“three things in life: your health, your mission, and the people you love. that’s it.” - Naval ravikant
CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK
Challenge this week!
Lunges! I challenge you to start out with 20 lunges, then add 20 each day. By day 7, you should be up to 140 lunges. Why lunges? Lunges are a popular strength training exercise if you are looking to strengthen, sculpt, and tone your body, while also improving overall fitness and enhancing athletic performance. This resistance exercise is popular for its ability to strengthen your back, hips, and legs, while improving mobility and stability.
Benefits of Lunges:
1. Weight loss
Lunges work the large muscle groups in your lower body, which builds leans muscle and reduces body fat. This can increase your resting metabolism, which allows you to burn more calories and trim excess weight. If you’re looking to lose weight, push yourself to your outer limits by including lunges in a high-intensity circuit training routine using heavy weights.
2. Balance and stability
Lunges are a lower body unilateral exercise since you work on each side of your body independently. The single-leg movements activate your stabilizing muscles to develop balance, coordination, and stability. Working one leg at a time causes your body to be less stable, which forces your spine and core to work harder to stay balanced.
3. Alignment and symmetry
Lunges are better than bilateral exercises for rehabilitation since they can correct imbalances and misalignments in your body to make it more symmetrical. If you have one side that’s less strong or flexible, spend a bit of extra time working on this side so you don’t overcompensate or overuse the dominant side.
4. Stand taller
Lunges strengthen your back and core muscles without putting too much stress or strain on your spine. A strong, stable core reduces your chance of injury and improves your posture, making common movements easier.
TIP OF THE WEEK
TIP OF THE WEEK
In the TIP this week, I am challenging you to reach out to three people and tell them how much you appreciate them. Let’s face it, 2020 has been a pretty challenging year. We all need some encouragement. The simple act of letting someone know they are important to you, means a heck of a lot.
Here are ten benefits of sharing your appreciation.
1. Your mindset changes. It’s not natural for many of us to actively look for the great work, brilliant ideas, and extra effort given by our coworkers and teams. That’s probably due to the fact that when we start our careers we’re simply focused on looking out for ourselves. But when you change your mindset to look for the good instead of the bad in the people around you, you begin to notice just how fantastic they are.
2. Your mood improves. Psychologists have long touted how our mood and daily outlooks change when we focus on positive things rather than negative. In fact, Michael “Dr. Woody” Woodward, PhD suggests that simply removing negative words from your vocabulary can have a tremendous effect on your mood. Imagine the impact using positive words to appreciate another person could have on your mood.
3. You engage at a higher level. While the whole corporate world is frantically trying to figure out how to engage employees, not many of us are asking how to further increase our own engagement. We should. A recent study shows that when employees (at any level) give recognition, their engagement score increases by 26%. That’s a sizable increase considering how easy and enjoyable it is to recognize someone at the office.
4. Your ability to innovate improves. While you may not see your role as an innovator, your leaders are trying to figure out how to get you to bring your brilliance to work — to improve a product or process, discover ways to cut expenses, and generate new ideas. Again, research shows that employees (at any level) who recognize their team members experience a 33% increase in innovation.
5. You build trust in relationships. Even the neuroscientists are proving that recognition builds trust. According to Paul J. Zak, professor at Claremont Graduate University, “The neuroscience shows that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public.”
6. You’ll actually want to stay longer. While it would make logical sense that those of us who feel appreciated stay with an organization longer, research from a global study shows we stay quite a bit longer. In fact, companies that that recognize their people for a years of service anniversary keep employees an average of two years longer than companies that don’t. And while that’s impressive, as you celebrate the service anniversaries of teammates you build a bond as if they’re your family.
7. You increase your effectiveness. Does giving recognition have a direct impact on results? You better believe it. Research shows that employees (at any level) who give recognition experience a 22% increase in work results.
8. You smile more…and apparently cry more. There’s something intrinsically nice, and good, about recognition and appreciation that just screams, “it’s the right thing to do.” People bring their heart and souls to work. You will see the emotional impact appreciation has on people — often decades after the recognition moment happened. So give it a try. Appreciate, and you’ll inspire some smiles and tears.
9. You inspire greatness in others. We all would love to be the person who inspires someone else. It turns out it’s not that difficult when you actively give recognition. A study by the O.C. Tanner Institute shows that 88% of employees who receive recognition feel inspired to do great work. Why wouldn’t they? They just got praised for a job well done.
10. You create a story with a future. Whether you’re a manager or an employee, giving recognition tells the recipient, and all of the people witnessing the recognition moment, what kind of work you admire. And, when everyone is clear about what great work looks like to you, they’re likely to produce more of it for you and with you. In fact, they’ll likely even try to do it better than the last time.