Acceptance of Circumstances, accountability, AI Productivity Tools, Importance of taking break, keeping a balance, keeping up with trends, making time for things you value, Objectives Setting, staying current, strategic planning, walking, warriors, fighters, doing good, giving back, paying it forward

Taking A Step Backward To Move Forward

So many fellow marketing professionals are talking about the value of storytelling these days, and that got me thinking about what story of my own vs. my clients’ that I could tell that might help or inspire others.

In recent months, I’ve taken a step backward on both the professional and personal fronts with the ultimate goal of improving my work-related productivity and my health.

What Tool Can Help Improve A Marketing Professional’s Productivity?

Over the last two or so months, I’ve spent a very large number of hours creating monthly marketing dashboards/reports for each of my ongoing/monthly clients in a new tool. Well, new to me, not new to marketing agencies and consultants. It was a huge investment of time, and there was a big learning curve — and I used ChatGPT along the way when I needed help with challenges I ran into along the way. But, I’m pleased and proud to share that I successfully migrated the aforementioned clients away from manually populated KPI Google sheets and Word docs to monthly reports on Google Looker Studio.

Accomplishing the above meant I had to allow myself to live with the discomfort that other client and administrative work was piling up. But, I was eventually able to catch back up on the piled-up work and sacrificing the short-term for the long-term has already allowed me and my clients to reap the following benefits of my taking time to learn and implement reports on Google Looker Studio:

  • I can focus less on manually entering data in KPI sheets and Word documents and focus more on the data itself and what the auto-populated reports are showing/indicating
  • I have more free work/personal time and work/life balance, which means I’m less stressed and my brain is fresher and has more energy for being creative and strategic
  • I can present results visually vs. just in table or paragraph format, so that clients can easily understand their monthly results and metrics
this image shows the legs of woman below the knees who is walking on wooden pier and who is wearing jeans and who is bare-footed.

Hitting The Health Bad Guys Head-On

I won’t go into detail about my health history, but for the last 20 years, I’ve dealt with difficult health challenges. You can read my health story at Our Heart Speaks, an organization who provides a voice to individuals who are dealing with chronic illness and/or disability and in this past blog post about why I’ll always feel like a cancer patient.

The sum of all of it is this. I have struggled with severe digestive issues for 12 years now, and there have been days and times — a number of them — where I literally cried about my situation and felt I just couldn’t handle/deal with it anymore. But I am a fighter, and I’ve always picked myself back up somehow, while trying to lift up others too.

I have seen a large number of functional/natural nutritionists and consultants, and gastroenterologists over the years, and tried countless recommendations to try to improve or eliminate my severe digestive symptoms.

For the second time over the last 12 years, I recently underwent a SIBO breath test, which required a limited diet leading up to, and 12 hours of fasting before, the test. The last time I had one, nothing helpful/conclusive came out of it, but this time my results indicated I have both what’s known as SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) and IMO (intestinal methanogen overgrowth).

The above can be treated, and possibly cured, by one or several courses of one or two antibiotics or thru many-months-long herbal supplement treatment. Because I believe the straw that broke the camel’s back related to my digestive issues was being put on a very powerful antibiotic after a surgical wound got infected in 2014 — killing off good bacteria in the gut and allowing bad bacteria to multiply — I decided to go the natural route in treating my SIBO and IMO. I’ve read that, often, the antibiotic approach is not effective and the bad bacteria and archaea return. But, the natural route has it’s challenges too, as I’m discovering already, including:

  • the supplements are expensive, only certain ones really work, and many, if not all, need to be taken in high dosages to be effective
  • you need 3 types of supplements or supplement groups: 1) one(s) that reduce inflammation, 2) one(s) that kill off the “bad guys” causing “die-off,” and 3) one(s) that improve motility and gut transit time
  • side effects of some of these supplements include nausea, burning, stomach pain/cramps, dizziness, and other unpleasant symptoms (including some of the symptoms I already had from having SIBO/IMO)

It’s the last bullet item directly above that really hammers home why I included the work I’m doing to address my health challenge in this blog post about “taking a step backward, to take a step forward.” Because, ultimately, I may need to feel worse on the digestive front for a few weeks (I just started my supplements on 3/27/26) in order to ultimately feel better!

We hope that whether it pertains to your professional life or your personal life, you’ll be both willing and able to take some steps back that will ultimately move you forward! And, we’d love to hear all about the steps back and the steps forward!

Speaking Of Steps, Be Sure To Check Out Our Blog Posts About Walking!

Check out our large collection of walking-related blogs, including ones about Boston, RI, and New England here: https://allintheresults.com/category/walking/