How to Incorporate Wellness Activities Into Your Next Event

For any event, it is important to make connections with your audience that are meaningful and memorable. Increasingly, that means being more creative when selecting activities to build into the event schedule.

Gala dinners, cocktail parties, and team-building games are always reliable crowd pleasers, but if you really want your company to stand out, integrating wellness activities & elements will do so more effectively. McKinsey & Company recently estimated wellness to be a $1.5 trillion industry – with expected growth of 5% to 10% every year.

Here are a few unique ways to make wellness part of your next event.

Pick a Venue That Promotes Wellness

Start with a destination that celebrates and values the key aspects of wellness: physical, mental, spiritual and social. This will allow incorporating these into your event programming seamless without a lot of extra logistics or vendors.

For example, Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California is just outside Los Angeles and surrounded by 102 acres of beautiful beaches and nature preserves bringing out a natural calm upon arrival with its scenery alone. The resort offers dozens of active pursuits like kayaking, surfing, hiking, archery, and more in addition to outdoor painting classes, locally sourced cuisine, and a comprehensive spa facility.

Other venues are full-spectrum wellness experiences like the Carillon Miami Beach, which has tailored its entire resort offering to the ultimate wellness-centric activities and services. Therapies for stress and anxiety, anti-aging, fitness, nutrition, meditation, state-of-the-art spa facilities, and a stunning beachfront location are all seamlessly woven into every stay, with multiple options for customized experiences.

Engage the Senses

With the scenery and blood-pumping activities covered, next focus on experiences related to smell, sight, taste, sound, and touch. Think about welcoming guests with aromatherapy, perhaps the soothing fragrance of lavender or the invigorating scent of the ocean.

This could happen in the form of sachets or essential oils given out in swag bags at check in or you can choose ambient scenting for the entire venue – and even change the aroma throughout the event.

Or, try a new twist on dining with a farm-to-table activity that involves all the senses such as a visit to an organic berry farm, speaking with farmers, and then enjoying a delicious dessert later.

Another option: a farmer’s market-style experience that invites guests to put together a custom lunch with locally grown favorites. You can even take inspiration from your event theme or brand image.

Launching a new green initiative? Consider something like a green tea tasting, or green tea ice cream.

Looking to “juice up” profitability as a theme? Invite your guests to make their own juice smoothies. These ideas and others like them are not only delicious and wellness forward, but also tied to a sensory moment guests will remember.

Get Guests Dancing

Sales presentations and awards ceremonies can be a lot to sit through. So why settle for entertainment that requires more sitting?

Instead, get your attendees involved in the entertainment with a choreographer leading them through a dance or the latest TikTok trend.

You can also let your audience split up into teams to choreograph their own dance battle and connect it to a motivational song that coordinates with your event theme.

Dancing is also a great way to celebrate culture by learning native dance movements and their significance. It’s a physical, social, environmental, and emotional wellness experience all wrapped into one activity.

Plan Downtime In Your Agenda

There is such a thing as over-planning an event. You want your guests to be energized and excited, not burned out and tired. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness are all served with some low-key relaxation activities strategically planned to start the day, as a closing to a workshop, or as a team building break in the middle of other activities.

Yoga is a rapidly emerging favorite as many guests now have their own practice they pursue in their free time. Explore unique and fun variations by doing partner yoga or a handstand or balancing workshop as an alternative to traditional team building. You can also offer yoga nidra – a deeply restorative practice designed to enhance a restful night’s sleep.

Guided Meditations are excellent ice-breakers because they don’t require anyone to be outgoing or immediately interact with other people. Instead, a guided meditation gives guests a way to settle in and reset after traveling to the event and start with a calming shared experience that then becomes an easy topic of conversation once it’s complete. You may even choose to start each day of your multi-day event with a guided meditation to root the event to a main theme or idea.