If mountains had stairs... (a goal setting tip)

danblood

(Caution: may contain pre-amble, because this idea isn't mine)

Over the past few years my employer has been taking part in The Green Impact Challenge, where us employees form teams and take on challenges to reduce waste, power usage, transport etc so that we can reduce the negative impact our organisation has on the planet.

There is a competitive element to all this, whereby teams are challenged to come up with innovations to push the boundaries of what we can do to help.

The best innovation of an organisation is picked to be submitted at a national level, and this year's winner of that was quite a fun one; a team at Manchester Metropolitan University measured stairwells and put up posters at the bottom of each one saying how many times you'd need to walk up [this set of stairs] before would reach the top of various mountains. So to encourage people to take the stairs instead of using the lift, they have introduced a personal challenge and by using a range of different heights they have given people benchmarks to work up to.

This is a really nice incentive that gives real meaning to reaching certain targets, much like websites such as Endomondo use, for example telling us how many burgers we have burned off in calories, or how far we've traveled relative to a trip to the moon.

This kind of visualisation of achievement has really helped me over the past few months!

wifealiciousness

I love that idea, and would like to implement similar at my work. And maybe use the idea in my promotional health stuff with sustrans.....?

danblood

As I said in my thing it's not my idea.. although given that it's a concept used quite widely, I don't think it could belong to the team Manchester Met who used it! They simply used it to win an NUS run competition and got nowt more than a bit of recognition for using something clever.

omma_to_3

My company has been doing this for a couple years. I see the posters on the wall in the stairwell.