If you keep up to date with all things Brilliant Agency you’ll know that we’re all about Health and Wellbeing for our team. We have subsidised Lean Lunches, monthly movement sessions and quarterly well-being workshops for all of our business, not to mention the free fruit.
Last month I decided to embark on the 30-day challenge with Joel from Better than Yesterday
Challenge was the right word for it. Personally, I have had a real uphill battle over the past year with my health and well being and was unenthused at first when I thought about how to approach improving it. However, joining Brilliant I started to see a real marked difference in my level of awareness on the subject and will to make some positive changes.
It started with 90-day stint of trying and testing a whole myriad of different vitamins, supplements, abstaining from all that not so good for you stuff and adding walking to work into my day. I cannot lie, it is true what they all say on every ‘I’ve changed my life interview’, I felt great. Being better at all things life and then the inevitable slide into ‘I only eat buffet food and my pockets are full of chocolate coins’ phase also known as December came along.
Getting back on track proved a bit of an insurmountable task in the New Year and then the 30-day challenge came along. The challenge itself isn’t anything troublesome on paper, with a daily calorie limit and exercise goals to reach along with some specialist advice and support it all makes sense and is exactly the ticket to wellness. That paired with the sometimes elusive will power. I have never been one for consistent self-discipline and although I do go through phases of eating our fruit in the office as snacks, you can also regularly find me surrounded by sweet wrappers and meeting people on bicycles with a takeaway at our reception.
That’s where it gets really interesting, even with support from a coach, lots of great advice and a daily journal to keep track of it’s completely up to you. That is the most obvious thing in the world when you write it down or read it but in real life, things aren’t that straight forward. And that’s where I found myself at on day 5 after getting off to what felt like an Olympic start. I was guilty of not setting myself realistic goals. My biggest learning has been that setting yourself a goal doesn’t actually mean anything if you’re not invested in reaching it or if you’ve made it unachievable.
Overall the challenge worked for me and I lost weight but the main thing I took away was that my goals have always been really poorly set and not thought through. The goal game is a bit more of a journey, you can’t sign up for guitar lessons in January and book yourself a spot for Glastonbury that summer.
There are a whole lot of what I’m now referring to as ‘service stop goals’. It’s like going on that big long drive, you know overall you have to get to that place 10 hours away but on the way, you live for the stops at the services, if even just to keep sane. For me, making my goals clear, achievable and not the stuff of fairytales has been the most valuable lesson of all. I now can apply it to all things and actually, they don’t seem scary now I can see the first stop on the horizon and it’s not that far away.