Unconventional Life – Podcast, Blog, Live Events

Author: Jules Schroeder

Ep270: Three Hacks to The PageRank Algorithm and Growing Your Website’s Reach, with Ardor SEO founder Kris Reid
Fresh off watching the Seaspiracy documentary, software engineer and Ardor SEO founder Kris Reid was thinking of making a donation to the Sea Shepherd organization to help the environment but he understood that there was more he could do.
Just like how he helped Food for Life Global raise six figures last year, digital marketing could do more than what one donation could do.
“Truthfully, I feel that if I get my message across to people, I’m doing them a service,” Kris says, “because I can help any business grow.”
Following the lessons learned from 80/20: Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, Kris notes that all transactions involve risks, and taking away that risk through a well-designed strategy has increased their sales significantly. He simplifies this strategy to three parts that we can start right now.

Beautiful websites don’t sell things, words do
Before people can judge a book by its cover, they should know it exists first; Kris says when building a business in this digital space, web designers are the last of your priorities.
“A website is like a business card,” he says, “you can have the most beautiful business card in the world but if it’s just sitting in your desk drawer, it doesn’t do anything. Same with your website, it needs to get in front of people’s faces, that’s a lot more important than being pretty.”
He pushes for people to focus on Keyword Research; understand exactly who your customer avatar is and exactly what they’re searching for. Search how many people per month are searching each keyword and have that dictate everything you do—how you structure your website, write your content, and set your title tags.

Build authority
Kris tells us in layman’s term that “Google doesn’t trust new businesses.” He notes that new small businesses need to make sure that their website’s Code Quality is on point since the bar is set much higher for them.
Here he highlights the importance of backlinks and those looking into increasing their website traffic should get as many of these as they can to increase their “credibility” in Google’s PageRank algorithm.

Stick to your Queen Bee role
Lastly, Kris advises that new business owners should organize where they put their efforts into and make sure they’re not wasting their limited resources. Learning from Profit First and Clockwork author Mike Michalowicz, he encourages people to leave certain areas to the experts.
Like in a beehive, the queen has her role, and supporting bees around her have theirs. “Any form of marketing is hard,” Kris stresses, “whether Google AdWords, Facebook ads, or any of it, you can burn money really quick and you can screw it up really quick to. Work with a professional, get them to do it, and stick to whatever it is you do.”
“Unless you want to be an SEO analyst, don’t learn SEO.” Kris reflects on his current role in the world, sharing that during coffee with his entrepreneur wife, they talk about how tiring it is to start new and more projects but he notes that creating more and building a bigger reach is how business owners are making a difference.

More from Kris:
Website – https://ardorseo.com/
May 3, 2021
Ep269: Changing the World One Step at a Time, with Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare genetic disease that affects roughly 15,000 boys in the US. The word “boys” is used because the illness causes degeneration of the body and is fatal, without a known cure for it, most patients rarely reach adulthood.
Compared to diseases like the flu, 15,000 is a small number but for Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan these numbers shouldn’t matter, because each of those 15,000 is a life worth saving, especially his younger brother, Terry, being one of them.
Sharing his story with us, Rich explains that growing up, he would watch other kids play and run around while his brother was growing weaker and weaker, and every doctor they went to would give them the same answer, that there was no treatment.
“In my eyes, it just didn’t make a lot of sense,” Horgan shares, “how can we do more than just monitor decline? Terry is one of the 30 million who are impacted and there’s a number of rare diseases out there, Duchenne is one of them, there are still over 7000 others.”

Knowing Why
Like many kids, Rich didn’t know much about other diseases and didn’t quite yet understand why a hospital can’t cure his brother. As he got older and started asking bigger questions, the brutal reality dawned on him.
“Your mind starts to wonder the question why,” he shares, “and why is a really dangerous question because then you start to understand the answers to why. As you understand as a kid, Duchenne goes from sort of this abstract, theoretical concept to this very real, very practical thing.”
Duchenne muscular dystrophy was discovered in the 1980s by French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, it’s been more than 40 years since then and comparing it to COVID-19, a fairly new virus, we seem to be closer to cure for it than DMD. Horgan says that the pandemic is a clear example of Pharmacoeconomics.
To make up for the funds put into research and development, the economy of drugs needs to address illnesses that cover a wider range of buyers; the rarer the disease the less likely it has a cure—or any research into it. “This is going to kill my brother if nothing else changes.”

Learning How
Growing up around business-minded parents, Horgan took that same fondness and entered Harvard Business School, still carrying that hope that there is a way to save his brother.
“Let’s make a lot of money so that we can take that money and put it to something that’s going to help Terry,” Rich said sharing his thought, “I got to business school in 2016 and it became very obvious very quickly that that wasn’t going to work, Terry just didn’t have enough time.”
His brother never left his mind and he considered the disease as something that was going to shake his life and the people he loved, but rather than sit and wait, Rich acted on hope. “I could never forgive myself for not trying,” he said.

What If
With his Harvard connections, Rich was introduced to MIT’s Jonathan Fleming and later to Dr. Tim Yu, a researcher at the Boston Children’s Hospital, and with that came an even crazier idea that turned Pharmacoeconomics on its head.
“I realized we could actually take medicine, and instead of doing one-size-fits-all, we could actually take it down to the granular level of one-is-to-one medicine, what we call n = 1”
It was at this point that Rich rallied a team together, including his brother’s clinician of 15 years, Dr. Brenda Wong from UMass. He founded the nonprofit group Cure Rare Disease that collaborates with the FDA and other researchers, clinicians, geneticists and bioinformaticians, that aims to produce customized therapeutics.
“It was the question What if that started this,” he said, “we know it’s a journey of a million miles, but what’s that first step? What’s the second? When you look down [at each step] by the time you lift your head up, you can get really far, and that’s exactly what happened.”
He advises the listeners to never select themselves out of whatever it is they’re pursuing, and hang on to hope as they push forward to the next step. Rich’s younger brother Terry will later this year undergo treatment and be patient 001 for the DMD treatment.

More from Rich and Cure Rare Disease:

Website: https://cureraredisease.org
IG: @cureraredisease
FB: @CureRareDisease
April 26, 2021
Ep268: Creating a New Identity, with Holistic Nutritionist and Hypnotherapist Melissa Kathryn
We know ourselves more than anyone, and often we need to be reminded to take our time to listen to our own thoughts. In our talk with Certified Nutritionist and Hypnotherapist Melissa Kathryn, she takes us for a quick meditation session and guides us to “let the answers in” as our conscious thoughts step back and we ask our bodies about how to solve our fears.
Melissa shares with us the MK method which she has been following and teaching people in order to change their lives, whether it be an issue with weight, diet, or general emotional and trauma healing. She describes it as a holistic approach that really strikes a problem to its core.
“MK method is about creating a new identity and understanding what your gaps are,” Melissa said, “something that I teach is where there’s lack, you’ll fill the gaps with x. [For example] where there is lack, you’ll fill the gaps with food. So, wherever we experience lack within ourselves, and within our thinking and within our being, knowing that we’re not enough now, we will end up filling those gaps with whatever it is.”
For Melissa, change isn’t simply about education and health, it’s also about empowerment; she points out that our actions are dictated by our minds and these decisions affect our body and how we live our lives. Sharing her own story, Melissa notes that even as a nutritionist she still bounces back to unhealthy routines.
“I got the weight back at the same length of time I took to get it off,” she says “so clearly something’s missing. And I was just on the floor of my New York City apartment, binging on Quest Bars, felt sick to my stomach. I was like why would I do this to myself? This clearly [shows] I don’t love myself because I’m putting myself in pain and I’m not living my best life.
“I started really looking at my mind and started realizing that all of this had nothing to do with food but my relationship to myself and my mindset.”
She shares that the beauty of her work is when she gets to empower women through her coaching and her story of surviving cancer but she notes that people also need to realize that they can look within to find their own answers and be their own inspiration.
“You don’t need an astrological reading to tell you that your desires on your heart are meant for you,” she stresses, “you got to give yourself permission to live your best life now.”

More from Melissa:

Website: melissakathryn.com
Podcast: Wholeness with Melissa Kathryn
Instagram: @melissa.kathryn
Facebook Group: Wholeness with Melissa Kathryn
April 19, 2021
Ep267: Having Contagious Self-Love, with Life Coach and Author Carla Romo
The topic of love is probably a subject that speaks to everyone. Whether it be a Valentine’s Day gift retailer, or TV and movie plots, love is something all of us have or want to experience; it changes us and makes us do the dumbest things, and sometimes we look for it so much that we lose ourselves in the process.
For certified life coach and Contagious Love author Carla Romo, the field of Love isn’t as pretty as Hollywood makes it and often it requires a lot of self-work. To find it, one needs to not only “get over” emotional scars but also be empowered in loving themselves.
Learning from experience, she now empowers lots of hopeful romantics to put themselves first and not go down this path of self-sabotage in hopes of being loved. Carla shares with us three tips that we can use to start loving ourselves more and not settle for toxic relationships.

Know the story you’re telling yourself.
Carla advises that one should give themselves a moment of quiet and “Listen to your damn gut.”
It’s in this crucial silent space that one tends to feel lonely but this is also an opportunity to ask yourself how you really feel and what are the fears underneath that thought.
She encourages the use of positive vocal affirmations either in front of a mirror or random sticky notes around our homes that remind us to say positive “I am” statements.
“Practicing these little interruptions through our everyday hamster wheel spins can start to get you into a place of self-love,” Carla stresses, “and fair warning, it might feel really cheesy at first but psychologists have proven through studies that the more you practice affirmations, your brain rewires and starts to believe them.”

Create Space for your feelings.
It’s not easy balancing work and your personal life, especially now with the pandemic forcing us to stay indoors and work from home, but Carla encourages us to “feel our feelings” and not distract ourselves from the emotional pain. She says to clearly define our intentions and not deny ourselves that space to grieve.
“What kind of screws people over, is when you don’t allow that space, so actually, you bring those feelings with you to your next relationship,” she says, “if you don’t allow yourself to process that, you still have a ball of yarn tangled up inside of you that is trying to tease itself in the next relationship.”
She advises that one should at least give themselves 3 or 4 months to go through all the stages of grieving before attempting love.

Don’t paint Red Flags green.
Often, we know the traits in a partner we are looking for, but it’s our personal feelings that cloud our judgments, this is what Romo referred to as self-sabotage—choosing someone out of insecurity and our desperation for love.
Carla encourages us to listen to that guiding voice and not ignore the signs of a toxic relationship.
“It was so easy to do before in the past,” Carla shares, “but the reason that I didn’t paint them green [now] is because I’m okay with myself. I didn’t need that validation; I didn’t need to force a relationship because I felt okay just being single.”
Romo told that a codependent toxic relationship from childhood led her down a path of self-sabotage that she hadn’t realized until she was 24. It was during a stressful time in her life that she decided to travel to Ireland on her own to find some peace, and it was in the quiet that she came to understand something.
“I saw two paths in front of me,” Romo said, “and I knew that I’d be okay no matter what I chose, but the two paths were: One, continue self-sabotage continue to be with this type of person—even if you broke up with them and just keep going and not doing that inner work, or two, break-up with that person, do that inner work, love myself, learn how to communicate what my needs are, and heal.
“So, I got back to Los Angeles and I ended that relationship because I realized the most important relationship I had was with myself.”

More from Carla:

Website: www.iamcarlaromo.com
Instagram: @iamcarlaromo
Podcast: The Love Fix
April 12, 2021
Ep266: Bars and Brainwaves, with Myndlift CEO and co-founder Aziz Kaddan
Growing up with a pediatric neurologist as the man of the house, it’s no surprise that neuroscience would be a common topic at the dinner table of Aziz Kaddan’s childhood, and why he found himself years later in the same branch of science.
At an early age, he was exposed to the topic of mental health and conditions particularly ADHD. He witnessed how his two siblings were examined by their father, and how much they rejected the medication that he gave them. As research in neuroscience expanded over the decades and therapy improved, Aziz now finds himself as the CEO of Myndlift, and building on the breakthrough that is Neurofeedback.
To simplify, Aziz explained that “Neurofeedback is based on something called Operant Conditioning. Whenever you do a certain action, you get a reward or a no reward, and if you get a reward immediately after doing that action, that action or that behaviour is being reinforced, right? So if you’re rewarding a baby, for example, whenever they do a specific behaviour over and over and over again, at some point they’re going to do that behaviour more and more naturally.”
This was the culmination of the research put into measuring brain activity which allowed for the non-invasive undertaking of sending frequencies to parts of the brain, which paved the way for therapy that improved actions like focus and treat conditions that affect the brain like ADHD and depression.

Starting the Start-up
Despite its effectiveness, Aziz acknowledges that it is yet to go mainstream, “Other than the high costs associated with it, the need to visit the clinic so often made it something that is sort of a last resort for many people,” he says, “you would prefer to take medication rather than stick to 60-day training regimen with therapy.
“I tried it myself and it helped me. I know the benefits of research, why is it not accessible? So we worked super hard on making it accessible by using wearable technology and mobile technology and just providing it from home.”
It was this idea that led Aziz and his co-founders to quit their jobs in 2014 and fly from Tel Aviv to a technology accelerator in Boston. It was a difficult journey educating investors and it took almost 10 months of work to make the first dollar for their start-up, but they persevered.
Now their compact Myndlift technology and software are being used in hundreds of clinics globally, inching their way closer to making this groundbreaking treatment a mainstream option in the field of mental health.

Rhymes and Relaxation
Having experienced the difficulties of being a new entrepreneur, Aziz encourages other dreamers, and aspiring CEOs to not forget about themselves in this painstaking process of growth, as their mental health is equally important as their goals.
“At the end of the day,” Aziz says, entrepreneurs are very prone to suffer from depression or anxiety due to the difficulty of what they’re doing—you’re alone, you’re building something big. Every day is a struggle and you don’t have somebody telling you what to do—you have to figure it out by yourself, all of these factors can be daunting. For example, if you’re funding for a big idea, and you have, you fully believe in that idea, your mom also believes in it [but] when you go to investors and they tell you well this will never work, or you’re getting rejection after rejection after rejection that can take a toll on your mental health.
Aziz shares that it’s hard to push through with projects when you’re dealing with internal burdens, so he suggests that from time to time, entrepreneurs take a day off to pursue other projects.
“I really recommend to every single entrepreneur out there that are just starting out, have an artistic project, whether it’s singing, drawing—whatever it is, because when you have such a project where you create something, and you’re not dependent on people—vying for the market or investors and it’s just your creation that you fully control in your own world, on the weekend. It just gives you that break that you desperately need.”
For Aziz, music and the lyrical world of rap was his part-time project outside Myndlift, and the CEO himself writes his own rhymes from time to time as his way of clearing his head.

Science and Stigma
Even though they have made treatment for mental health more accessible, Aziz acknowledges that the stigma of mental health treatment is still there. Many countries and parts of our communities are still associating it with disability and jumping to uneducated conclusions on the topic of mental conditions, but there are noticeable signs of acceptance in more areas.
He says that during this time of COVID-19 where many of us are stuck at home, many are starting to see the importance of mental health.
“[At times] I’m interviewing candidates who want to work at Myndlift and I’m noticing a lot of openness,” Aziz shares, “people are telling me ‘look I really connect with this company because I’ve suffered from a mental health issue, and I think I’m still suffering’ they know that I’m not gonna pass judgment. And so, that’s the beautiful thing that’s happening right now and I hope that this continues to grow.”

More from Aziz and Myndlift:

Follow them at their Instagram page @myndlift
Visit their website at myndlift.com
April 5, 2021