s a wizard! He’ll go through phases exploring the limits of familiar brunch elements. There was the french toast phase in which all bread, pre-packaged cakes, cereals, cookies and savory concoctions were soaked in egg, pan fried and served with a surprising sauce.
Lately, it’s been experimentations with loafs containing meat, veggies, cheese or whatever was in last night’s leftovers with an intuitive sense of how much flour, egg and baking soda to add to get the right consistency.
There’s the thrill of not knowing exactly how it’s going to turn out since he bakes blind, but each one is better than the last. It’s usually the best meal of the day, lovingly prepared and shared together while everyone else is working.
Research shows that 74% of customers would rather buy from a company that makes decisions based on concern for society and the environment. But how much do they really know about the social responsibility of their suppliers and business partners? Where is the measuring stick. Enter Social Enterprise Mark.
Until now, a bit of marketing spin on a website or design on a product gave one the warm and fuzzy feeling that their dosh was going to a good cause. That’s all changed as companies can now get an official badge of approval, with the Social Enterprise Mark, the only certification authority for social enterprises.
It all started with RISE, an organisation that promotes social enterprises in South West England. A strategic leader for the sector, they uphold values such as credibility, accountability and trust in the businesses they count as members. After having successfully piloted a Mark in their corner of the UK, they decided to partner with Social Enterprise Coalition to launch the Social Enterprise Mark on a national level.
It’s all well and good that a Mark has been created, but how stiff are the regulations for who gets in and who gets told to try harder? The Government defines social enterprises as “businesses with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners.” The Social Enterprise Mark has quantified this with strict guidelines that a company must adhere to in order to qualify, along with an independent Certification Panel that gives the final stamp of approval.
The company must have social and/or environmental aims, spend at least 50% of all profits on socially beneficial purposes, and if it ceased trading, remaining assets would be distributed for social/environmental purposes. These standards will not only serve to promote social enterprise in a larger business context, but also raise the bar for existing companies that would like to move into the social space by giving them solid benchmarks for achievement and purpose.
The Social Enterprise Mark is creating a network of businesses across the UK, which helps consumers vote with their wallets and promotes companies doing good for their communities who may also want to trade with each other.
Nigel Kershaw of The Big Issue endorsed the Social Enterprise Mark: “The Big Issue was set up to find a business solution to the social crisis of homelessness. We are proud to be a social enterprise, proud to be part of a movement and the Social Enterprise Mark on our cover tells our readers just that.”
Ben Moss of Bristol Wood Recycling added: “The Social Enterprise Mark will help us when we are approaching private sector clients, such as construction companies. The Social Enterprise Mark will give them confidence that we are genuinely socially motivated. We see the Mark as key in identifying ourselves as unique and legitimate in a very competitive field.”
Clara Breen had a problem. What others see as bits of paper to clean out of bags and back pockets and stow away in drawers, she finds utterly precious, sentimental and meaningful. So she took your tube ticket and turned it into wearable art. Leaflets and transport stubs are her fodder, and jewellery making her craft.
Breen plays between the lines of treasure and trash, meaning and chance, incorporating colourful found paper into handmade silver pieces that are at once poetic and divine.
She holds tight to the emotional power of memory and weaves it into her work, explaining, “We often keep hold of train tickets and photographs to remind ourselves of a past experience. Combining these with silver, I play with the notion of preciousness, reinterpreting the keepsake.”
Utilizing colours such as cobalt blue, lime green and fuchsia, Breen follows the shape of her brooches, necklaces and earrings with paper strips in a style that could be described as deconstructed origami.
A strong focus on material as the starting point and inspiration for each design is evident in Breen’s work. Rather than decorative or elaborate, the lines are clean and severe, while negative space between neatly folded paper creates a beguiling, contemporary pattern.
Breen is based at Cockpit Arts in London, a social enterprise and creative business incubator based in central London. Cockpit is a hotbed of up and coming designer-makers, and Vogue has billed their studios as “notorious for fostering some of London’s most creative talent.”
Dr. John Demartini to demystify The Book of Wealth on July 7th
The year was 1898. Long before the post-war boom and the dot com boom, Hubert Howe Bancroft published a book that would describe in detail how every nation and individual in recorded history amassed its wealth. In its first two editions, The Book of Wealth was as luxe as its subjects. Covered in golden silk and lined with white brocade, the book included original watercolours and engravings.
What is truly outstanding was the price: £1,550, or the equivalent of £39,486 when calculated for inflation. What kind of information would command such a price? And why are people across the globe still scrambling for copies of this book, limited to just 2,000 copies and long out of print?
Bancroft was an American historian and publisher who came of age in the mid-1800s to the backdrop of an American West expanding its borders and a country divided by northern and southern sensibilities and slavery in the Civil War.
It was an exciting time to be writing about history, and Bancroft went so far as to employ six people for a period of ten years, capturing oral histories and documenting statements of fact around the country.
The Book of Wealth was a natural extension of Bancroft’s curiosities. In ten volumes he defined what would later be known as the modern Wealth Attraction ethos. He painstakingly analyzed common traits of wealth creation and factors shared by kings, countries, businessmen and companies who achieved a massive acquisition of wealth in their lifetimes and left lasting legacies behind. Financial wizards and gurus of the New Millenium refer to his principles and guard his secrets carefully.
Dr. John Demartini is not a fan of hiding knowledge. On the contrary, his career has been founded upon sharing the information that he’s gathered over decades of studying philosophy, medicine, finance and psychology. One of the writers of the bestselling book The Secret, which includes tips on attracting wealth, he will be giving a talk in London on July 7th on The Book of Wealth.
Until recently, this knowledge was kept in the hands of the Kennedys, the Rothschilds and other illustrious families who had the financial means to find and purchase the book. Demartini is once again breaking the mold, revealing what every wealth creator has known and followed since the dawn of civilization. Watch this space.
A forty-something man with grey hair and a paunch is trying his luck at swamp fishing. He waxes poetically about playing the saxophone and raising four children while working the rod and reel, and speaks of his life’s great love of music with a mixture of pride and humility.
Pat Breaux, part of the eight-piece group called Lil Band o Gold, embodies the trials and tribulations that cross the racial lines of rhythm & blues and country. It is that same line that these white Louisianan music men are reviving with passion and finesse, in their sometimes rockabilly, always toe-tapping tunes.
Thanks to Lily Allen’s sublime choice in wedding music, the group added a gig at the 02 Shepherds Bush Empire to their British trip.
The show opened with a down-home documentary on swamp pop in general and Lil Band o Gold in their particulars, shining a light on this genre indigenous to the Acadiana region of south Louisiana. A group of Cajun and black Creole teenagers got together in the 1950s and 1960s and started messing around on their instruments, combining influences from Zydeco, blues, New Orleans R&B as well as traditional Cajun and Creole sounds.
The love of life and music that has kept the likes of swamp pop legend Warren Storm looking so young for his seventy-odd years is present throughout the film, and once the curtain came up his soulful voice went beyond all expectation. The crowd hooted and hollered and had a right good old time.
If Warren is a father figure to the band, CC Adcock, on guitar and vocals, is the brooding and passionate older brother. His longish locks and boho beard adds a dose of fashion to the group, and his stage presence is positively electric.
Tunes such as I Don’t Wanna Know, about a man who has lost the love of his life, to Aint No Child No More, an accordion-driven cry out for a ‘grown-up love’. This is swamp pop, all grown up, and worth a serious listen. Don’t be surprised if you end up grabbing your grandma and dancin around the living room. You’ve been warned.
Take the cream of the Secret Garden Party crop, the original eclectic UK summer festival, add a heaping dose of speakers and intriguing content, and voila – The Wilderness Festival, the boutique happening set to launch this July in Cornbury, Oxfordshire. With a dedication to arts and the outdoors, there is a decidedly quirky, folky and artsy element to the event, and with an expected turnout of 10,000 people, it’s an easily digestible weekend without mega crowds and mega queues for the loos.
Stiglitz WOW Talks will be offering its brand of far out and fascinating speakers, asking the important questions, and getting The Wilderness folk to ponder mind-opening matters. It is proud to be part of this pioneering group of art and nature lovers who will certainly be making history this year.
You can tell a lot about a festival’s spirit based on who is headlining. Take Glastonbury, for example. The iconic festival that used to get revved up with the likes of David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, this year is promoting pop sensation Beyonce on the main stage. Far from the commercial sounds of ‘All the Single Ladies’, The Wilderness has billed New York punk gypsy group Gogol Bordello. I doubt we’ll be seeing them on the BBC One Morning show anytime soon … but that’s exactly what this festival is communicating: creativity at the most exciting fringes of culture, and cult sensations that target a thinking musical audience.
Beyond the music, expect a lot of odd and wonderful happenings designed to get festivalgoes in and out of character, whatever that character may be. On Saturday, the Last Tuesday Society is presenting a midnight masked ball, featuring storytellers, ballroom dancing, puppet theatre, processional bands and a seance for good measure. The Secret Garden Party organisers are hosting a late night concept party called Where the Wild Things Are, sure to be psychedelic and magical. They will transform a woodland area into a theatrical landscape. We suggest to all to read the famous children’s book or see Spike Jonz’s film of the same title to properly get in the mood.
The Wilderness is capitalizing on the trend for glamping, and is set to feature a luxe outdoor spa where one can hot tub under the stars with a glass of champagne. It looks like wellness just grew up and got a makeover. No longer just massage and macrobiotics, the festival has gone eco-posh. Now, that’s what we call roughing it in style.
Stiglitz 