Refresh Your Relationship with Your Activity Tracker
As we approach the end of summer and look forward to shorter days and colder weather, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how to sustain your motivation for self-care activities like movement.
You may be among the many people who have hoped that their wearables, activity trackers, and mobile apps were going to be the ultimate motivation solution. For some, they are; but for many others – ourselves, or our patients, clients, or employees – they are not turning out to be.
If you or someone you know is thinking about quietly putting your wearable in a drawer, wait a sec. Refresh your relationship by applying some science-based strategies to help you see your app as an ally rather than a nag. (If you are about to purchase your first activity tracker or wearable, these insights can help you get off to a good start!)
- Find these strategies, and the science behind them, in my recently published article in the ACSM Health & Fitness Journal: Activity Tracking + Motivation Science: Allies to Keep People Moving for a Lifetime. This featured article is freely accessible until 12/31/2017.
- Watch a 2-minute video of me explaining key points in the article.
- Click here for a worksheet and case study showing specific messages and strategies for implementing the Why, the Way, the Do with tracking apps and wearables that you can use for yourself, or for the people you work with (patients, clients, employees).
From Research to Real Life
Research-based insights related to creating sustainable behavior change, meaning, and well-being can be – and are being – translated into real-world applications by organizations, professionals, and individuals. My hope is that the content in this section can help all of us start thinking about how research-based insights can be used in the everyday life.
I this issue of Sustainable Change I want to share some findings from research on well-being programs conducted by Virgin Pulse and Human Capital Media. They were featured in an article by Javier Simon called Holistic Well-Being Programs Becoming Critical Business Drivers in Benefits:
- For the first time in the survey’s history, improving employee engagement was cited as the top reason employers offer well-being programs, equal to managing healthcare costs.
- These programs are well received by employees. The majority of employees who participate in well-being programs say they do so to improve their health (97%), and 93% participate to boost their energy levels.
- Ninety percent of employees say these programs positively affect work culture, 77% say they make them feel like the company cares about them, and 62% say these offerings make them more loyal and engaged to the company.
Why is this of interest? Reframing employee wellness as “well-being” might be a powerful hook for engaging employees in self-care.
The shift to emphasizing “well-being” (instead of the traditional medicalized “health”) is becoming more common and, I believe, will become the norm as we move forward. Well-being initiatives that are authentic and aligned with organizational culture (as opposed to a just a façade for “health promotion”), designed in alignment with the right science, and consistent across all touch points (including marketing, communication, and behavioral programming like coaching mobile apps) will yield real rewards for everyone: employees, organizations, families and communities. (Always keep in mind, initiatives that are termed “well-being” yet offer employees programs about and communicate in ways that emphasize the Wrong Whys and medicalized health/weight goals will undermine the potency of it to actually cultivate health or valued business outcomes in sustainable ways.)
Please continue to share your stories and experiences with applying these ideas in your personal and professional lives. (I might even feature your story in a future newsletter, if you are open to that.)
Shout-Out!
This newsletter’s Shout-Out goes to the following article I recently enjoyed
- The Unselfish Art of Prioritizing Yourself. This HuffPo blog post by Lisa Firestone is a reminder that our own self-care is strategic for what we most cherish in life – and not at all selfish. While this belief is starting to make inroads, far too many people still feel guilty when they take time to tend to their own well-being, energy, and joy.
My Bookshelf
I recently reread a lovely, inspiring book that I originally read close to 30 years ago: Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson (anthropologist Margaret Mead’s daughter). Through investigating the lives of five very diverse women (including herself), she explores how they threaded together their experiences, including challenges, to compose fulfilling lives. Despite being published decades ago, her insights are extraordinary and relevant for today’s health, wellness, and fitness professionals. For example, she writes:
“Today, those who begrudge themselves care, feeling that their role in life is to care for others, can be persuaded to think about issues of health and stress reduction. As a result, little cherishing of the self is translated into responsible behavior, being a way of caring for others like [taking a way for exercise]… But self-care is important for its own sake as well. It is intimately tied to self-esteem, with implication that the one who is cherished is important and valuable for his or her own sake.” (Page 45).
We need to think more deeply about her point: that each individual who practices self-care activities would greatly benefit from perceiving these acts as ways to deeply tend to our SELVES in addition to recognizing that self-care is in service of What Matters Most. If our self-care is only in service of everyone and everything else, then it might be easy for us to consider ourselves only as functional vehicles instead of worthy and loving beings. Note how well Bateson’s insights align with Lisa Firestone’s The Unselfish Art of Prioritizing Yourself post, featured above.
Feel free to share this post with others who share your interest in the science-based how-to’s of creating lasting changes that can survive in the real world.
Copyright © Segar, Michelle.