Photo courtesy of Simply Luxury Travel on Flickr
One of our recent posts identified 6 traditional business practices that are popular in health promotion, but which undermine our progress. It suggested that to the extent that traditional business practices are part of the problem, then they aren’t the solution.
If “what got us here won’t get us there,” where should we turn to generate wellness solutions that are more engaging and effective? Today, I’d like to share 5 potential sources of inspiration which I believe to be fruitful avenues for health promotion exploration and creativity.
Inspiration for Health Promotion
- Arts. Think of the songs you’ve danced and cried to, the murals that made you go “wow…!” or the out-to-the-ordinary culinary experiences that fueled your conversations for weeks after the meal, and you’ll realize that the arts have inspired masses for centuries. Given all the richness this field has to offer, it’s quasi absolute absence from worksite wellness conversation is surprising. What can can we learn from the arts, as a field? There’s certainly something to leverage here.
- Education. I recently read The Smartest Kids in the World, and How They Got That Way. Since education is part of the wellness industry’s mission, I was curious to learn about countries that consistently perform best on international standard tests, and about what they do differently to achieve such superior results. In a future post, I will share what I learned. In the meantime, I’d like to challenge you to think about educational conditions and techniques that can help us improve our rates of success.
- Positive psychology. Wouldn’t a field entirely dedicated to wellbeing have something valuable to contribute to the conversation? I recently presented on the 5 pillars of positive psychology to the participants of the Wellness Underground Workshop. I suggested that these 5 pillars — namely, Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishments (spelling the acronym PERMA) — could be a much improved replacement set for the current best practices in worksite wellness. Reading the reviews that my workshop generated, it’s clear that a lot of other professionals saw value in this proposition.
- Anthropology/Sociology. There are areas in the world where people’s health norms are exemplary. In the Blue Zones for example, the rhythms of life are very much organized around walking, praying or meditating, cooking at home and spending time with loved ones. That’s quite a departure from what’s considered normal in America! Yet, the people who live in the Blue Zones succeed at getting their work done and paying their bills. While we may not be able (or even want to!) replicate the Blue Zones fully, examining what these healthy cultures do right may bring useable wisdom that can enrich the growing conversation around organizational culture.
- Nature. Stephen Kaplan, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, proposes what he calls “attention restoration theory.” When we switch from effortful attention to allowing our attention to be captured by whatever presents itself, we can restore our brain power and perform better afterward. Spending a few minutes in nature or in park can be sufficient to move us from cognitive exhaustion to engagement. This is one of the many reasons I feel nature deserves a growing part of our health promotion efforts and programming.
Which of these fields do you find most promising? How do you use them already? Are there other disciplines you’d recommend the wellness industry to look into to find inspiration and solutions?
