Less Stress In Life
Less Stress In Life
EP: 47 Guest Keenan Hart Using Texting and Positivity for Mental Health Support
Our mission is to give you tools and strategies that will help you move from being stressed to feeling your best.
Entrepreneur and mental health advocate Keenan Hart has a passion for impacting those around him with positivity. He is the co-founder of FRANSiS, a mental wellness company, Keenan and his team have found a way to weaponize text messages for the power of good by interrupting your day in a positive way with support and encouragement.
Co-hosts Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are certified HeartMath® Trainers, and certified stress educators, who are skilled at helping people discover the power of living form the heart. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in Canada, click here. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in the US, click here.
SPEAKERS
Deb Timmerman 00:00
You're listening to the less stress in life podcast. Your hosts, Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are on a mission to help individuals and organizations manage stress and change. Together, they bring you real conversations, inspirational stories, and strategies to help move you from being stressed to feeling your best. Good morning, everyone. I'm Deb Timmerman, welcome to our series of 52 practical tools for less stress in life. This is episode 47. My co-host, Barb Fletcher has a cold and no voice. So, we send her love and well wishes today. And I get to talk to Keenan and have a wonderful conversation. So, I'm pretty excited. Our goal is to give you tools and strategies to help you move from feeling stress to feeling your best. So, I mentioned our guest is Keenan Hart. He is an entrepreneur who has a passion for impacting those around him with positivity. He's a mental health advocate and describes himself as a positive soldier. He's the co- founder of Fransis and mental wellness company, he and his team have found a way to weaponize text messages for the power of good by interrupting your day in a positive way with support and encouragement. Welcome, Keenan.
Keenan Hart 01:17
Well, Deb, thank you so much for having me here. Today. I'm so excited to be able to share this space with you and talk about this incredibly important topic. So, thank you so much.
Deb Timmerman 01:24
Tell us more about Fransis.
Keenan Hart 01:27
So, Francis was really spawned out of necessity. When I first started my entrepreneurial professional business life, I started creating telehealth systems for increasing access to mental health professionals here in the state of Nevada. Now, when people come to Nevada, they think of the glitz and the glam of Las Vegas, or they think of the smallest big city in the world, Reno, being in the north. But when I moved here in 2012, I found out that there were so many small communities in the middle of our state, in the middle of the desert, three and a half, four hours isolated, without access to critical mental health professionals. And so, I had a personal experience one day where somebody came into one of my family friends psychiatry office. And she said, it took me five hours to get here today and save the regular for. And this is a drive that she did every week. And so, the conversation naturally started. And I said, What took you so long to get here. And she said, Well, there's a truck that was rolled over on the freeway and unfortunately, I don't have resources in my community. And kind of at that same time, I had just started to discover the power of virtual connectivity, and the impact that it could have in healthcare. And just in 2014, when the Assembly Bill 292 came out, they said that you can have a virtual interaction with your doctor, and they can be paid as if it happened in person. And so, one of the areas that I quickly focused on was helping the small communities to be able to increase access to care. Now, the future rolls on, we work with lots of different communities, lots of different mental and behavioral health professionals and organizations. But I started to realize some other gaps in the care plan. You know, when we talk about mental health improvement, mental wellness, a lot of the time when people go to therapy, go talk to their counselor therapist, they are often really engaged when they're face to face, as you and I are right now in this livestream. But as soon as they leave a lot of the tools, a lot of the front of mind awareness goes away, because life gets in the way, right. And so I started looking at how we could utilize different tools like technology to be able to get in front of people again. And what that really meant for me was looking at my lifestyle, looking and being observant of the people around me and realizing how much time we were spending on these little devices. Now one of the things I also notice, the best way to get someone's attention often isn't calling them on the phone, because we don't answer phone calls like we once did. It's often texting people. And so what we did is we developed Francis through partnering with our mental and behavioral health professionals to create messages of positivity, encouragement, support, simple reframes, or additional resources. And we deliver those to our subscribers into our patients, clients organizations that we support at a randomized time throughout the day. And so being able to interrupt somebody with a positive message of support can be incredibly powerful, but also is the best way to keep people engaged in their mental wellness, or at least snap them out of the feed scroll, or the stresses of life. And I think that's a conversation today to be able to support people in the real world. And so that's where I really got my passion for just mental health, but also using technology like text messages for the power of good.
Deb Timmerman 04:36
So you and I spoke Gosh, a month and a half or so ago, and I spoke with your sister as well. She offered me a chance to have a trial subscription of Fransis and I have to say I feel like I'm pretty in tune, but those messages would drop in my text box at such opportune times of the day. And I think has been really helpful to me at getting me to slow down in a different way. Like it's just a whole different delivery experience. I teach people to do this kind of thing, to be in tune, and to use tools. But you're right about how we get into that cycle of life comes up, and we just don't. And so I found it to be a great experience. Can you share some of the texts or the styles of texts or messages that would come across?
Keenan Hart 05:33
Absolutely. So, first of all, Devon makes me so happy to hear that you've been having a good experience. And to kind of harp on that for a second, before I get into the messages, that's the thing that I realized is when we get caught up in life, we are somewhat kind of going with the flow. And because we have so many different responsibilities, either consciously or subconsciously, it's very difficult for us to audit how we're sitting in the moment. And so being in tune is an amazing thing. But I feel like for so many of us, we often get swept up in the current of the day. And so that's why I believe that those text messages are so powerful, because they do drop in at opportune times in your brain naturally. Contextualized is that message that comes to you, depending on your situation, which can be so cool. But one of my favorite messages that we have in the system is you are a human being not a human doing, how can you find time today to simply be, and it gives me that same reaction as well. Right? You know, it's just like interesting to realize that we are human beings. And sometimes there's so much power, and just being here and being ourselves rather than trying to check off the entire list of everything we can do today, tomorrow, next year, and do all those things.
Deb Timmerman 06:47
I love the variety. So there are things on gratitude and breath work and positive thinking and reframing where you're at, I think it's super well done. And this morning, I was having a conversation with one of my clients who I meet with a few minutes each week, because one of the things that she's struggling with, even though she knows what she needs to do, is creating time for that daily practice. And so I found myself thinking about how this might apply to her, could that tiny interruption help her stay on track. So I'd like to set her up and just kind of see how it works. I know it was great for me, I would
Keenan Hart 07:29
absolutely love to be able to get her set up, it's been really cool to not only create the tool, but to hear the feedback that we get as well. And so this is I'm not trying to boast or anything, but we just deployed our most recent survey. And we asked a one question survey at the 30 day mark of being with Francis has this had a positive impact on your daily mood or your mental health. And we've gotten so much feedback back 98% of the people who responded to that survey said that it has impacted their mood and mental health in a positive way, which has been so fulfilling, because it's one thing to take an idea and to really talk about the impact, but to get everybody's individual feedback has been so cool.
Deb Timmerman 08:08
Yeah, I just got mine the other day, which I thought was really cool and it was so short. It like two seconds to do. So that was neat. And the other thing I wanted to kind of touch on is this can be interactive, right? Because some of the questions that you ask can elicit a response. So, you can actually text back to your team. What happens with those messages? Where did they go?
Keenan Hart 08:33
Yeah, so we call that the safe place Digital Journal. And so when we were partnering with our mental and behavioral health partners to like really create this tool, often, our therapists and counselors would say, you know, encourage people to journal. And there's so much data out there that talks about the efficacy on our physical and our mental health, and we have a safe place to be able to get our thoughts and our emotions out. And so what we did is allowing for people to use that text message conversation, like you said, an open ended prompt, if you will, to be able to practice a gratitude exercise, which is amazing. And when they respond back in their text message that stays on your phone, on our side, we don't even see those nor do we have an opportunity to read any of those messages. So, it's completely safe to you. But the really cool thing that we also did is we made the platform completely anonymous as well. And so there's just a whole bunch of phone numbers in our database, we have no identifying information. We have no email addresses, no names, no last names, no addresses. And so your conversation is completely yours is just in a sea of other people who are enjoying the experience with Francis. And so I just think about once again, like you said the survey, making things as easy as possible. I have a journal here next to me on my desk. And I have to admit, I take a lot of pride in writing in this thing. But sometimes when it's out of sight, it's out of mind. And so if I can create a tool that allows people to do the same type of thing here, at least I know that I'm putting something in a place where it's as easily accessible as possible, and hopefully that helps people on a daily basis.
Deb Timmerman 09:59
Let's talk a little bit about why you chose text as the platform.
Keenan Hart 10:03
In my experience, when I first started developing telehealth solutions in 2014, I had a really good friend who was an Epic EHR implementer. And so, he worked on the organization's behalf. And if you know anything about health care, Epic is a huge documentation system. It's very popular, right. And so, he was implementing this at a local hospital. And I was doing some work there as well. And through time passing each other in the hallways meeting each other for lunch, we started talking about what we were doing. And as I was creating these tools for people to increase access, he was also implementing a tool called their patient portal. And I asked him, how's the patient portal development go? And he was like, it's good. The tool is really cool, but we can't get people to use it. And I said, Why is that he's like, Well, often people get frustrated, because they have to have an email address and a password to log in. Often, it's not the best personal experience for somebody to access that data. And so we're only seeing adoption of about 4%, which is crazy to think about how expensive these systems were. And so as I started looking at the different tools out there, there's always the option and everybody says, should we develop an app for that. And when we design an app, that has to be so attractive to the end user that they continue to come back to it. And so there's really interesting data out there talks about the 30 day attrition rate of mental health focused applications. Now, in the first couple of days, they get incredibly high engagement rates, we're talking 80 90%, because something is brand new, when we download it, we want to engage with it, we come back to it to see what's interesting about the tool. But by the time we get to the 30 day rate, or 30, day mark, only 4% of people are coming back to that app day after day to use that tool. And naturally, that kind of throws up a red flag for me, but also has been looking at why is that happening? And my perspective is human behavior, we are spending so much time on these devices. And its competition on these devices is so strong, that we're fighting with the TikTok we're fighting with the YouTube, we're fighting with the Facebook, the newsfeed, all of these other things, which have been designed to grab our attention and keep us coming back over and over again. So when I put an application on somebody's phone, and I say make sure you use this everyday Deb, the odds of you doing that consistently to get the impact that you're looking for is not going to be very good, right?
Deb Timmerman 12:21
Well, there are only so many apps that can fit on the front screen of your phone, or maybe the second and then those ones that are buried back in the back. You just don't look at they get dusty, right. So, I want to touch on another thing. When we spoke the first time you talked about people in rural communities, not always having access to internet. So, I thought that was really cool. Could you talk a little bit more about your experience and what you found with those accessibility issues?
Keenan Hart 12:53
Absolutely. So, when I started the whole telehealth journey back in 2014, I was pretty lucky because I didn't understand how good we have it in some of our metropolitan communities. When it comes to connectivity. When it comes to internet access when it comes to being able to use things on a daily basis. One of the first towns that I started supporting with telehealth was a small town called Tonopah, which is in Northern Nevada. And one of the biggest problems that we ran into there was their internet in the town kept going out on a weekly basis. And so we would have patients and clients who would want to show up at the location to have internet access to talk to the therapist. But you know, it was just a commonality that some of these communities, their internet would go down. And I thought that that was wild to experience in 2014. How are we in such an age past the millennium, where we have people who are not consistently having access to internet. And so that is a bigger challenge for so many people. And I'll go off on a little bit of a tangent here AT and T and SpaceX, the company with Elon Musk have actually just announced a partnership in the last couple of months to be able to use low orbit satellites to be able to create coverage in those small communities, which is incredibly impactful. And I talked about this with some of my friends who are in the digital virtual health space for large health systems, and the impact that that can create. Because not only is distance a divide for these people, and a barrier to getting care, but also there's a technological difference in where we live compared to where they live. And it's like, unless you're aware of some of the struggles of these communities, you're never really going to be able to understand what it's like to not have consistent internet access, which is a huge barrier. But the one thing that can kind of get past that is text messages once again, because we're coming from the sky.
Deb Timmerman 14:41
It's 2022 and we're still having internet connectivity issues in some counties like I live in a rural county. I happen to live in a neighborhood that has fiber optic cable and we have cable, so we get our internet there. But at our old house, we had to get ours from Hughes net And you have to pay for the amount of data that you have. So, it's crazy. And we just had a big economic summit here with our chamber of commerce, and they have a whole committee working on broadband in our community, because we still have people in many of our areas that once you get outside the city, they do not have service. I think that your recognition of this being really simple tool was really brilliant on your part.
Keenan Hart 15:29
And I think that comes from my early experience in the mental behavioral health space as well, because a lot of behavioral health organizations have a large Medicaid or a transient population, because we talk about substance use, we talk about other services that they deliver in the community detox. And a lot of these people do not have the dollars or the resources to have the new iPhone, or the new Samsung phone that we all take for or take advantage of. And so a lot of these people will be using flip phones, or you know, phones that they get from Cricket, or any like Boost Mobile. And a lot of these phones don't have smartphone capability. But they do have the ability to send and receive text messages. So it's like how do we create a solution that is scalable enough and accessible enough to people who need access to these tools, but I can't put the iPhone barrier in front of them because that's an automatic disqualification.
Deb Timmerman 16:19
Let's switch gears here and let's talk about you. So what got you into the behavioral health field? What was your why? What is your why?
Keenan Hart 16:29
Well, my experience was very interesting. So, I'll take you back a little bit in 2008. My family lived in Detroit. And we were always a small knit family. My dad was an entrepreneur. So, it was me. My sister, my mom and my dad were always like on an island between us. And in 2008, my dad got a call that every family member at some point in time is going to get but his mom my grandmother went on to hospice. Now she was a lifelong smoker, she had emphysema she would carry around the oxygen tank end of life. And so in 2008, he automatically dropped everything to go be by grandma's side who was in Seattle, Tacoma, Washington to be exact. And the experience of that hospice experience for her was very traumatic for all of my family. And definitely because of the pandemic. I know so many more people have experienced the swiftness of losing a family member and not being able to say goodbye, appropriately. So, I still remember in 2008, my dad handing the phone to all of the family members basically virtually and saying, Hey, it's your time to say goodbye to Grandma, because she's not going to be here tomorrow. I still remember saying goodbye to her over the cell phone because there was no FaceTime, there was no tools to be able to articulate what all of the years of compassion and love and all of the sweet candies and stuff that she had given me over a phone call, especially when she couldn't respond. And so, when she passed away, I started thinking about that experience that I had and how I could impact more people with a positive experience at end of life. And so when I first got into my entrepreneurial journey, telehealth started as standing up video tools for people to spend time with their loved ones before they passed away. Partner with The Hospice organization, stand up an iPad, let's call it that in the home and give access to the family members who are in Baltimore, Texas, Florida to virtually be there on a daily basis, to talk to the nurse to come for the family members and do all of those things. Just so happens by chance. In one I would say Monday morning, the CEO of the hospital organization said hey, I want you to come meet a hospital CEO for me, because they're having a huge problem getting access to their mental and behavioral health assessments at that time. And so, I realized that this tool that we were using for family visitation could play more roles in creating access to resources in my community. And then I had that family experience where that individual came into the office. And we started partnering with all the small communities. But more so than that, in 2017, the telehealth business was not exactly proven. I'll just say that. So I'm three years into my career. And a lot of healthcare organizations are saying nobody wants to do this, Deb, no patients ever going to want to meet with their doctor virtually, you know, especially if we can't have surety around that getting paid. We don't know if we're going to do that. And so, in 2017, I'm 27 years old, and struggling financially to be transparent, struggling to, you know, have the fortitude to believe in my dream of starting this telehealth business. And I realized that there wasn't a lot that I could control, other than my mindset. And so as my New Year's resolution, I started a 365 days of positivity for myself. So I'd hop on Instagram as an accountability tool every day and make a small story. And you would see me come to camera and say, Hey, guys, you know, today's Monday, it's a brand new week, we have control over what we can do today. Let's take small steps to be positive. Let's be small to have small steps to be encouraging. And as long as we're making progress, we're heading in the right direction. And it was something that was very interesting at day 60 day 90 Day one 20 day 145 day 200, I would have friends who would start coming out of the woodwork when we'd see each other downtown here in Las Vegas. And they say I just want to let you know, I watch your messages every single morning. And I haven't told you this. But they've really been impactful for me. And they really helped me get through some tough times. And so I started realizing the power of encouragement, the power of positivity, not only for myself, but for the people around me. And so since then, I've gotten older, 32 years old now. And the society that we live in today is based on kind of take, take, take, and I want to be somebody who's going to be known for giving. And for somebody who can impact people favorably. And so being a positive light in this world that is surrounded by negativity, it's just so important to me, it all comes down to mental health for me because of my personal experiences and what I see on a daily basis. So now it's a long-winded answer. But that's just why I'm so passionate about everything.
Deb Timmerman 20:55
Oh, I love that, and often, we go through a healing experience or find a some tool that helps us and it launches our business that happened for me, too. It's cool. So, let's talk gratitude. Gratitude is kind of our theme this month, although shame on us for packing it all into a month, right? Because it really should be all year long. Tell me what your gratitude practices and how you use gratitude to keep yourself in a positive mental state.
Keenan Hart 21:23
I read a book a couple of years ago, that was very impactful for me. And it was called the Gap and the Gain. And it talks about it's amazing, right? And it talks about for everybody who hasn't read, it talks about a simple philosophy. And I'm going to boil it down here, you know, people who have high achieving mindsets, often find themselves in the gap between here and there. And if you know anything about trying to be successful, and trying to do the most that you can with your time in life, it's always easy to get here. But it's very much easier to look up and see that now I need to get there. And often we find ourselves in the gap between where we are today and the horizon of tomorrow or our next goal. And sometimes it's so important to be able to deploy gratitude and the ability to look backwards and see how far we've come and see the gain of from where we started to that next checkpoint, and that next checkpoint, and that next checkpoint in the next checkpoint. And so my practice of gratitude is often looking backwards, and seeing that 24 year old kid who had no idea what he was doing, but he just wanted to help out people when their family members were dying. And then the guy who was thinking about how we could use technology to be able to increase access to mental health counselors and therapists, and then the guy who developed started developing a tool on patient engagement. And that turned into Francis, and then the guy who's now 32 years old, and I'm still out here, kind of doing what I can on a daily basis to impact people favorably. And now I get to come on the show. And it's just like an amazing journey to be able to appreciate not looking forward towards what I want to accomplish, but looking backwards at all of those things that I've done, to get to here. And that's what gratitude is, for me, it's really just giving myself the opportunity to be here. Now, rather than thinking about what is going to happen in the future, what I can't control.
Deb Timmerman 23:07
Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan in that book, use an app called the Win Streak. So it really teaches you to look back on your day first, and see what your wins are. But I love that you have that ability to look back over time, because it's not just what we do today is it. It's all those today's that stack up to give us these big huge steps that we take. I love that.
Keenan Hart 23:36
It's a powerful practice. One other thing that I took from that book as well was the practice of three wins. So, counting up and creating momentum in like, what was three wins from today? Well, I got to talk to my parents, well, I got to, you know, tell my girlfriend that I loved her, I got to take my dog who's become like a classic on the podcast episodes and live streams that I do. You know, he's here today, and I got to spend time with him and take him on a walk. When you have the ability to I like to use the terminology like self-audit, where I'm at in the day, it creates so many opportunities to be appreciative and deploy gratitude. And just to be happy with what's going on that when you do that on a daily basis, before you know it, once again, you look back a couple of weeks and you've got a huge list of things to be appreciative for and things to deploy gratitude against, and just make some momentum in the positive side of life so much easier for me.
Deb Timmerman 24:28
Folks who want to connect with you and sign up for Fransis, how do they do that? Where do they find you?
Keenan Hart 24:35
Yeah, so you can come to F-r-a-n-s-i-s.us. We'd like to say us because it's all about us at the end of the day. And so there's a really cool opportunity that we're deploying right now, if you're listening to this live stream, it's a good one, give one special for Thanksgiving. And we want to give thanks back to everybody who's supporting us. And so if you come on to the website@fransis.us and you sign up for a subscription You will be able to be gifted another subscription to somebody as well. And so a great way for you to experience it, but also to spread positivity to others and so I would encourage people to come check out the website and come see you know what you can do to participate in this low barrier version of mental wellness, by having us positively interrupt your day on a daily basis.
Deb Timmerman 25:19
And they can also connect with you on LinkedIn, correct
Keenan Hart 25:22
LinkedIn as well. So, you can find me, Kenan hearts, k WENAN, H, AR T, I've got a gorilla in the front of my name and a purple heart at the end. Because gorilla for Francis is our logo. And you know, very easy to see me, I'll have a big smile on my face. But I always encourage people to come connect with me, because, you know, being able to connect with you, Deb has led to so many opportunities, but it's also created a really cool friendship, that, you know, I wouldn't be able to experience if we weren't doing all of this virtual connectivity, and you know, sharing this space with each other,
Deb Timmerman 25:52
It's cool. So, we always have a call to action at the end of our podcast, because we can sit here and not take any action and not do anything, but we really have to be an active participant in our mental wellness. So I would urge you today, if you're ready to make a change to hop on and get the Fransis text messages. I think they'll make a positive change. And if you're not ready to do that, take our advice and read that book Gap and the Gain and start doing those three wins. I think those are just a wonderful way to take a survey of your day, I always did mine before I go to bed, I still do that to this day. And it ends your day on a positive note and I think it's such up for winning tomorrow. It is the 16th of November already. We're coming on Thanksgiving. So this is a week to prepare before we eat all that turkey and dressing and all that stuff and think about how important our mental wellness is in terms of our overall physical wellness as well.
Keenan Hart 26:57
Absolutely. And can I add one challenge for the call to action as well? You know, as we record this on the 16th of November, there's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of negativity swirling around us. If you turn on the news today, you're going to see things that are happening on the other side of the world that are out of our control, but the things that we can control is the impact that we have in our small community. That small community could be inside your grocery store, inside your gym inside your office. So my challenge for people today would be tell somebody something encouraging. Give somebody a compliment, snap them out of the process of being stuck in the news feed and everything else and be that positive interruption to another person today. And you never know how that can change somebody's life and change somebody's world today. It's very powerful.
Deb Timmerman 27:42
Oh, I love that we'll watch for the ripple effect. Absolutely. Yeah, next time everybody. Less stress in life is possible. If you're new to this kind of thinking and would like to explore what's possible for you. We'd love to connect. You can reach us through our website at less stress in life.com. That's less stress in life.com