by Aneela Idnani, Patrick Parker LMFT, and Laurie Healy | at MinneBar 13 | 3:00 – 3:50 in Calhoun | View Schedule
Let's talk about the mental health-iness of our tech/entrepreneurial community. How can our already supportive community support each other on the mental health front? What cultural changes can we encourage our corporations to take? What skills can we give our freelancing cohort, working primarily on their own? How can we enable startups to build an open culture from the start? What can our co-working spaces do to help their members stay mentally healthy?
Patrick, Laurie & I can’t wait to have this conversation with you all. Our hope is then start rolling out events through the year to help end the stigma and give all of us tools to manage stress/anxiety & other mental health issues, regardless of severity.
Aneela Idnani is Cofounder & President of HabitAware (www.habitaware.com). HabitAware created it's Keen smart bracelet to help people “Retrain The Brain” from detrimental behaviors to positive ones. To do this, Keen creates awareness and mindfulness of hair pulling, skin picking and nail biting, which at their core are debilitating mental health conditions. Having grown up with hair pulling disorder, Aneela is now an outspoken mental health advocate, raising awareness of these very common yet unknown conditions. Aneela is a HAX hardware accelerator alumnus and her company recently received a research grant from the NIH to improve their device and validate Keen as a treatment for these disorders. Her life’s work (HabitAware) has been featured as a TIME Magazine 2018 Best Invention and in BuzzFeed, SELF Magazine, The Washington Post, Prevention Magazine and more.
follow: www.twitter.com/ak310i or www.twitter.com/habitaware
Patrick has been working with individuals using CBT and DBT modalities to solve struggles and find strength and answers within themselves. Patrick works with individuals with the focus on looking forward and solving problems and not lamenting in the past. Working from a solution-focused approach, it is Patrick's goal to make sure at that every individual and business in the Twin Cities start-up/tech community is working at optimal levels of productivity.
Patrick is born and raised in Minneapolis and is passionate about helping the city and local community in civically minded ways. In his spare time, Patrick enjoys riding his bicycle, watching youtube, drinking local craft beer, spending time listening to records with his wife, Kaitlin, or having loud joyous conversations with his family.
Passionate about making sure workplaces are healthy places. Jumped into the MSP tech startup scene in 2000 and was instantly hooked. A certified fitness instructor, introduced wellness classes into the startups I worked for to help employees+founders deal with the stress that comes with the territory. Since 2015, I’ve run marketing and sales at Fueled Collective (COCO), a destination for growing businesses and a place where entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses come together to explore, build and grow. Building a business and building a community have a lot in common. It’s important that a healthy and supportive ecosystem exists to address the physical, mental and emotional weight that all of us carry - whether we are a startup founder, a freelancer, a company employee or someone getting ready to head back into the workforce. It’s about taking care of business, and each other.
