I am not an exercise person.I've never been athletic, and I didn't make working out a priority at all in college (Who did?). But now that I have a fairly regular work schedule, I decided to change that. I chose to start with Jazzercise for two important reasons: 1) There's a class offered in my office building, so I can just walk right down after work. 2) There was a promotion going on, so the cost was reasonable.
I'm now proud to say that since I started seven weeks ago, I have missed just one class. Only one other person in my class can boast the same thing, and it's a big deal to me given my humble fitness beginnings. This reminded me of a post I read on lifehacker.com a little over a year ago about Jerry Seinfeld's motivation technique.
Jerry wanted to make himself write one joke per day, so he put a calendar on his wall and put a big red x on every day that he did it. The idea is that after several days you see a chain, and the goal is not to break the chain. It's actually a pretty compelling idea, especially because once you miss one day, it's easier to skip another.
You could easily adapt this to any size calendar, actual or virtual. There's also a Web site called dontbreakthechain.com , where you click on days to turn them red. You can view up to a year of dates at a time, and it calculates how many days non-stop you've met your goal.
My Jazzercise classes are only two days per week, so they don't lend themselves as easily to this strategy, but I could create one for exercise in general, even if it's just a long walk.
Some other goals I thought of are eating fruits and vegetables, meditating and reading.
Question: What are some other ways you could use this strategy for wellness?
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