Do you want this year to be the year you actually keep your New Year’s Resolution to achieve better and healthier habits?
“It’s the ultimate personal challenge,” says Leigh Stringer, author of The Healthy Workplace.
"It takes guts and determination to make and keep those life-changing
commitments in our lives, but it can be done.” Stringer offers up 5
major reasons we fail, and how to stay on track:
1. Get Serious. We need a strong reason to overcome our natural lack of motivation.
Becoming healthier is a really good
idea. But to get us to change our behavior – to actually change the way
we eat, move, sleep and manage our stress on an ongoing basis –
requires a really powerful motivator. We need a reason that makes it
“absolutely essential” for us to do something differently, and think of
ourselves differently. Our lame excuses need to be trumped by a greater
calling. We need a real sense of urgency and a stronger “why.”
Deciding to be healthy has to be more
than just a cool thing to do or a “nice to have.” Making the firm
decision to change lifelong habits for the better requires steely
resolve and a strong, unquestionable purpose. It has to be
bullet-proof.
Take Action:
· Think. What would incentivize you to make a firm decision and commit to it?
· Write down what motivates you and post it where you will see it several times a day. This is your “why.” A strong ‘why’ can navigate when the how is not so clear.
2. Choose friends wisely. You can influence your own behavior by hanging out with healthy people.
Social influence and peer pressure
positively impact our exercise behavior, awareness of our intent to
exercise and produce results, and the attitude maintained during the
exercise experience. You are more likely to stay on an exercise program if you have a friend (either an individual or group) who works out with you. Connecting with other people is critical. We
are hard-wired to want to impress and relate to our friends. In
addition, if you commit to being at the gym every day, you will feel
good and will achieve your goals by keeping your promise to yourself.
Take Action:
· Find
a friend you like to exercise with and set up meetings on your calendar
to do so. Make friends with people you meet at the health club.
· Surround yourself with people who are healthy and have already adopted the behaviors you are trying to achieve. Decide to be around them often. It will help nudge you to make better decisions and achieve your goals.
3. Be accountable. Get a partner to help you stay that way.
If you are accountable for the commitments you make, you are much more likely to achieve your goals and succeed. One great way to keep honest is to find an accountability partner – someone you
trust and who will check in with you on a regular basis (daily, weekly
or whatever is needed) to see how you are doing, give you positive
reinforcement, track how well you doing, and encourage you to stick with
your commitments.
Take Action:
· Find someone you trust to be your accountability partner.
· Talk to them about your goals and specific objectives.
· Get specific with them about actions you will want to take as well as rewards and consequences for taking or not taking them
· Set
up regular check-in times. This can be a text message, a periodic but
regular encounter, or a phone call, whatever makes sense.
· Review
your progress and your goals and objectives honestly to track your
performance, and modify your targets. Keep your goals ambitious but
attainable.
4. Make Getting Healthy a Game. Sticking to your goals and resolutions isn’t very fun, but technology can help make it fun.
Do your best to make getting healthy fun.
You can turn your journey into a game and adorn your arms and body with
wearable devices that help motivate, engage and prompt you to make
better decisions. Apply video game-thinking and
game dynamics to engage yourself and change your behavior. The
technology is available and has really evolved. You can turn any goal or
objective you want into a game-like activity that will become ever more desirable and highly addictive. Gaming
is now understood as a significant way to encourage people to adopt
more healthy behavior. Two of the most powerful elements are competition
and progressive reinforcement, where a player gets a challenge, meets
that challenge and then receives an immediate reward for its
accomplishment. Retained engagement is known to produce 90% improvements
on start to finish challenges.
Take Action:
Here are a few more apps you can try:
· Pact,
funded by the founder of Guitar Hero, helps you make pacts with
yourself to regularly exercise and eat healthily, and you are paid in
real dollars to do so.
· LifeTick
is a goal-tracking app that asks you establish your core values, then
follow the S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic,
time-specific) goal-setting method to create tasks or steps that are
required to achieve your goal.
· Habit List
helps you track your “streaks” – how many times in a row you completed a
habit, and will send you reminders to keep you on track.
· Lift
allows you to choose your goals and then select the type of coaching
you require: advice, motivation, and/or prompting from the Lift
community.
· StickK,
developed by Yale University economists, requires you to sign a
commitment contract which binds you to a goal. It will cost you real
money if you fail to reach it.
5. Pay Attention to your Environment. It may be working against you.
Your environment greatly influences the
decisions you make about your health. To the maximum extent possible,
take a careful look around, and if necessary, change what you see, hear,
smell, taste, and feel. Choose to keep your
personal space clean of the enticements that will destroy your ability
to achieve your goals. Clean your kitchen and your will be 44 percent
less likely to snack than if your kitchen is messy. You will eat less if your kitchen is stocked with smaller vs. bigger plates (ideal is 8-10 inches in diameter).
Take Action:
· Pay attention to how your environment can sabotage your goals and objectives. Don’t
set yourself up for failure by keeping potato chips in an easy-to-reach
cabinet. Move them or get rid of them and place them on the forbidden
list. Look at your home and work settings with fresh eyes, and put away (or throw away) anything that you are to giving up.
· Strategically
place healthy snacks, running shoes or other prompts in prominent
places to encourage you to make good on your commitments.
Choosing one of these strategies is probably not enough. You
will most likely keep commitments if you employ “multiple
interventions,” including strategies that intrinsically and
extrinsically motivate your behavior.
The Healthy Workplace:
How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees-and Boost Your Company's Bottom Line
Leigh Stringer
List $ 27.97
Trade hardcover 256 pages
Publisher: AMACOM (July 19, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0814437435 ISBN-13: 978-0814437438
The Healthy Workplace utilizes real life and real time research and studies to prove that it pays to invest in people's well-being. Leigh
Stringer reveals how to: create a healthier, more energizing
environment; reduce stress to enhance concentration. She explains how to
inspire movement at work, use choice architecture to encourage
beneficial behaviors; support better sleep; heighten productivity
without adding hours to the workday. The book is filled with strategies
and tips for immediate improvement and guidelines for building a
long-term plan. The Healthy Workplace is designed to help boost both
employee well-being and the bottom line.
About Leigh Stringer
Leigh Stringer, LEED AP, is a workplace
strategy expert and researcher. Her work has been covered by national
media, including CNN, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Good
Morning America.
She works for EYP, an architecture, engineering and building technology firm.
She is the author of the bestselling book, The Green Workplace: Sustainable Strategies that Benefit Employees, the Environment and the Bottom Line (Palgrave MacMillan) and The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees—and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line (AMACOM).
Leigh is currently collaborating with
Harvard University’s School of Public Health, the Center for Active
Design in New York, the International Facility Management Association
and the AIA DC Chapter on Health and Well-being to create new tools to
connect like minds and to blur the boundaries across industries in order
to advance and improve our well-being at work. She is a regular contributor to Susan Cain’s Quiet Revolution Blog and Work Design Magazine. Leigh regularly speaks at U.S. Green Building Council, CoreNet
Global, the International Facilities Management Association and
American Institute of Architecture events and writes for a number of
workplace and real estate magazines and journals, along with her blog,
LeighStringer.com.
Leigh has a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters
of Architecture and an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis.
Leigh lives with her husband and two daughters in Washington, DC.
What People Are Saying
“Leigh is clearly on the cutting edge of the revolution that is occurring between workplace health and business performance. The Healthy Workplace is research based, immensely practical and filled with genuine insights.”
- Jim Loehr, co-founder of the Human Performance Institute and renowned performance psychologist
“We’ve spent so much time trying to make
people happier at work, neglecting how to make them healthier. Stringer
combines the best thinking from physiology, psychology, nutrition, and
sleep science into practical advice. This is a great read on a
critically important topic—a must-have for anyone concerned with
waistlines and bottom lines.”
- Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of ORIGINALS and GIVE AND TAKE
“Leigh goes far beyond ROI and productivity and digs deep into unseen benefits of workplace wellness in The Healthy Workplace. Autonomy, creativity, mindfulness, and reduced presenteeism
are just a few ways your culture will benefit from various workplace
health initiatives. If you are looking to start a workplace wellness
program or simply want to be inspired and re-ignite your population,
this book will be an imperative tool so start reading and get out there and change some lives.”
- Sam Whiteside, Chief Wellness Officer, The Motley Fool
“If you pick books that offer both
learning and enjoyment, Stringer’s writing delivers mightily on both.
You’ll learn why the Huffington Post has napping rooms, why we have a
preference for ‘savanna landscapes,’ and what ‘acres of neutral colored
work stations’ do to workforce performance. Stringer offers many long
lists of practical methods workplace wellness readers can take to people
managers, facilities managers and food managers alike to make their
workplace a healthy one. I urge you to read it!”
- Paul E. Terry, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) and Editor, The American Journal of Health Promotion
“Whether you seldom think about the
interplay between healthy lives and healthy business or you live and
breathe it, this book provides a new way of thinking about the
connections between psychology and sociology, medicine and health
promotion, architectural design, management science and the history of
industrialization. Stringer convinces us like no
other about the business case for raising human health and performance.
Through insightful reporting of the research and company anecdotes,
sprinkled with her wit and candor, Stringer challenges us to think
differently and deliberately about designing healthier work
organizations. This book is for everyone who wants to unlock the
potential of work for good!”
