As adults, we still engage in the process of creating and breaking habits with the goal of becoming the best people we can be physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. For me, outside of making it a habit to constantly interrogate what society holds up as the "norm," (especially with regard to what makes a family and what a mother/motherhood looks like) I've been on a lifelong quest to make fitness and healthy eating a lifetime habit. Now that I am a mother, there is an even greater sense of urgency to my goal. Even though my little one and my husband give me the bulk of the fire I need to keep the flames of motivation lit, I'm always on the lookout for other sources of encouragement and accountability.
Last month, at Blogalicious, I discovered DailyFeats a free site which is, in their words, "a place (and an app for your iPhone) where you get points, rewards (yes, real-life rewards that save you money, or that support nonprofits), and encouragement from friends for all your day-to-day accomplishments." After chatting with Monique, who was manning the DailyFeats booth at the conference, I had the feeling that the site could provide me with another really great way to maintain my commitment to a lifetime of healthy habits. Over this past weekend, I finally had the chance to really acquaint myself with the DailyFeats site and all of its features.
When you sign up, you can chose from a list of feats grouped in different categories like Health, Eating, Money, Productivity, Learning, Balance, Family and Community. Everything from taking your vitamins to volunteering is covered. Once you decide upon which feats you want to make plans to accomplish, you can decide whether to tackle those feats, daily, weekly, monthly or even on the weekends. The site runs on the honor system and apparently has mechanisms in place to ensure that folks won't try to rack up points just to get rewards. I like that. As you can see, my welcome page includes my planned feats of Home Workouts, Keeping a Food Journal, Strength Training, and Planning Menus.
When I achieve my planned goal for the day, week, month, I check-in on my homepage to log my achievements. As I achieve my feats, I earn points which I can use with a host of different brands associated with DailyFeats OR I can choose donate my points to one of their a 501c3 partners! There are also premium rewards which are given courtesy of the site's partners (i.e. $50 from American Airlines). (My one quibble is that they don't offer an app for Android users to do a mobile check-in.) Yesterday, I worked out at home, planned my menu for the week, and wrote in my food journal.
Another great thing you can do as you plan your feats, is build a team of like-minded habit-creators to push you along and to keep you accountable. You can give your team members "props" when they do something extra fantastic as added encouragement. The site also offers "feat-specific" challenges to help push teams toward their particular goals. Even better still, you can suggest a feat which offers the great potential to customize the site even more to fit your personal goals. I suggested a feat for the community section that would help people get into the habit of interrogating how privilege works in their lives:
Identify an area of privilege in your life.If Daily Feats continues to offer more possibilities for people to customize their feats, I can see different organizations, community groups, and other like-minded people banding together to create habits that would hopefully benefit both their local communities and the societal community at large. Imagine if you could create habits that encourage people to do their part to help put an end to the structural forces that maintain systems of racial, economic and social inequality? That would truly be creating a good habit of a lifetime and I hope that Daily Feats and their brand partners would support such efforts.
Identifying an area of privilege in your life can help you understand how life would be for you if you did not have that privilege. For example, someone with financial privilege has access to resources unavailable to someone without financial privilege. How does your _____________ privilege make life better/easier for you and how does it make life worse/harder for someone who does not share your same privilege?
All ITYC listeners who want to start their own, personalized good habit journey can use the code isthatyourchild50 to get started in the good habit-game with 50 points courtesy of Monique and DailyFeats team.
*Disclosure Note: I did not receive any paid compensation for this post. However, I did receive 50 points when I signed up with DailyFeats and the promo code to share with the ITYC community. (Special thanks to Monique and Yoni for answering all of my 20 questions!)
