CEO of Your Healthy Habits

Could operating a business share similarities with your healthy habits? 

We [Zest Wellness] think so, and this article shares why. The TED Talk titled “How to Build a Business That Lasts 100 Years” by Martin Reeves is the backbone of this article.

As you embark on the journey of continuous improvement for your healthy habits, striving for effectiveness and efficiency just like a CEO, the following factors can serve as your foundation. What the underlying message here is alluding to is that the journey of continuous improvement for your healthy habits may be just as dependent on the conditions or design (i.e., the system) of your healthy habits, rather than the healthy habits themselves. Instead of putting the accountability or ownership entirely on yourself and relying on willpower for our healthy habits, you can ensure the conditions or design of your healthy habits help make the healthy choice the easy choice in the first place. 

You must not rely on willpower to overcome poor conditions or design. When you go through the following factors, think about how the factors spark thinking to create conditions or design around your healthy habits. 

“Willpower cannot be used to overcome a lifetime of poor programming. Let’s also focus on the system around healthy habits rather than solely the healthy habits themselves.”

The Consistency

Just like non-negotiable business operations that must occur each day for the business to function, there are healthy habits that have to be done every day. Obtaining a sufficient number of steps is an objective for each day, not a once-a-month objective. Therefore, being redundant by being consistent with your healthy habits is what you want! Said differently, be compliant with healthy habits as an occurrence for each day. A tip is to try putting your healthy habits into your daily calendar or scheduler. Perhaps the healthy habits become bond when it is in the calendar or scheduler as you position other things around your healthy habits, rather than the other way around. This is also why integrating your healthy habits with technology can be useful for achieving consistency because of technology’s ability to serve as a form of convenience and tracking. This is why the Zest Wellness platform, powered by Virgin Pulse (http://joinzestwellness.com/), can be a positive game-changer for the consistency of your healthy habits. Ask your employer if you are eligible for the Zest Wellness platform, powered by Virgin Pulse.

Diversify Yourself

Even though business operations and your healthy habits must be consistent each day, not a healthy meal once a week followed by days of sedentary behavior and frivolous spending, diversifying what you do to help keep things fresh and fun is an asset. “Be consistent with being healthy by diversifying your healthy habits.” Whether it be changing the time of day for your healthy habits, the locations of your healthy habits, or your healthy habits themselves, as mentioned, diversifying your portfolio is what helps gets you through challenges. You are encouraged to wear your creativity hat as it is crucial to plan for a variety of healthy habits. A strategy to experiment with for this factor is diversifying which healthy habits you do with others (choosing when you utilize social support). It may be that you enjoy physical activity by yourself, as you prefer to wear headphones, but grocery shopping with someone else helps make grocery shopping that much more of an enjoyable experience for yourself and offers you the opportunity to learn about healthy eating from the someone else.

Break It Down

When a new task or project for a business is being explained, it can certainly feel like new information overload. The same can be said for healthy habits in which too much at once or too large of a change at once can be intimidating. What can appropriately be done is to break the healthy habit down into small steps. In doing so, whether it be creating units/classes/modules, the healthy habit can become more manageable. Just like in business, a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for a healthy habit can allow for gradual, continuous improvement and target areas of opportunity to overcome barriers or challenges, rather than throwing away the healthy habit entirely, so to say. If this, then that, rather than delete all. A small step paramount to success but easily overlooked is the act of preparing equipment necessary for the healthy habit, such as preparing your gym bag the night before for a morning workout the next day. Further to that, keeping an extra pair of clothes for physical activity in the car can allow for times of spontaneous healthy habits that may be presented.

“Inch by inch it’s a cinch, yard by yard it’s too hard.”

Being Open to Change

As a business operates or you pursue your healthy habits, influences outside of your control may impede progress. In both business operations and your healthy habits, being open to change is a must for then being able to adapt to the change. Thinking ahead of time for your healthy habits is a form of adaptation to think in advance about how availability or timing surrounding your healthy habits may be altered for a given day. This thinking ahead of time can be thought of as forecasting or market research to see what is happening around you to help build defenses for flowing with change. It is all about preparing for the worst, but expecting the best, to be realistic about your healthy habits. Hope is not a strategy. Some days you will have compromised healthy habits, which is okay because what is important is bouncing back the next day and keeping with your healthy habits over the long-haul. 

Spotlight on Quality

At different points in time, such as each quarter for a business in that of 4-month intervals, action towards evaluation is a must. Before we aim for where we are going, we must know where we are now. Pausing to check the quality of your healthy habits, having that notion of discretion and carefulness, is another action for your healthy habits’ effectiveness and efficiency. A method of putting the spotlight on the quality of your healthy habits can be performed by engaging with others by means of collectives, which are centered around helping you be the best you. This is the act of evaluating the quality of your healthy habits and sharing your progress with others. Such collectives can be termed mastermind groups (similar to a type of focus group), mentors, and even having your own personal board of directors. As the CEO of your healthy habits, who can you consult with to be on your personal board of directors so that you are learning from them through their constructive feedback?

Again, the journey of continuous improvement for your healthy habits can be just as much about the conditions or design (i.e., the system) of your healthy habits as much as the healthy habits themselves. Put the system in your favor to help direct you to success. Each day is different, but your mindset of the factors mentioned above can be locked-in.