At Cultivator, we operate on a FOUNDER FIRST mentality. It is of the utmost importance to ensure that our founders are creating a balance in their life and looking after themselves in all aspects of personal wellness while building their companies. As World Mental Health Day approached (October 10, 2022), it was important for our team to bring more awareness to our Mindfulness in Residence partner, Twello, and provide a refreshing week of activities for founders and startup team members to take part in…thus came: Wellness Week (October 4 -7, 2022).
The theme for 2022’s World Mental Health Day is, “Make mental health for all a global priority.” The importance of this day is to raise awareness and reduce the stigma about mental health issues internationally and to raise efforts to support mental health and wellness. Twello is committed to providing virtual and onsite corporate wellness training to drive growth in organizations by promoting strategies that improve mental and physical well-being. Classes offered by Twello are designed to achieve optimal wellness for employees, and, ultimately, business and work culture.
Twello (formally known as Peak Wellness) has just rebranded!
“This change symbolizes our exciting expansion into a border range of wellness and teambuilding offerings. We will continue to offer our complete wellness catalog and frequently add exciting onsite and leadership training options.While our name and website are changing, our mission will always stay the same! Twello embodies our core values and purpose; to serve burnt-out, stressed-out, professionals around the globe.”
We were so fortunate to work directly with the founder and CEO of Twello, Kayla Baum, to organize activities that encouraged our Cultivator community to get active, while also taking some time to recharge with mindfulness, meditation, and yoga.
Twello started our week with a session tailored to “Mindfulness For Positive Mental Health In The Winter.” Kayla led this engaging session by getting attendees to share, “what activities help everyone stay positive in the winter months?” This question had everyone focusing on what they enjoyed most during Saskatchewan winters– allowing participants to embrace one another’s ideas.
Kayla shared “5 Practices For The Winter Months”
We opened and closed the session with a calming meditation for ‘Changing Seasons’ that left everyone feeling refocused and ready to take on winter with an open mindset, aware of our body’s needs.
Twello exists because, putting it quite simply, I had a nervous breakdown at my office in my early 20s. After learning very quickly that I knew very little about my mental health and stress management, I was ultimately pushing toward a path to learn more about well-being and mindfulness training. These tools were so effective for me that I began to teach them to my friends and colleagues. I quickly realized there are at least four generations in the workplace that have never been taught any stress management tools.
Our mission at Twello is to support stressed-out and burnt-out professionals worldwide. We are trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands, such as Amazon, Capital One, and KPMG. Our largest and most common clients are accounting and consulting firms, law firms, and tech companies– but we have worked with several non-profits, nursing groups, teachers, and veterinarians. All clients have one thing in common: their teams are stressed out and looking for wellness tools.
All of Twello’s workshops focus on evidence-based practices that are proven to reduce burnout, lower stress, and boost morale. Twello facilitators are experts in their fields, offering: Mindfulness Meditation, Chair Yoga, Mat Yoga, Mindful Eating & Nutrition, Resilience Training, Fitness, Pilates, and more. Many people struggle to maintain wellness practices in their spare time, so Twello brings the practice to them – at work! Once we started collecting feedback from our end users, and the employees taking our wellness sessions, we saw how special our courses were, and the impact they had on the workplace. One testimonial that always sticks out to me was someone who said, “these classes are an island of peace in my week during a time when it’s much needed.”
We’re very happy to run the business out of our hometown in Regina, Saskatchewan, with facilitators and teachers based in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, the UK, and over 15 other regions.
I was able to return to Saskatchewan after completing school in Ontario and started my business after a short stint in the corporate world. Cultivator made it possible to stay in Regina, you can start a company, get help with it, grow it, and employ local talent. The network Cultivator provides has been so helpful. When I had zero employees, I could talk to someone who had four employees… Now I have four employees, and I can talk to someone with 10 employees… The community truly looks after one another. As founders, we have all had the same issues, using all the same systems, and I don’t know how I would have built that foundation of support outside of Cultivator.
For someone who has struggled with their mental health and actively manages bipolar disorder day-to-day, I am hyper-aware of the heightened risk to well-being that entrepreneurship can bring. For me, wellness is a combination of mental, physical, social, and emotional health, that all work together to help us thrive. I try to check in on these areas regularly to make sure no category dips too low.
Interestingly, entrepreneurs are disproportionately impacted by mental illnesses, although the reason is not entirely understood. So instead of thinking that being an entrepreneur triggers mental illness, I also like the perspective that perhaps those who have experienced mental health challenges are incredibly resilient – and well-suited to solve tough problems and run great businesses.
Because we have created all our content in-house, our sessions blend to paint a larger holistic picture of overall health and wellness. When we begin to work with an organization, we can build a program that works best for their team and continue providing blocks of curated content and resources that benefit their needs. Our services are all accessible virtually and can accommodate any workplace needs.
I look forward to building out a monthly program with the Cultivator team, that founders and team members can attend (in-person and virtually) and benefit from a meditation session, or a roundtable discussion through: ‘Cultivate Calm.’ The Cultivator community can expect more to come from Twello soon!
You can listen to Conexus Credit Union‘s podcast, What Connects Us, as they feature Kayla on the episode: “My nervous breakdown did not break me“. In this episode. Kayla explains how the diagnosis of her mental health disorder changed the trajectory of her life.
KAYLA BAUM – FOUNDER + CEO, TWELLO
Curious, Happy-Go-Lucky, Focused
Mindfulness For Stress Reduction– because we break misconceptions around self-care. Each person develops a personalized stress management plan for themselves that they can take away and practice using in their day-to-day routines.