This Week’s Thrive in Five is about Walking Meetings and getting more variety and movement into your day
I hope you’re well, and I hope you’re staying healthy. This week I have a simple little tip for you this week to get a little bit more movement into your day, a little bit more energy and variety. Variety is such a crucial part of wellbeing, and life can become quite samey when we’re working from the same place that we’re living, or at very least we’re attending the office much less.
Think about the meeting you’re planning
When you have a meeting scheduled, we tend to defer straight away to zoom or the equivalent, teams. Whatever it might be, video conferencing is the new default, because we’re trying to replicate the face-to-face interaction as best we can.
But here’s the thing very often those sessions don’t need to be face-to-face, and no matter how successful those meetings are, it is different meeting virtually. It’s completely different looking at someone across the screen, as it would be in person. It’s a different energy, that requires different concentration. You also may have other complications like the technicalities of zoom, cutouts, and so on.
So why not look at that meeting and think:
Do I need to screen share?
Do I need to note take copiously?
Could the zoom call actually be a phone call? If the answer is yes that gives you options.
Firstly, you can be much more mobile. So you could walk about your office, walk about your house, walk about your garden, or even better get a set of headphones and take that person on a walk and talk. Maybe you have your walking meeting through the park, somewhere where there’s minimal noise interruption and you have that conversation over the phone instead of face to face via zoom. It’s a simple little thing.
Now there’ll be some meetings that you can do that. Some meetings where you need to be screen-sharing or note-taking, and it’s not possible. But offer people the option or you could indicate in the meeting invite, you could put a little W in the brackets of the meeting invite in the title, which suggests this is a meeting that could be walked. If people chose to.
This simple tip of walking meetings gets a little bit more movement into the day.
A walking meeting gets you some variety, it gets you out in natural light and moving. And we know through copious amounts of studies, that movement promotes new agenesis. It promotes the production of serotonin. It creates more energy and it makes us more productive and more creative and ultimately happier little human beings. And that’s really what it’s all about.
One study found recently that a brisk 10 minute walk per day resulted in an overall feeling of increased mood and energy for up to two hours afterwards. And when participants did the 10 minutes every day for three weeks or more, they had overall increased mood and elevated energy as well throughout the whole day. So that’s just how important walking is.
So that is my tip for this week walking meetings. Please share this with anyone who needs to hear it, spread it all around your company and let’s get more and more people having walking meetings. Stay healthy all the best for now.
Looking for more wellbeing content?
We’d love to talk to you, so get in touch. You can look at some of our content on the blog or listen to our podcast, download a free chapter of Leanne’s book Rise and Shine.
At Bodyshot Performance we work with businesses looking to bring energy and vitality to their teams, leading with wellbeing as a competitive advantage. Find out more about how we can support you and your teams.
For more great wellbeing content follow us on social LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
If you’re interested in finding out what your health IQ is, take the Health IQ test, and get a free personalised 39-page report. Built around our six signals, which are sleep, mental health, energy, body composition, digestion, and fitness.
