Motivating your team through the January blues

We're kickstarting 2022 channelling positive change. Nicola Holmes, XSEM Account Manager, talks us through the personal resolution she's taken on, as well as the challenges the wider team are making their own this month.

Let's hear from Nicola...

Like most people, I start January with the best intentions. I make a million resolutions only to get halfway through the month and the cold, post-Christmas blues get to me… and I usually break most of them! I was determined this year would be different.

As a team at XSEM, we decided to kick the year off with the same mentality: set ourselves a positive change goal and make it achievable. Obviously, being the competitive people we are, we had to make it a challenge. We would all be lying if we said we didn’t like winning!

I was tasked with creating a competition that everyone could get on board with if they wished. Me being me (and after the amount of food and drink I consumed over the holidays!) based it loosely around health, fitness & wellbeing. I’m sure the rest of the guys thought I’d come back with something crazy... a million super hard workouts?

However, this was less about what I wanted to do; what could we do as a team? What was achievable together?

We broke it down into 3 areas:

Give it up

Anything! Alcohol is the January go-to (but I knew I for one would not be doing this) or even something as simple as giving up the Tesco meal deals (that wouldn’t hurt the bank balance either!).

Give it a try

Try something new or bring back an old favourite. Maybe you haven’t been for a run for years or you want to try a new hobby? I love this idea and my new year resolution stems from this. I've started kickboxing! Just get up and give it a try, you might even love it (I do!).

Go for it

8,000 steps per day. How hard is this when you’re working from home? Getting out in the fresh air though can work wonders for fitness and mental health.

We have created a dedicated Teams’ channel, Fit Don’t Quit, and it’s great to see everyone sharing their progress. It’s also giving me the motivation I need to keep going with mine (there is no chance I will risk losing the competition!).