Encouraging Healthy Changes

Absolutely. Thank you very much. It's all about having consistency in making goals and setting yourself targets. If you were, and on that note, if you were to encourage someone in your community, in your circle of friends, in your circle of peers, to take a positive step for their health into the spring, what would you say to them? What kind of motivation or support would you share with them? So I think for me, this is very much like I think that social prescribing has sort of been drilled into me, but I think you can always pick up on things through conversations. So I would never try to be one of those people that is, well, you should really do this, you should really do this, I think you should do this, I think it very much has to come from that person. So I think if I kind of hear conversations with friends or you know people that I'm working with and they're like oh um let's use smoking as an example but I think if they're saying oh gosh I keep seeing about stop smoking and I just really really wish that I could smoke a lot less or you know those kind of where they're kind of in that pre-contemplation stage but they're thinking about a change, I think that's when I would really start to have that conversation with them and kind of explore, okay, what sort of changes do you think you could make? I think it very much has to come from them, so I wouldn't really be kind of pushing changes on people if I didn't think it was, but I think during spring is very much, you know, people have more energy and, you know, that new feeling of new life and you've got the whole prospect of summer ahead of you, so I think it's a really nice idea to make changes, so I think people maybe do have those conversations a bit more. And I think for me it's always just baby steps, things that build your self-esteem slowly and confidence growing and I think for me that is really really key whether it's anything, whether it's weight loss, whether it's drinking more water, getting more steps, I think it's looking at where you are right now and being really honest with yourself about where you are right now. Because I think some of us that work from home, I think there's been days where I do about 200 steps, because I work from home, you know, giving the dog a really, really short walk. And you sometimes have to be really honest with yourself that your starting point is about 200 steps a day. And it's not going, oh, I'm going to do 10,000 steps a day, because that's just so unrealistic. I think if I was really trying to kind of increase someone's motivation or self esteem, or really boosting them to try and make a change, or kind of be a bit more healthy maybe, I think it would be look really honestly at where you are now and just say okay well next week I'm going to try and double that. Like realistically if you're doing 200 steps every day imagine if one day you did 400, well that's you've doubled yourself and I think it's creating those really small baby steps that really build your confidence and grow your self-esteem and make it more likely that that's going to be consistent.