Why I stopped taking a holistic approach and what I do instead.

May 26

I want to tell you something that happened long before I ever started Studio Kynd. It happened in a lecture theatre during my nurse training, of course I was tired in the way that student nurses always are, running on not enough sleep and I was half-listening when a lecturer said something that made me sit up straight. He told us not to take a holistic approach to patient care.

Don't be holistic, he said. Be W-holistic. See the whole picture.

So that word followed me onto the wards and working there with real patients, real pressure, and real consequences, I began to understand exactly what he meant and I watched what happened when that principle was ignored. I watched people walk into a room, identify a symptom, treat it, and sometimes not always, but sometimes completely missing the point because the person in that bed wasn't just a symptom. They were someone with a history, a home, a way of coping, a set of fears they hadn't quite named yet and when those things went unseen, care fell short, not from a lack of skill but from a lack of perspective.

When you only look at the problem, you miss the person and the person is always where the answer lives.

Years later, I left nursing. I moved into brand work, a different world entirely, different language, different pressures but I kept seeing the same thing; studios focusing on the deliverable and I kept thinking about the wards, about how easy it is to treat the presenting problem and miss everything underneath it.

Brand work was doing the same thing, starting with the brief instead of the person and asking what do you want before understanding who are you.

So I built something different, something that understood the business and the life around it. The values and the nervous system and the vision and I called it the Wh-olistic™ approach because that word from that lecture theatre had never really left me, and it felt true.

It isn't a process, it is simply a commitment to seeing the whole picture before we build anything. We look at three things: you, your brand, and your world. The whole person, the whole expression and the whole life you are designing around your work.

Where all three meet, that is where the real work happens and that is where The Becoming™ lives.

If something in you has felt the gap between the brand you have and the one that actually feels like you, I want you to know that gap is not a failure, it is usually a sign that the work started in the wrong place.

That it started with the brief instead of with you.

That is the only thing I do differently. I start with you, I stay curious about you and I don't move forward until I have genuinely listened because the brand we build together is only as true as the foundation we build it on and the foundation is always, always you.

The thing about being truly seen, it tends to change people.

I hope this work does the same for you.

With light, Niobe x

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