How Incremental Health Came to Be
This website was launched in time to celebrate my Dad's70th birthday. I had been working on the book (still a work in progress) that underpins this site and the Incremental Health By Mandy Insta profile for a few months and knew there was no way that I could complete the first draft in time to give it to him on his special day as I had originally planned. My Dad is incredibly hard to buy gifts for and I wanted to pay tribute to the man that encouraged me to combine my two loves - writing and photography - as a business idea. So, for a couple of weeks, I dropped working on the book at night to set up incrementalhealthbymandy.com.
A website was always going to be part of my long-term business plan but I figured it was a nice gesture to show him how thankful I am for giving me the push I needed to make time to work on writing a book on health (a serious passion of mine). I put together a design brief and commissioned my gorgeous friend and former colleague, Alline from The Infologist, to put together a suite of digital assets that would help promote joy. I then gathered up the photos I had been deliberately taking for months and loaded them into my online repository. I wrote some blog posts from material that was already complete in the book. I set up the aforementioned Instagram profile to try to build an online presence and spread health to the world in my own quirky way and direct people who are interested in the work that I publish here.
The ethos behind Incremental Health By Mandy is that making small consistent changes can add up to huge progress over time. Without too much effort, your life will slowly morph into what you once wished it would be. Over the five years prior to the inception of the idea for Incremental Health By Mandy that's exactly what I had been doing myself - forming helpful new habits one by one and incrementally adding to the pile. Over the last seven years, I have transformed my life, one small change at a time, from a workaholic, people pleaser who claimed to never have time to take care of myself to a vibrant, happy, healthy human.
Throughout my work life, I have come to learn that my greatest skill is being able to collect, digest, analyse and correlate information and then bring it together in a meaningful way. I am, if truth be told, an information junkie. My exceedingly tolerant husband will attest that I regularly break conversation to defer to google to fact-check a story lest I misrepresent the truth. I maintain that the greatest way to learn is to feed curiosity.
I have always been amazed by the human body and am often asked by friends and family why I didn't go into the field of medicine (memories of the rat dissections from first-year biology are probably a key indicator that I would not have made it through the realities of med!). My thirst for knowledge and my love of writing has been quietly nagging at me for decades. In the last five years, that gentle voice in the back of my head has grown louder and more insistent to the point where I felt I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn't pay attention to it.
I can honestly say that even if I publish my book and no one reads it I will still be able to consider it a success. Writing is now a necessity in my life. Not only is the process cathartic, but it also brings me a great sense of peace and joy. To think that there's someone out there in the big wide world that might benefit from my bower bird-like behaviour of searching for, gathering and retaining only the best information I can find is good enough for me. And if that one person is my Dad, then that's even better!
My Dad has always been a great source of support. He's watched me try, and fail, and try again. He has not always agreed with me but he is strong enough to respectfully listen to my opinion in silence and then slam me about all the ways in which I am wrong. I love our debates, his alternate views have often been a source of curiosity for me. Where I could have been frustrated by our difference of opinion (and there are topics where we are definitely polar opposites) but I prefer to think of us like two kids on a see-saw. Sometimes we are perfectly balanced; both of us perched evenly with our feet firmly on the ground. Other times I am high in the air with my legs dangling like spaghetti from a pasta scoop when you pull it out of the pot. I wouldn't have it any other way. My Dad has made me the inquisitive, open-minded person that I am today and I will be forever grateful for that.
It would be remiss of me to neglect to thank him (and my amazing mother) for all the sacrifices that have been made to make my life better. My parents left their home when my sister was in kindergarten to escape the ravages of war. They left almost all their worldly belongings, their home, their family and their friends to keep us safe. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for them to move halfway across the world with the level of uncertainty that came with their circumstances. As I was so young when we moved to Melbourne, I can only remember snippets of the pain they experienced in a new country - not knowing which brand of soap to buy or where to go to get furniture or learning to navigate their way around a new city not to mention the financial strain they were under and the complete change of lifestyle they experienced. From a large sprawling home with an inground pool, gardeners, housekeepers and a nanny and friends and family nearby to renting a small home in one of the most dangerous suburbs of that era would have caused enormous distress. I am so grateful for all that my parents have done for me to give me the best opportunities in life. It is through their unselfish behaviour that I have been able to grow up in a safe environment, get a private school education, study at one of the top universities in the world and follow my dreams. There are not words enough to express my gratitude but, given time, I will try to do just that.
This is the only birthday present I could think to give a man who says he has it all. My writing career is dedicated to you. I love you Daddy xx
