GOOOAAALLL!!!

 Achieving a wellness goal can often be as exciting as scoring a soccer goal – maybe not quite as vocal as that famous Spanish Soccer commentator’s signature screeeeeeeeeeem of joy – but still something that feels pretty good!

And here’s the thing – even if you don’t achieve the goal you have set for yourself (NOOOOOOO!!!!!!) your “failure” can still be viewed as something positive (YEEEEEEESSSSSS!). It all depends on how you choose to think about it. William James, a 19^th Century philosopher who also wrote influential books on the then young science of psychology, wrote

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

This thinking can also apply to the stress we feel when “failing” to make our goal.  What I have learned during my 35 years in the field of wellness, and perhaps more particularly as an Intrinsic Coach® http://www.agewellinitiatives.com/html/intrinsic_coaching.html is that while there is a very effective formula that everyone can use for the process of setting your goal (more later), what is important to you, and unique to you, is how you choose to react to either achieving or not achieving your goal. It is this more than anything that will determine how you continue, or whether you continue to progress toward current and future goals. The “thought choice” here is between “Failure” or “Learning”. Choosing “Learning” (I didn’t make my goal – What did I learn from this?), is likely to be far more productive than choosing “Failure” (I didn’t make my goal – Why the #$%#@ did I screw up?). The really cool thing about this ’new thinking’ is that it is equally powerful whatever happens with your goal.

You did it? What did you learn? What’s next?

You didn’t do it? What did you learn? What’s next?

So as you think about goals you have set – maybe even that ever more distant New Year’s Resolution – what’s coming up for you?

It’s your choice.

Kicking yourself up the assets

Taking an asset-based or positive approach to life is often viewed it seems as a ‘glass half empty, glass half full’ situation. But I think it is much more than that. As I mentioned in my previous post, the growing field of Positive Psychology has demonstrated time and again that viewing things from an asset-based, positive or optimistic manner is far more than just ‘Positive Thinking” which I think for most people has more of the feel of the philosophy espoused by Stuart Smalley, late of Saturday Night Live ”I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”

Educational research out of Stanford in the 1980’s with teachers and teaching performance reported that an approach focusing and building on the teacher’s ‘assets’ (i.e. their strengths, and what they did well) promoted high quality learning, while an approach focusing on the teacher’s ‘deficits’ (i.e. their weakness, and correcting what they were doing ‘wrong’) was far less effective in eliciting quality learning. Yet this ‘deficit-based’ approach is still out there in education and in behavior change.

One of the best known hypotheses in the area of Successful Aging is “The Compression of Morbidity”. This refers to the idea that the period of sickness (morbidity) at the end of life may be reduced (compressed) by adopting healthier lifestyles. This hypothesis has recieved much attention in the field of gerontology and as a professor I have talked about it myself on many occasions. With my ‘new thinking’ hat on however, I see that, although this hypothesis was clearly aimed at doing good, it was actually taking the ’getting less bad’ approach. Not much assett-kicking going on here! Instead there is an obvious dichotomy between “Successful Aging” – a positive, asset-based concept, and “The Compression of Morbidity” a negative, deficit-based concept. So here’s my Teleosity-based, assett-kicking version of this hypothesis. You heard it here first! Instead of “Compression” – why not “Expansion”? Instead of “Morbidity” – why not “Mobility”? And so we have “The Expansion of Mobility”. In other words ‘being better, longer’ instead of ‘being worse, shorter’.  I like it already!

So as you think about situations and goals in your life – what assets are kicking up for you?

Getting less bad

Back in 2000 when I was an assistant professor at Arizona State University, I was invited to be first author on a book chapter in a major publication called The Handbook of Health Psychology. The title of the chapter was “Effects of physical activity on physical and psychological health:  Implications for exercise adherence and psychophysiological mechanisms” (A pretty long and involved title I admit, but then this was a pretty long and involved book – I was actually Chapter 38 out of 51). The reason I bring this up here is that in my research for writing this chapter I was struck by the fact that almost everything on ‘psychological health’ out there in the scientific literature was about ‘getting less bad’.

I still see the same thing out there today, with the rationale for setting wellness goals such as ‘getting active’, ‘getting fit’, or ‘eating healthy’ predominently based either on reducing your actual bad stuff or on reducing your risk of bad stuff. With a moment’s thought you could probably come up with your own list of the usual bad stuff culprits: overweight, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar,  stress, depression, anxiety, risk of a heart attack, risk of a stroke, risk of dying, etc.

I suspect this is a consequence of living with our ‘Medical Model’ of health which is uniquely designed to kick in and fix the ‘bad stuff’, and has little or no designs at all on the ’good stuff’. The result of this is that we tend to view our wellbeing more in terms of how bad we aren’t rather than how good we are. When we try to set and achieve our wellness objectives we tend to focus more on overcoming obstacles rather than achieving goals, to focus on what we are not ‘getting’ rather on what we are ‘getting’. It reminds me of the lady I described in my last post. Even though she was truly gaining significant and meaningful benefits from her regular walking, her first response was to focus on what she wasn’t getting “It’s not fun”.

What I know as a scientist and Intrinsic Coach® is that focussing on the positive aspects of pursuing an active lifestyle will bring you a host of positive benefits – you’ll look better and feel better about your self and your life, be more alert, have more energy (usually this is substituted with ‘less fatigue’), clearer thinking, better quality of life, better sleep. And there’s more ….

That old cliched differentiation of people who either view ’the glass half empty or the glass half full’ reveals a pathway to some major (and positive!) consequences. Research has shown that people who have a more optimistic (ie positive, glass half full) view of things do better in life: they earn more money, are more successful, have more friends and even live longer. And as this wasn’t positive enough, you can even learn to be optimistic. You think I’m joking? Go check out the research of Dr. Martin Seligman acknowledged as the founder of “Positive Psychology. Read his book “Learned Optimism”. You can also check out an interview on EQ http://www.eqtoday.com/optimism/seligman.html

 So … As you read about these benefits – what positive things are coming up for you?

The F Word

FUN! I was thinking about that word the other day.  I keep reading that when people want to be more active they should ‘make it fun’ or ‘find something that is fun’ or even ‘find something you enjoy’. I saw these same kind of suggestions in some of this year’s recycled ‘ten sure-fire tips’ to stick to your New Year’s exercise program (Déjà vu all over again?). Of course if you can find an exercise that is Fun, then you are well on your way to a long-term love affair with exercise and your active lifestyle is virtually assured. My point here however is that if you look only for Fun or if you think it always has to be Fun, your options are more likely to be limited, and your intentions are more likely to be compromised. What prompted this line of thinking was a conversation I had recently while standing next to a lady doing some walking on a treadmill (She was doing the walking, I was doing the standing). We were chatting about the usual kind of stuff – ‘How do I get rid of my flabby arms?’,  ’What’s the best kind of exercise to do to lose weight’, etc. I was talking about the fact that she was already doing something really positive by walking on a regular basis when she said “But this isn’t fun”. To which my response was ”Who said it had to be fun”.

Of course this got a big laugh from her and her neighbours who automatically thought that the ‘jock’ in me was speaking (See the image above “50 more reps and you WILL be having fun or suffer the consequences!”). However that was not the point I was trying to make. The day before, this lady had seen me in the gym as I was coming to the end of a fairly intense session on the elliptical trainer. There I was in front of her cranking away, sweat flying, arms pumping. I asked her “When you saw me on the elliptical yesterday, did it look like I was having Fun?”. Again she and her neighbours laughed but (without quoting the resulting conversation word for word), the point I tried to make in the ensuing conversation was that, while I was definitely experiencing a number of positive physical and mental feelings during my workout, ‘Fun’ was not an appropriate descriptor of what these feelings were. Empowerment, self esteem, a sense of achievement, ego, being in control of my body, a sort of sense of completion, of being in tune with the rhythm of my movements – any of those – or more – could describe what I was feeling. But FUN? This didn’t even come close to what I was experiencing.

FUN is defined in the dictionary as “enjoyment or playfulness”, or “something that provides mirth or amusement”. It is certainly a pleasant feeling, and one that almost by definition, is rather trivial and not long lasting. In other words not something in my mind likely to persuade you to adopt any kind of long-term behavior change (like regular exercise).

So I said to this lady “I see you here on a regular basis, so what is important to you about what you do here?”. She thought for a while (actually for about 20 yards at 4 mph), and said. “It’s walking with my friend here (pointing to the lady on the next treadmill). We chat about things and the time just goes by”. I let some time go by without filling in the silence. Then she said “You know what the best thing is? When we walk out of the door at the end of the session, I feel really good about myself because I have achieved something”.

Sounds to me like a lot more than “Fun”!

So as you think about this story – what is important to you about being active?

Resolving anew?

Welcome to teleosity – ‘a sense of moving toward a goal or an inescapable conclusion’. Speaking about goals. how about a new way of resolving instead of resolving anew? After all didn’t we resolve much the same thing last year? Instead of (once again) studying ’ten tips for sure-fire ways to keep your resolutions’. Think different – think – “what is it that is important to me this year at this time?” If like the great majority of resolvers you come up with ‘weight loss’, then go deeper and ask “what is important to me about weight loss?” Hold that thought, take that approach and I guarantee that you will elicit a whole new way of thinking about you and the year to come.