Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Regular Exercise - A Habit? Why is it that I am 53 and have ignored well-intentioned and factual advice for 30 years to take regular exercise? I know that it will be good for me. I know that this is not baloney like many diets are. Taking more exercise is unquestionably good for me. For a while, I buckle under the social pressure and try it. I go to the gym, buy a rowing machine. If the barrier was only awareness, I should have taken it up years ago. Why is this important? Because our health system will buckle soon if we don't find a way of living better. On PEI 59% of Islanders are overweight and the trend for children in particular is frightening. This is a health epidemic for the developing world. We are trying lots of things and making lots of excuses for why we are making no progress - the trend is getting worse at a non linear rate. There are lots of theories for why we participate so poorly in taking exercise.  The influence of TV as a passivity driver. The lack of organized sport at school. Busing at school. The lack of time in adult life because the demands at work are so great. The lack of coaching and facilities - if only we had a community pool, gym track etc.  The diversion of sport money for the masses by a focus on elite sport etc. I wonder if the answer is both simpler and more complex than this? I have been talking to my friend Brian Chambers and our bottom line as to why we have become the most slothful group in history is rooted in  two questions. - Is taking regular exercise a habit? Is not taking regular exercise a habit? Think a bit now. Is your day not right without exercise or is taking exercise an interruption to your day? Do you have withdrawal symptoms if you do not take exercise or do you feel worse if you do? These feelings are symptoms of habits. Habits are hard to change. You are a smoker and you know you should quit but cannot.  You drink more than you should but you cannot stop. Merely having a lot of information is not enough to stop an ingrained habit. Acquiring a new habit is equally a challenge. If taking/not taking regular exercise is a habit then much of how we have approached the issue of participation in regular exercise is probably not going to work. This is quite a statement - so let's do a bit more digging. Why is it that we see only a few of us - we used to call them Fitness Freaks or Nuts - come rain or shine pounding the roads? Why do some some middle-aged men still get out every week in the season and play hockey while most of us only watch it?. Why do some women have to go to the gym every day and others not? Brian and I believe that those who take regular exercise have a habit. They have a need to take exercise every day.  It is part of their whole life - they cannot imagine not taking exercise. Regular exercise defines them - it is part of their identity - it is who they are. I bet that the opposite is true. Some people cannot "see" themselves taking exercise. Let's look at me and see how hard it is for me to take up this new habit and to break my lifetime habit of not taking exercise. I have never taken to the habit of regular exercise. I think I have to go back to my early days to find out why. My parents did not take it seriously. They in fact sneered at it. Any prowess in this regard was ignored at home. In my home the habit was to use the mind. This is where the family reward system kicked in. "Sport" at home was winning the argument, breaking into the conversation or being seen as amusing. Secondly I had low conventional physical skills. In particular I have very poor hand ball foot coordination. I had to play "sport sport" at school but for me with no natural aptitude, "sport sport" was for me an exercise in humiliation. In primary school the team would groan when I was picked usually - last. At Harrow, I was the star of the 5th 11 in cricket. I dreaded Sports Day at my prep school where the only event I could be in was the 200 metres where they put all the slobs. Sport was defined in my youth as a team sport that usually involved skill with a ball of some sort. I can't do this. Now if I had been introduced to yoga, tai chi or rowing I might have found a mind/body sport that fitted me - but that was not the culture of sport then nor is it now at schools. I never developed the habit of exercise as a boy. In fact I developed another habit - a lifelong dislike of using an awkward body and a lifelong love of the world of the mind. I have instead the habit of reading - in a poor week only one book. In a good week maybe 7 books. (This has been a good week) Many of my athletic friends tell me that they do not have the time to read. I sense that we are at two ends of a polarity. There are the habits of the mind and the habits of the body. There appear to be extreme positions for each habit. If you are extreme at one end it may preclude you having time to indulge in the other. Some manage both but I sense that there is only so much time. Then there seems to be a huge group in the middle of people who neither read nor take exercise. Habits can be formed and broken. At the right time habits are easy to form. All established habits are very difficult to break or change. It is important to consider this if we want to find a way of increasing the overall participation of people in regular exercise. When are many of our habits formed? I suggest to you that regular reading and regular exercise are both habits that are mainly set when we are very young? Homes with no books rarely produce compulsive readers. Homes with no trophies rarely produce folks who define themselves through the use of their bodies. I am sure there are exceptions but this is my observed experience. I point out the home because we currently look to school and to the workplace as the frontier for improving participation.  I am not saying don't try there. I am suggesting that we look earlier as well. Breaking habits is so difficult. If not taking exercise is a habit then exhortation and more information will not get us to change. How easy is it to acquire the habit of literacy as an adult? How easy to give up drink or to give up smoking? Breaking bad habits is very hard. It took my father's death to give us as a family the motive to pull back on our drinking. Some questions for you: Do you take regular exercise? If the answer is yes or no - Did you have a role model/support at home? Did you have a natural aptitude for ball and team sports? Do you have  a habit such as smoking or weight or drink. - Can you give this up? Has it been easy to give this up? Could you do this without a support group? What type of support group might you need - of peers or experts? Are you a team sport person? If you are when did this begin and why Do you like individual activities? If yes when did this begin and what influenced you? Are you a big fan of professional sports? If so, did elite sport get you involved in taking exercise yourself ? If yes - what age were you when you gave it up and what do you do now? Did you play pavement hockey or some kid organized sport when you were young (skateboarding?) If yes, what do you think of adult organized sport? Please help Brian and I with these questions and with our main thesis that regular exercise is a habit. Brian is the Chairman of Sport PEI and is tasked with the challenge of finding a way to take Canada's most inactive and fattest province and making it the opposite - no small thing. We are convinced that doing what we have been doing but harder will not work. So we are going outside of the box and asking ourselves the odd question - why if we know that exercise is good for us are we not taking this advice. If we are right and the core issue is habit, then we will have to develop strategies to encourage the formation of the habit. This implies working with the families of very young children before they get to school. It implies finding out how to motivate parents to behave differently. What would be a motivation that would work? We know that many kids will self organize. Ball hockey and skateboarding are being surppressed in the guise of safety and order. Should we not look at the effectiveness of kid organized sport?. It implies developing strategies to do the really hard stuff of helping people like me to change a habit of no exercise. How could we do this? What are the lessons of smoking and drinking that may help? What is it about schools and the workplace that are barriers and what can we do there to help?  What are the convenience issues? Where are all the places and where is the time? Why do so many schools close their doors and hence gyms and pools after 3pm? Whose school is it anyway? What is the reality of our climate for taking regular exercise where we have 6 months of winter? Can we take back the time between 2.30 when school finishes and say 5.30 when 80 % of parents return home and fill this with a fun time for exercise? Can we fill the 6 weeks of summer vacation when parents are working with a fun time when kids take exercise. Can we make it convenient to nip out for lunch at work and take exercise? 12:45:48 PM    comment []

Friendship and Blogging - A Social and Economic Revolution? Dina often provokes me to think more deeply. In her recent series on corporate blogging I started to think about the friendships that arise from Blogging. I wonder - are we seeing a new basis for friendship? In the past, we have made our friends through a combination of place, interest and values. EG - Until maybe 30 years ago on PEI, you married a girl who was no more than a day's buggy ride. Your friends came from the small community you lived in and were cultivated in the pressure cooker of the local school. If you were Catholic, you could only associate with other Catholics. Good Catholic girls until 30 years ago did not even ride in cars with Prots. Then religion was the dividing line for one key set of values. Everyone farmed or earned their living connected to agriculture so all shared an interest in farming and all shared the same set of pioneer values that come with being yeoman farmers. You can laugh at this narrow world but stop for a minute - where did your friends come from? Place interest and values. I bet place wa important. My close friends still come from my time at university. I have given up all my school friends but for 2. I see now that they were a product of place. At school we all had such a narrow choice. So we all made do with the small pool of possible friends that a house of 65 and a school of  700 could provide. Once I entered a large enough world, Oxford, where there were many more choices, I focused on those where I had a closer match in interests & values. At the time we all shared a common set of values about ourselves and the world - we were all enamoured by the corporate world and all joined it willingly and did well financially from it. These friendships have endured. One reason is that we have all given the corporate world up. It is weird coincidence that this group are all now self employed and could never work back in the system again. We must have sensed intuitively all those years ago that we would make the shift in values from group to self. In addition we had another link. An interest that we all shared was our children. I am godfather to 7 and this precious human link to the future of my friends has kept our friendship alive. This tells me that, today that for me shared values and a shared interest seem more important and enduring than a shared space in connecting friends. But for many people place is I think still the main driver for friendship. Especially if you do not move around much and where your old friends who were cultivated in early life live close to you. I have moved more times than I can recall. All these moves have I seen in retrospect broken any place-related links except the ones where the interests and values are in still in synch. All my corporate friends who are still very corporate have largely fallen off. The exception are those that I feel are trembling themselves at the edge of the line. What is true for friendship is true for love. The troubadours tell us that love enters through the eye. But even in love the requirement for place is eroding. I think that the key is that in cyberspace you can be heard. To hear someone is a gift, To hear them is to know them. Paradoxically being heard is a challenge in the early days of a face to face relationship when each person's need to speak can stop their ability to listen. Being yourself  can be hard in face to face where "projection" plays such a large role and where we seek to please. We so often "see" who we want to see rather than the real person who is there. With blogging, it seems to be hard to hide the real you. The real you may take time to emerge but emerge it does. The irony is that in not seeking to please, we are more attractive to others. The issue seems voice. After a while of blogging our real voice comes to us. For the first time maybe, we say to the world -  "here I am warts and all" Where Robert Scoble has to admit that it is hard to reconcile how work and his marriage. My reaction - Scoble is a real person and not just a techno scribe. Where Dave Winer cannot help but feel like a parent to RSS and sounds off he becomes a man and not just a commentator and developer. Paradoxically, the more real we are- the more frail - the more attractive we are. Conversely, corporate voices do not lose their temper or have doubts. Corporate voices are like Dolores Umbridge's from the Ministry for Magic: they use soft language for terrible things such as final solution or "right sizing". As Cluetrain tells us - the corporate voice is becoming the great lie that we cannot hear anymore. But I get ahead of myself. Back to friendship. My question. Is blogging changing the rules for friendship and maybe for love? With blogging, you can get to "know" someone in a deeper way than after many candlelight dinners, many years at school and many barbeque's with neighbours. We hear how the other person thinks. We hear what really interests them. We experience their values. In return, we can gently link up so that over time they too can know us too. Projection is more confined as we do not rely on the visual cues for our norms of what is attractive on the surface before we know what is attractive below the skin. Everyone is at choice - you can make the connection or not. I don't know the sound of your voice and in many cases don't know what you look like. In most cases we are separated not only by distance but by culture and by different Gods but if we speak the same values and we are interested in the same things, then the link is made. The values that I am talking about are the great divide between those that are externally motivated and those that are on the path to a self motivated world. There is a huge gulf between these two sets of values. Those that have crossed this line know that there is no going back and that it is dangerous to speak out too clearly to those that remain in the "group" mind. They too have acute sensitivity to heresy and there is no heresy quite like not having to belong to the group anymore. This shift in values is what is really going on today. In the centre is the progress/corporate hegemony. In revolt on the right are the fundamentalists who long for a mythic past where women know their place and God speaks for us. This group is firmly in the group set of values and are outstanding in forming groups - hence their power. On the left is a new group that is not really a group. We are the Cultural Creatives, the Free Agents. We don't like groups and have not until now found a mechanism for getting together that fits our self driven mindset. Until now. Until blogging. We have no power as isolated individuals. Until now. Until blogging. For the irony is that for those of us that have crossed the line, it is lonely. While our motivation is based on self, we are still primates and human and we crave brotherhood and sisterhood. Blogging appears to be a tool that enables non joiners to find a mechanism to join safely with others like them. A club for non clubbers! For me the potential in blogging is less corporate than social. It will create a new business model rather than support the old. What do I mean by this? I have hopes for corporate blogging but they are dim. Why am I so depressed about this? Because of the values clash. The essence of the corporate state is that it is a collective where the group identity is paramount. Such a values set is like anti matter for those who are self motivated. Corporations claim that they want initiative and creativity but they need obedience more. Obedience is the core piece of DNA in the Ford model. Where blogging will help most is in creating social and economic networks of individuals who share common goals and values - look at Matt and Paolo. Or look at how the community of bloggers is coalescing on PEI around Peter Rukavina. Look at how a whole group of doctors is forming around Marc Pierson Look at the influence that Ross Mayfield is having on all of us that think about social software or that Critt Jarvis is having on the election. This is the world I think that I, Dave Pollard and Dina are looking for. Look at what happens when those who have developed relationships via blogging meet in person! This is surely a revolution? Place and Face are no longer the initiating drivers for human relationships. The blogosphere is becoming the safe place for creative people to connect in. Just as eBay made it possible to trade safely outside your local area, so blogging makes it possible to access a global network of friends and lovers safely. 7:21:18 AM    comment []