Please, please, please can we as an industry stop focusing on the ‘what’.
Continually we focus on ‘what’ we have to do, rather than the ‘how’ we do it, or even more importantly, ‘why’ we do it.
The ‘what’ is the action or the output. The ‘how’ is the enabler or the facilitator that allows the ‘what’ to consistently occur. The ‘why’ is the reason, the emotion, the passion and the behaviour driver. The ‘why’ is the reason we maintain a behaviour, time and time again.
Ask anyone ‘what’ they could do to be healthier and most will tell you they need to eat more fruit ‘n veg and exercise more.
This is why we do not need educating on what we need to do, we need help learning how we can introduce more fruit and vegetables into our diets and how we can create more time to be more active.
First though, we need help truly understanding why we should eat more fruit and vegetables and why we should be more active. Telling us that if we don’t do these things, means we’ll die young, get diabetes, or our risk of heart disease and cancers increase, is not motivational! If it was, we’d be living in a much healthier society!
As humans we are reactive, we believe it will never happen to us, or at least it’ll not happen for many years to come, therefore long-term scare tactics don’t work.
If we truly want to influence people, we need to focus on the short-term benefits, keeping our messaging exclusively in the positive.
