Ann Rockley: Wellness Strategies for Content Professionals – Episode 161

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Ann Rockley first took the title of “content strategist” in 1989. Over the next 30 years she pioneered content management, intelligent content, and many other practices we now take for granted.

Until recently few knew that she accomplished all of that while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people.

Ann now focuses on health coaching and career mentoring, two intertwined practices that help her clients, most of whom are content professionals, manage their health and wellness and thrive at work.

We talked about:

• her pivot from content strategy to health coaching and career mentoring
• the parallels in the practices she uses across her two careers
• her personalized approach to her client work
• how she approaches the challenges of helping people change their behavior
• how she helps clients develop better habits
• how much some of her work looks like agile methods
• her tagline: “Be well. Be successful.”
• the issues involved around deciding whether or not to reveal health challenges in a work environment
• her insight that her health is her superpower
• the importance of cultivating self-awareness around your health needs and practicing self-care

Ann’s bio

Ann Rockley, CEO of The Rockley Group is known as the “mother” of content strategy.  She has an international reputation for establishing the field in content strategy, content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multichannel delivery, and structured content management best practices. Ann introduced the concept of content strategy with her ground-breaking book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, now in its second edition. Ann is the creator of the concept of intelligent content and founded the Intelligent Content Conference now part of the Content Marketing Institute suite of conferences. She shared these concepts in Intelligent Content: A Primer.

Ann has achieved tremendous success, traveling the world sharing her methodology, keynoting at conferences, and growing and mentoring teams & key people. And unknown to anyone, she did it while learning to manage her lifelong health challenges.

Now after 32 years, Ann has made it her mission to help high-achievers to fulfil their health and career potential through health coaching and career mentoring. She brings her lifetime of experience in managing her own health challenges and balancing it with the demands of life as a high achiever. She inspires her clients to develop an approach that allows them to overcome health challenges while still boldly reaching for their career goals. Her unique approach has earned her a respected position amongst peers and those looking for health and career guidance from a powerful woman and exceptional mentor, who has walked the talk.

Connect with Ann online:

• LinkedIn
• rockley at rockley dot com

Ann’s Books:

• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy
• DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers
• Intelligent Content: A Primer

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 161. If you follow the field of content strategy, you’ve encountered Ann Rockley. Kristina Halvorson calls her the “Mother” of content strategy, a title that Ann first adopted in 1989, years before the introduction of the World Wide Web. Until recently, none of us knew that she had pioneered the whole field while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people. Ann now helps professionals succeed in their careers by managing their health and wellness.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 161 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am super delighted today to welcome to the show Ann Rockley. Ann is known as the Mother of Content Strategy, and she earned that title. She’s recently made a pivot into health coaching and career mentoring, and we’re going to talk about both of those things today. So, welcome, Ann. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Ann:
Well, thank you. Well, these days, as you said, I have pivoted to health coaching and career mentoring, and I have a lifelong relationship with challenges with health, and I worked very, very, very hard to not let it impede what I was trying to do, but I realized, with all the challenges we’ve had in the last few years, that after over 30 years of being highly successful in content strategy, that there were a lot of people who could use my services in a very different way, be able to work with me as a coach and as a career mentor because it’s so important that you’re not jeopardizing your health when you are developing your career to be highly successful. It’s so easy to do that.

Larry:
It is. You don’t have to read more than five or six posts on LinkedIn any one day to see somebody who’s struggling with burnout or some kind of challenges like that. We were talking before we went on the air. One of the things that was really intriguing to me is how there are some parallels between the way you practiced content strategy and the way you practice your health coaching and mentoring practice. Can you talk a little bit about that because I was really fascinated with how those line up?

Ann:
Very, obviously. I mean, I developed my methodology for content strategy and the unified content strategy, and I would always, always start with an organization doing what I call the substantive audit because people know that they have a problem, but they typically can’t articulate why they have that problem, what’s causing the problem. They know they have goals and a direction that they want to take, but they don’t know all the nitty-gritty details associated with that. So I would always do a deep-dive analysis with the organizations that I work with, and then present them with a set of recommendations, and then teach them how to develop a content strategy, how to develop metadata, workflow, all the aspects that you need for content strategy, and talk about structure and all those sorts of things because it was so important for me to help companies be able to do this on their own, to be self-sufficient because, I mean, they know their content. They know their audience. They know everything.

Ann:
It wasn’t something that I wanted to do, come in, figure out what the problems were, charge a fortune, fix things up, leave, and then come back every couple of years to do some more work. It’s really, really important to have the company self-sufficient to work through and deliver what they needed to deliver to their customers. So when you flip that and you take a look at health coaching, somebody might say they have blood sugar issues, and maybe they’re diabetic or something like that, and they’re having a really hard time managing their blood sugars. Well, great. That gives me a lot of information, but it isn’t enough, and I start with deep-dive analysis on the health side as well.

Ann:
So I actually do nutrigenomic assessments so I can look at their genome and understand what areas they may be more sensitive to, maybe what different types of supplements they need. They might need more vitamin D. They might need something else. They might be intolerant to grains. All of those sorts of things. That gives me a huge amount of information. Then, I would do another set of nutritional analysis to understand, “Well, what are you eating? When do you eat, and how do you eat? What’s that doing to your system? Yes, you have diabetes, but you’ve got an underactive gallbladder,” or something like that.

Ann:
So it’s really getting into the details, the nitty-gritty to understand that person and understand… In the business, I would always look at the culture, the way they work, and the issues, and the challenges within that. “Well, are you working 24/7? Do you have children? Do you have elderly parents you’re helping to support?” All of that because it’s one thing, “Oh, go off and eat this,” but that’s not going to help them. They probably already read that. They may already know that. They won’t know the nuances of the genomic assessment, but that’s not enough for people, and so helping them to understand how to manage their health and when they get off kilter for whatever reason. They’re flying. They’ve got time zone changes. It’s really impacting their blood sugars. How to deal with it? What are my tips and tricks that they can use to improve their health and continue growing that?

Ann:
Then, with the career mentoring, it’s such an important part. I mean, yeah, there’s food, and there’s other different lifestyle changes and things like that, but when you’re working, there is so much of your being that is associated with your career. Are you working excessively? Are you experiencing burnout? Are you highly stressed? Is it a toxic environment? Are you getting to where you want to go? Are you feeling that you’re not making the kind of progress that you want to make?

Ann:
I do another assessment. It’s called the Kolbe Assessment, K-O-L-B-E. This helps me to look at someone’s innate strengths, and they use those innate strengths in their day-to-day work and highly oriented towards details. They’re really good at fast decision-making. They’re really good at… whatever it happens to be, and that helps in terms of changing their lifestyle and helping them to manage their health. At the same time, “Well, wow, that’s why I like doing this,” or, “That’s why I hate doing this.”
So it helps you to decide and look at your job and say, “Is this where I should be? Is this what I should be doing? Is this what I want to do?” Typically, at this point in time, the majority of people who come to me are from the content world, not surprisingly. So I know that world inside-out and backwards, and can help them by combining things so that they can be healthy, strong, resilient, focused, great energy, great ability to think the way they want to do, and go after their goals when it comes to a career. So very similar, but more on a one-on-one versus a corporation.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, as you’re talking about that, two things occur to me. I’ll ask about the first one first, that in both cases, I’m going to guess that they show up with just a sense that they have a problem and something needs to change. But in both cases, all these assessments you’re doing and all the evaluation, you’re probably making recommendations that aren’t exactly what they thought they were going to get. Is that true or?

Ann:
Yes, they learn so much more. I mean, as I said, if it was just a matter of run-of-the-mill… Again, let’s say it’s a diabetic, “Eat low-carb,” or something like that, that’s not going to solve their problems and they… I look at people as bio-individuals. We are all very unique, and we respond to things in a different way. So all that analysis says, “Okay. In your situation, you’re likely to respond in this way, and hey, you can do this instead of that. You can focus on these kinds of things. You can focus on what you like, what makes you feel good health-wise, and emotionally, and mentally as well,” as opposed to, “This is the generic, what you should be doing.”

Ann:
I will identify other things with people that had no idea. “Okay. It looks like you’re experiencing some challenges with your gallbladder. I’m seeing issues where you’re not absorbing enough fat. You know what? That does…” and go on from there, and it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.” They’ll go off, and they’ll get some tests done and things like that. “Yeah, you’re right.” “So what do we do about it? Okay. Let’s take it from there because we’re optimizing.” Again, just like you would in a company, you’re optimizing all the different pieces of the whole strategy. You have to optimize the body, the mind, everything together to get a very strong, healthy, resilient individual in the long-term.

Larry:
It’s funny. I’m almost thinking like it might have been better if you’d done your career the other way because I have a feeling that human anatomy and physiology, and behavior is probably more applicable to an organizational thing than trying to take organizational dynamics and liken them to a body, which gets the second question, curiosity, I had about, as you described this, the end. After all this assessment stuff, you’re asking people to change their behavior, which is just notoriously difficult in individual-

Ann:
It’s very difficult. Absolutely.

Larry:
Yeah. That’s something that we all struggle with. I mean, you got any tips and tricks, help for us?

Ann:
Well, there’s a couple of things that go into that when they start to feel better. So we work on an intensive period, and they start to feel better, then it makes it easier. It’s like, “I feel good when I do this, and I don’t feel good when I do that.” So that’s part of it. You’ve got that motivation. You’ve got that incentive to do that. We do work with mindset. I work with them to help them identify the roadblocks, the challenges, the things that are holding them back. As someone who has had health issues since I was a baby, literally, I had to learn so many different ways of being as healthy and as effective as I could possibly be because I lived and worked an extraordinarily busy life, and I’ve got a daughter and things like that, but it’s like, “Hey, you don’t have to do this. You could do that. Have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about doing that?” All of the little suggestions, the tips, the tricks, the easy things, and we keep working on it.

Ann:
People talk a lot about doing gratitude, and gratitude is great. Absolutely, you need to have gratitude. But when you’re going through major change, I think wins are even more valuable to an individual. It doesn’t have to be a big win. I mean, somebody wants to… They come in, and they go, “Well, I want to get my A1C to here.” “Okay. Fine. Well, we’re not going to get it there immediately.” That’s a big win. What do we have to do to get there? “Well, hey, I ate two vegetables I’ve never had before, and I really enjoyed it.” That’s a win, or, “I got more than six hours sleep. I got seven hours sleep last night, and my blood sugars are a lot better.” I keep using diabetes, but I work with autoimmune disease. I work with allergies, and intolerances, and gallbladder issues, and a variety of different things.

Ann:
It’s one of the wins, and when you’ve got those wins, it’s kind of addictive in the sense you don’t want to go back there. If you have a bad day health-wise, and you say, “Why do I feel like this? What did I do? What didn’t I do? Oh, it was that. Okay. Well, let me change it and do something else,” and you’re just so much more effective. Why live in pain or where your brain is not working as well as it could be, or exhaustion, or frustration, or anxiety, or depression, or whatever it is? Your mind and your body is so important. Why live that way when you know you don’t have to? Some things may never go away, but you learn to manage them such that it doesn’t impact you negatively, unless you don’t think about it, and you do something you shouldn’t really be doing, so…

Larry:
I got to say, as you talk about that, I’m picturing this relationship between… You mentioned both mindset and, it sounds like, the importance of adjusting that to be more productive, but that’s not… The main thing is the wins, the behavioral stuff. So it’s the cognitive part, and it seems like you’re showing me… There’s some virtuous cycle there, but you look at your behavioral stuff and go like, “Hey, a couple wins here.” It’s probably easier to adopt that better mindset, and then a better mindset leads to better behaviors. Is that how it works or…?

Ann:
It’s cyclical. Yes. When you find out what works, and what doesn’t work, and why so you can make decisions at different points in the future, you just get jazzed. You feel good. You feel better, and that helps you. We go through different types of habits and how to form better habits, how to break difficult habits, and just how to deal with all the different challenges. So you’ve got those wins. You’ve got the wins in the office. When you feel good, and you know you’re at the top of your game, and you can accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to do, you can go after those wins in the office. You can go after those wins as an entrepreneur, or a contract, or whatever it is you happen to do because you can do it. Whereas if you can’t, you can barely get out of bed in the morning, or you’re just not functioning very well during the day. You can’t go over after your dreams. So it’s cyclical. It’s reinforcing the positive. It’s helping to figure out where the roadblocks are, and make changes, and adapting.

Ann:
We talked about… Think of agile. Okay? You do a little bit. See how well it works. Did it work? Great. Didn’t work? Let’s change it. Well, we’re working together in very much an agile method where you testing things out and fixing things that aren’t working until you know what works, and it’s like, “Hey. Now, I know that I can do it. This is what we need to be doing.” Same sort of thing. Usability and functionality, and what’s going to work for people. It’s all the same, but now it’s on an individual basis.

Larry:
Yeah. When you talk about that agile iterative approach, all of a sudden, I’m thinking of the… I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s this great line, “What we think progress looks like is an arrow going up into the right, but what it actually looks like is this squiggly line that go all over the place because of the-”

Ann:
Oh, yeah, a squiggly line. Yes.

Larry:
So you’re re-contextualizing that for me, but I also like the way you were just talking. I wasn’t 100% clear before we had this conversation about the relationship between your health coaching and your career mentoring, but that’s crystal clear now because some of those wins that you’re observing are at work. Some of them are in your medical or health symptoms, but some of them are like, “Man, I crushed it at work today. How did that… Oh, that’s because I was doing this stuff that Ann told me about.”

Ann:
Yeah. Absolutely, or you feel confident in yourself and your abilities to talk to management, to look for new job, to seek promotion, to complete certain things, and you know you like doing sprints, or you need the details to get it done effectively. Those are wins. Being healthy on its own is obviously a major, major success, but being healthy and successful. My statement, the tagline that I’m using is, “Be well. Be successful.” It’s so important. You cannot have success without being well.

Larry:
So this comes back to the nature of your pivot and where you’re at. You were successful, but nobody knew that you weren’t 100% well throughout that whole first 25, 30 years of your career. So, one, if you could go back, would you be more candid about your health challenges at the time, or how do you… I guess how can you help people manage when they are dealing with a health challenge of some kind to keep that work performance going, but also take care of themselves, but not jeopardize their career with like-

Ann:
Yeah. It’s a very difficult question. If I was to go back, absolutely not. I would not tell anybody because here I was a consultant in the high-tech field in very early days where there are not a lot of women doing what I was doing. I hate to say this, but strikes against you. Female, young, all of those kinds of things. I wanted my mind, my success, my accomplishments to lead, and not the fact that I had to be very cognizant of my health issues. Now, it became obvious in companies. I did workshops around the world. I have quite significant food allergies, and I would say to the company, “What are you planning on serving? Are you doing sandwiches? Are you doing a buffet?” Then, they would tell me, and I’d say, “Well, I can’t eat that,” or they would have sandwich, and it’s like, “Well, can I get a salad with chicken on it? Give me my protein. Give me my veg. I can’t eat the bread. Blabbity, blah, blah, blah.”

Ann:
So, in a little way, they would learn that, and I only had one other rule, no nuts in the classroom, because in one situation with a client, somebody else had nuts. I am anaphylactically allergic to nuts, and they… So, the volatile air. So that was a problem for me, but what’s most important was they touched a marker, dry erase marker, put nut oils on it. I touched it. I got a huge allergic reaction. I happened to be in a medical device company. They had lots of doctors on staff, but it was just… I didn’t want to say that. We went out to dinner. I could pick what I wanted. There was something else. So it’s not something that you need to tell people all the time, but if they want you to work 16 or 18-hour days for days on end, that’s… Self-care is like, “I can’t do that.” Maybe you’ve got family responsibilities. “I can do it for X, but I can’t do it on a long-term basis.” If you’ve got other types of issues, you don’t have to tell anybody until it’s going to impact. They want you to do something, and they need that because I hate to say it, but they will hold it against you. At least that’s my attitude. Maybe it’s wrong, but-

Larry:
No. I’m the similar generation as you, and I totally recall that. I’m very grateful for how things are now that there’s much more… even if it’s just nutritional awareness about the choice to have salads and meat, but the hazards of anaphylactic shock from a peanut allergy or something, that’s a top health concern. I’ve had to deal with it myself as a conference organizer, so that’s really… We were talking before we went on the air. I was talking about this thing. When I reflect on your career and all this stuff you’re talking about, all that you’ve accomplished, all the challenges you had, I said you’re like Ginger Rogers who’s Fred Astaire’s dance partner doing everything he did, backwards in high heels, just crushing it with all these things. Is that how it feels in retrospect or?

Ann:
In some ways, but I think my health is my superpower, frankly, because I had to learn to manage that health, and when I didn’t, and I nearly… Well, I ended up in ICU very shortly after I started my own business, and then it wasn’t nuts or anything like that. It was stress. I was burned out, and I was looking long hours, and just all sorts of stuff. I was really doing it wrong, and it triggered a lot of my old health issues, and I ended up in ICU, and it was like, “Okay. I can’t do that anymore. I cannot live that way.” So you have to be more effective. You have to know how you work most effectively. You have to know what you need to eat in order to have the brainpower to function effectively. So things like… You talk about a conference. So I ran a conference too, and I eventually sold it. One of my things from health was always be prepared because what can go wrong will go wrong. You’re on a plane, you don’t get food. You’re on a plane, the person next to you had nuts. You’re stuck in an airport. Whatever. So I would always plan for what could go wrong health-wise, so I was never left short.

Ann:
Well, if you’re running a conference where are all the different things is planning for getting marketing and getting all the stuff done, all the handouts, all the tags, getting everybody organized, what happens if a speaker doesn’t show up? Maybe they got delayed. What can you do? Maybe somebody gets sick. What can you do? How do you feed people? So, be prepared. It was always, always, always be prepared. What can go wrong will go wrong, and a lot of people might not think of those sorts of things.

Ann:
Running my own business, I went through four recessions. So, after the first one that nearly did me in, I knew, and it was like, “Okay. Another recession. These are the things that I have to do to put in place to support my team to make sure we’re financially viable, to make sure that I’m supporting people in the way that we need to support them.” Just all sorts of things that you might not think about if everything always goes your way all the time.

Ann:
When the pandemic hit, it was like, “Okay.” This is my third pandemic. Most people don’t know that, but I nearly died as a child with a pandemic. I spent six weeks in a hospital and lost 50% of my body weight because I got that pandemic and was not good for a lot of time, but it was like, “Okay. I can work from home. I can work from home. I can deal with this.” It’s that resilience thing. Again, it’s like, “Yes. Stuff will come at you out of left field, but if you know how to handle it, if you just feel confident even if you’ve never seen it before, whatever it happens to be, ‘Yeah. Okay. I can figure out how to deal with this.’ Panic initially. That’s okay. But then, stand back, deep breath, analyze the situation, figure out what my options are, and move forward.” So I believe that knowing that and having to take care of my health meant that I didn’t get – for the most part after that first one in the early days – I didn’t have to deal with that anymore. I didn’t get sick in the same way. I made sure I didn’t. The only way I could do that was-

Larry:
Yeah, and so for you, it sounds like… and I’m guessing this could apply to a lot of people, that self-care is the foundation of resilience, knowing what you need and anticipating what you’re going to need if things go haywire. Is that sort of-

Ann:
Yes.

Larry:
Yeah.

Ann:
Yes. Absolutely. Self-care is critical. Self-care on its own is not the only solution. Again, you have to know how to manage what your challenges are, but you need to know how to take care of yourself and know that you can’t work four-hour nights, and that you can’t travel through four different time zones in two days, and meetings, and presentations, and doing all that kind of stuff. It’s like you push back, and you go, “Okay. I’m already doing this one, and I’m committed to that one. Can we do it another time? No. Okay. Well, catch me next year.” Whatever it happens to be. If it’s a company, that’s pretty easy. Conferences, not quite. You’re going to say, “Okay. Well, look me up next year, and we’ll work-”

Larry:
We’re coming up close to time, so I need to wrap in a minute, but the first thing I want to say is I’m a former book editor, so I do this all the time. I want to know when your next book is going to be because you’ve written a couple books about content strategy. When is your book about this stuff coming out. Not to put you on this spot.

Ann:
Yeah, I’ve written three books in content strategy, and it’s certainly on the back burner, so I don’t think it will be next year. Maybe towards the end of next year, 2025, but I have to laugh. When I first mentioned that I was pivoting, somebody in the industry said, “Well, aren’t you going to write another book?” I went, “I’ve already written three.” You know?

Larry:
That’s right.

Ann:
“What more do you want?” I probably will as I build my methodology, and just like when I did the Unified Content Strategy, I worked with companies for three or four years before I wrote the first book when I knew that that’s what worked for organizations. So, late ’24. Maybe ’25. Don’t hold me to it.

Larry:
Okay. No pressure. We don’t hold you to that. Hey, is it… and before we wrap, Ann, I just want to make sure. Is there anything last, anything that we haven’t covered in the conversation yet or that’s just on your mind that you want to make sure we share before we wrap up?

Ann:
I’m just trying to think here that… I just want to reiterate to people that your health is important. Your career is absolutely important, but your health is important, too. Without your health, you’re not going to have career success like you want to. You’re just not going to be able to sustain that level of focus, and that I would highly encourage anyone to reach out to me, to talk to me, to see if I can help you, and you will not regret it. You’ll have a level of wellness that you might not have been able to achieve on your own, and certainly, don’t ignore it. It’s too dangerous, too dangerous.

Larry:
And that leads to my very last question. What’s the best way for folks to connect with you?

Ann:
Well, there’s certainly my email, rockley@rockley.com, and I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you and others on LinkedIn, too. They can reach out that way through a direct message, something of that nature. My email hasn’t changed in 35 years. I’m still rockley@rockley.com, so-

Larry:
Nice, and you got your own last name for your domain. That’s pretty good. Yeah.

Ann:
Yeah. Back then, 35 years ago, it wasn’t too hard to get my name. Actually, Rockley is pretty unique. Not too many of us around.

Larry:
Nice. Hey, well, thank you so much, Ann. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Ann:
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about my passions.