|
The concept I’m about to share with you changed the course of my life. Are you ready to learn about the "Crisscross Effect"? I’ll share a fair amount of my personal history today so you see that I have overcome challenges myself and want to help you do the same. Helping people like you is why I started SparkPeople. This lesson gets to the heart of how and why the SparkPeople program works when it comes to changing behaviors. This lesson will reference other lessons and activities that we’ll get to in the future. I mention them here because they were crucial in the development of our overall approach. This is also a longer lesson because it introduces many topics. When I was a kid, I was known as the shyest kid in the class. I was that person who looked at his shoes while he walked down the hall because I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. I was very interested in improving myself and reaching goals, though. I generally did a pretty good job of this with good grades, playing sports and having a fair number of friends, especially once I took the initial steps to conquer social anxiety in high school. I did not eat very well, but was so active that I didn’t have weight issues. While I didn’t realize it at the time, there is a chance that my poor nutrition even contributed to other health issues and my anxiety overall. I knew I still had a long way to go, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I still had a fair amount of anxiety, and I’d often put together a plan to get in great shape. This would work for a while until life would get busy, I’d fall off the wagon and have to start all over again. This was both frustrating and challenging, since the beginning stages of any improvement program (including a weight-loss program) require more effort put in than the initial results you get back. That imbalance and a feeling of your effort not being "worth it" is why so many people give up on programs like this in the beginning stages. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was doing yo-yo fitness, just like so many people do yo-yo dieting—losing weight and then gaining it back. Then came the start of a major breakthrough. I read two books that were a big spark for me:
These two authors presented incredible leadership material. As I read their material plus pieces from other leadership experts, I had an "a-ha moment." I realized that leadership experts were often great at the leadership element, but underestimated the value of fitness and health. On the other hand, health experts (like most personal trainers and dietitians) were great at telling people which exercises to do or which foods to eat, but most of them seemed to miss the value of the full leadership and behavioral psychology picture. I wondered what would happen if I smashed together the best of health and fitness with the best of goal setting, leadership, motivation and behavioral psychology. I started by thinking about what was most important to me in life, just like we asked you to do in day two. Next, I set some specific goals related to what was most important to me, which we’ll do on day 18. As a test, I wondered what would happen if I combined goal-setting and fitness by committing to do at least 10 minutes of exercise per day and tracking the number of days in a row I could do this. This "crisscross" between exercise and goal-setting worked, leading to amazing results as shown in day nine. After exercising 700 days in a row, a local newspaper did a story on my journey, labeling me the "Cal Ripken of fitness." That success made me wonder what would happen if I started including other areas of life in my program. It also gave me a burning desire to continue improving. After all those years of not quite being on the right track, I knew I was finally on the right track and good—make that great—results were about to happen. One thing I wanted to do was figure out how to stay motivated since there were so many demands on my attention that would make it easy to fall off track. One effective strategy I used was to make my goals visible to me on a regular basis. I cut out pictures that represented my goals and turned those into a vision collage that I hung up on my office wall right next to my computer. This kept me on track. I started eating better. Instead of hitting the vending machine at work for snacks, I would bring healthy snacks like nuts and fruit to work. Instead of making bad fast food choices many times a week, I started making my own food at least some of the time. I noticed that my stress levels started going down, so I researched different stress management techniques to enhance this. At the time, I was in a high-pressure management program at Procter & Gamble. When I started working there, I felt a bit like I was drowning—like I could never become a leader in this type of environment, even though there were many nurturing people taking me under their wing. But as the days of my streak added up, I had both more energy and more confidence. At the time, I was an accountant and needed to deliver accounting information to others as part of my job. I started making it a game to do the best I could at helping others do their jobs better. At one point, all of these managers got together and wrote a joint letter to my boss thanking me for helping them do their job better. I still have this letter. I soon started sleeping better. As a person with anxiety, when I went to bed the first things I would think about were the mistakes I made over the last 10 or 12 hours. Then I would think about all the things I was going to screw up the next day. This process resulted in less sleep and lower quality sleep from the stress. With the changes in my routine, now I was falling asleep faster and clearly getting higher-quality sleep. I took additional steps to improve my sleep habits, and the improved sleep led to even more energy and more determination to continue the plan. That energy made it easier for me to make better food choices and exercise more. All of these improvements, both mentally and physically, combined to make a dramatic difference in my social anxiety leading to better relationships with other people, both at work and in friendships. Those improved relationships in turn improved everything else. Overall, I started feeling more in control of my destiny—like I could do anything! I had always been a generally happy person, but this was different. The combination of being in great physical and mental shape along with being on a path that I knew would continue led to a "pure joy" I had never felt before. I remember this feeling hit me one day when I was driving down the freeway and started singing out loud to a song on the radio. My goal became to make all of this like a game, and continue figuring out more areas of life to pull into my program to help me reach goals. The Crisscross Effects from all of these areas kept impacting other areas of life, and eventually led to the SparkPeople Program, an all-encompassing way to reach goals. This is a way to truly build a healthy lifestyle and not just a "diet" that is narrowly focused on one area of life. Every step of my journey gave me the passion and energy to become an entrepreneur. My friend and I starting an online auction website named Up4Sale that grew into eBay’s leading competitor. eBay made us their first acquisition just prior to their IPO and I used part of the proceeds from that sale to start SparkPeople. I share this to demonstrate that this program really can transform your life and help you reach goals you might have never thought possible! Do you see how all areas of your life fit together and how improvements (or problems) in one area can impact all other areas of life? How will you use this to your advantage in reaching goals? |