When Patricia Adams was first starting her wellness group, she heard the word “no” 64 times before she got her first “yes.” It takes a strong person to not let 64 “no’s” get the better of you and continue to push forward.
That’s exactly what Patricia Adams is: a strong person. The founder and president of Zeitgeist Wellness Group, a health resource that offers businesses and families access to therapists, psychiatrists, acupuncturists and much more, has never given up on anything she has put her mind to. In fact she doesn’t consider giving up to be a viable option.
“When you get ‘no’s,’ it hurts,” Adams says. “But immediately, perseverance says, ‘OK. Calm down. Let’s find out what we did wrong; let’s fix it.’ You don’t bury your head in the sand. You get up in the morning and you say, ‘Today’s another day.’ You don’t want to let people know you’re sweating, because you believe it’s going to happen. You don’t give up. There’s nothing that would have caused me to give up.”
When Adams was starting out, she wasn’t broke or in debt, but she was funneling everything she had into her company to get it going.
“I never, ever once thought to give up,” she says. “Not ever. I could go back to my old job. I could go back to teaching since I was a college professor. I could go back to being a chaplain at the hospital. They would hire me back with their eyes closed. But I never dreamed of doing that. There was no need to do that, because if so and so could do it, my thought was so could I.”
That attitude for the past 10 years has turned Zeitgeist Wellness Group into a successful business. Her struggle now is getting people to understand the true benefits of utilizing all that her business offers.
“Every single day, it’s a struggle to get somebody to understand you’re not crazy if you come and see somebody like me,” she says. “We went from providing counseling to now everything is shrouded into what we call B wellness. In our wellness model, we have everybody. We have psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family therapists. We have nutritionists, we have personal trainers, we have massage therapists and acupuncturists. We even have chaplains and coaches. We’re telling people behavioral health is not what it used to be. You used to think you were crazy if you came to see a counselor. No. We have all these people in here because we know if you’re … not taking care of yourself or you’re not eating right or you’re not getting enough sleep, that makes you a hazard at work.”
Adams doesn’t just advocate these services; she demonstrates their effectiveness by using them herself.
“I get acupuncture, massages, and I walk every day and run every other day,” Adams says. “I’ve learned that if I don’t take care of my physical self and my mental self, then I can’t persevere, because every day a challenge is going to come up. I build that into my workweek. I build it into the workweek for my team. I have the same program for my team that offers the same things that I do for myself — the acupuncture, the massage, personal trainer, nutritionists, I do all of the above.”
While utilizing those services helps her stay sharp to run her company, Adams says the biggest key to maintaining a successful business is having some help.
“You have to get a mentor,” she says. “I’m the type of person that’s looking for leadership. I’m looking for guidance. I’m talking to someone, my therapist, my coach or my life guru … and I ask them a lot of questions. I also have women who have been in my life who have answered some really hard questions for me and they’ve challenged me along the way. Don’t do this by yourself. Get yourself a good coach. Get somebody who’s going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not. Do not try to do this by yourself; it’s impossible. I need five or six people who are smarter than me to help me take my business to the next level. You cannot think that all through by yourself.”
HOW TO REACH: Zeitgeist Wellness Group, (210) 212-2323 or www.zeitgeistwellnessgroup.com
