WHOOP Podcast - January Jumpstart: The Path to a New You Through Personal Readiness

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is going to talk all things January Jumpstart. That’s right Kristen is here to break down our January Jumpstart in-app challenge, and how you can take control of your year by working on your personal readiness. Kristen discusses the January Jumpstart Challenge (1:40), the meaning of personal readiness (4:05), understanding your identity (6:57), aligning your values (14:37), the power of anchors (18:33), and how to identify your outlets (23:15). Resources:Personal Readiness Exercises Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. It's 2024. We're ready to kick ass together. We're here to unlock human performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder, and CEO of Woop. I hope you all had a safe and happy holiday. 2024, going to be a great, great year. And appropriately so, We're joined this week by the fearless Kristen Holmes, our principal scientist, the WOOPVP of Performance Science, and she's going to talk all things January jumpstart. That's right. She's going to break down our January jumpstart in-app challenge. This is a very cool new product feature that you all will hopefully enjoy. Kristen explains how to get involved in the challenge, what each of our four challenge,

tracks and tails, how your body will benefit from participating in the challenge, the importance of developing habits that can continue throughout the year, and some of the habits that she herself has focused on to improve her overall health and wealth. A reminder, you can try whoop for free right now, free 30 days on whoop. That's at whoop.com. If you have a question was he answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at www.com. Call us 508.4.4.com. Call us 508. 434952. We're going to do a big Q&A podcast here shortly. Without further ado, here is the amazingly talented Kristen Holmes. Happy New Year. In today's podcast, I am going to outline how I was able to say goodbye to the January reboot forever by following a framework centered around a

concept I call personal readiness. Before I dive into those components, I wanted to share that we have a January jumpstart in-app challenge for WOOP members that will run for four weeks. Members will be invited to participate in one of four challenge tracks within the new weekly planned feature in the app. The goal of the challenge is to find an area of your health and wellness journey that most closely aligns with who you aspire to be in the world. More on that to come. These are behaviors that contribute to your personal readiness.

The four tracks include the strongs, start track. Think about this as balancing demands of your daily life with appropriate levels of recovery, the sleep right track. Think about this one as embracing daytime behaviors that position you to have a restorative night's sleep. For example, monitoring the timing of your last meal, light viewing behavior in the morning throughout the day, and then the lead up to bed, and proactively managing stress throughout the day. The third option is the dry, track. This is all about reducing the cellular stress and damage associated with metabolizing alcohol. And finally, the In the Green track. In the Green is really a beautiful metaphor for living

a life that allows you to show up in the world as your truest, most aligned self. We all know that January is typically where resolutions are made and the pressures of completing them begin. My goal in this podcast is to really challenge you to think beyond the 30 days and consider a framework centered around this concept of personal readiness that has its roots in science, but it's been modified based on my time as a coach working with individuals in free living settings, as well as things I've learned through my own personal experimentation and journey. I've found this framework provides a solid foundation that will allow you to consciously start practicing, living your values, and back into your larger

purpose with a greater degree of alignment. I want to warn you, this is not a podcast about goal setting. It's a podcast about a way of being in the world that will allow you to discern what goals are actually worth pursuing. In the show notes, you'll be able to download the exercises I reference to help you individualize and reinforce many of the principles I discuss today. So what exactly is personal readiness? It's a strategy. It's about tapping into the rhythm of your inner voice and embracing your individuality

and viewing it as a special gift you bring to the world. This is really about a way of being or a way of moving through the world that is unique to you. A lack of readiness is often due to fear and an underappreciation of the self. It is vitally important to remember and appreciate that no one can be you and being you is absolutely enough. Personal readiness is the realization that we are all given the freedom and the creativity

to pull forward in our lives what has actually been there for us all the time. And so over the next 15 minutes or so, I'm going to step through the scaffolding that is at the core of establishing a way of being and that will provide you the readiness to lean into your personal potential and talents in a more authentic way. The exercise of understanding and awareness is less, again, about specific goals and goal setting and more about a confidence about who you are so you can step into the world with firmer persuasion. The scaffolding that makes that personal readiness centers around four components. Number one, understanding your identity or who you want to be in the world across the many roles that you inhabit in your life.

Number two, your values, which are your core beliefs. Three, your anchors. These are specific behaviors that set the tone for other behaviors and ultimately ladder up to who you want to be and will allow you to live your values more fully. And finally, outlets. This exercise is about identifying the work, the people, the places and things in your life that allow you to use your gifts. to the fullest and express yourself in a way that aligns most closely with the impulses

of your heart and of your mind. Once you have this framework in place and you practice living it, decision making will be far less friction filled and as a result require less mental and emotional energy. Both micro and macro decisions will either very clearly ladder up to helping you live your core values, contribute to your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual readiness, and reinforce who you want to be in the world, or it simply will not. Okay, so let's dig into understanding identity. The first step to saying goodbye to these aggressive, hard annual resets is to figure out who you want to be in the world. The beauty of spending time defining who you want to be across your various roles and then aligning your values and beliefs to that

identity is you end up almost by default backing into the behaviors necessary to actually live those values and be the person you strive to be in the world. What is powerful here is that every time we practice a behavior that aligns with our core values, we are supporting the reward systems in the brain that come with a deep satisfaction and joy of living our values. Every time we prove our identity be true, we get a really nice drip of serotonin. This makes us feel good and creates a virtuous cycle. For me personally, this system is so powerful that all I have to do is imagine not living my values and it creates such strong dissonance that I can actually feel in my mind and my body revolt.

The bonus is that this revolt generally comes with a lot of stress and maybe a little bit of anxiety. but because I'm aware of this dynamic, I can use that energy created from being stressed and redirect my behavior to take a positive action that will again reinforce my identity and help me live my values. Stress is not inherently bad. Stress is usually a signal, and many times it is a gift because it usually is a direct comment on what matters to you. And if you listen to the signal, it can be a powerful source of insight.

Sometimes we feel stress because perhaps how we're acting is in conflict with what we know in our heart we value. This dissonance will show up as an increase in heart rate, adrenaline. It can narrow our focus, which can be good. If we channel it with a behavior that brings us back into alignment, I think what we want to avoid here is muting that signal with a short-term fix. Oftentimes, this is when we reach for that thing in the fridge that we know we really shouldn't be having, or we start scrolling on social media, or, you know, I call these parasympathetic fixes, right?

They're doing something to our nervous system that calms and relaxes us, but actually isn't productive and is really just pushing under the rug what we might actually need to be surfacing in order to take a positive action. And what I found is that once I understand the signal, I can then make a choice about how I'm going to act. And the more I leverage this dynamic, the more I learn about myself and the more I learn what I want for myself in this life. And as a results, I'm in a much better position to consciously create more alignment, more matches in my life. So in principle, when it comes to living our values, we pretty much always have a choice. When I'm not living my values, I might get away with it in the moment, but sure enough,

it rears its head in some way, shape, or form. Perhaps I'm more distracted or I feel a little off. I might get less restorative sleep. My heart rate very, very, very, ability is lower. My resting heart rate is higher. I don't move as much. What these subjective and objective data points tell me is that when I'm able to reinforce my identity by living my values, I set myself up to have control over my energy production, my motivation, and my attentional capacity. I am actually choosing my level of performance by consciously creating alignment between who I aspire to be in the world and my actions. The word control is actually really important here.

Control is a core psychological need that is innately tied to our physiology. When we feel in control over who we are, we understand it can live our purpose, and as a result, our self-image improves and stabilizes. This relationship between control and self-image was discovered by, psychologist Edward Dessie and Richard Ryan. Performance for me isn't about PRing a 5K or finishing my PhD. It is about living each day in such a way that I have the capacity to intentionally behave at a level equal to my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual potential. For me, that is what it means to be in the green. That is my North Star. Okay. So now that we have

an understanding of the importance of clear identity. Let's talk about how to find yours. I found it really helpful not to think about my identity as a preexisting condition. I don't find or inherit myself. I create it based on who I want to be in the world and how I want to live. Then I get to practice being that person every day. And I also know that identity can change and shift as you grow and evolved. It's not a static thing. So it's okay to shift your identity and to change. change it. It's just a matter of being conscious of the downstream effect of making those changes. So the first exercise is to start off by simply asking, I am a person who fill in the blank. I'm a person who is fill in the blank. And remember, you can have multiple identities

inside each role. Your roles might include a professional, a daughter, son, sister, brother, spouse, your identity is really the way you would like to see or think about yourself while in this particular role. The second step I found helpful is to list what needs to be true in order for me to practice being this person each day. For example, if I want to be a mother who makes my children feel safe and loved, what needs to be true in order for me to practice creating those conditions daily. How do I need to think about my work commitments, my relationship with my partner, my friends, how I use humor, how I show support? Once you've gone through these exercises, just put it aside. And I just want to reemphasize that the beauty

with identity is it can be fluid. I am a person who fill in the blank. It is possible for that to change and evolve. And it's absolutely okay to change. You will grow out of your current situation or you simply might want to reinvent yourself because those little impulses in your heart and soul are telling you that it's time for a change. Creating space to listen to those impulses, both big and small, is so critical because it will generate the awareness necessary to open up and expand your horizons and evolve into your new identity. So every day creating these little pockets of space is really important, right? Put down your phone, be alone with yourself, create some solitude.

So you can start to think about some of these larger questions. Now we're going to dig into values. And you'll see very quickly how they tie back to identity. So values are a set of actionable, highly relevant beliefs that feel core, to who you are and who you aspire to be. Think of your core values as the little burn on your shoulder. Your values not only guide you, they in a sense are you. There's no self apart from one's values. There is no you apart from your chosen identity. What you choose to do and how you choose to do it is actually who you are. And so it's absolutely in our best interest to understand

what it is we value so we can align our behaviors with what we care about. There is excellent evidence in the literature which will link to that showed experimental evidence that if you are genuinely interested in long-term habit formation, your chance of success will increase when those desired habits are linked not only to your identity, that is who you aspire to be in the world, but also your values. And this is why often the goals we set in January don't actually come to fruition because they're not linked to our identity and our values. Core values are powerful in that they help us define and accomplish specific objectives and ultimately reflect the current and potential alterable aspects of our professional, family, and personal lives. I look at a

values every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. And I've just gotten into the habit over the over time because it just, it centers me, it grounds me, it makes me think about my actions, all the little things I do across the day. I really see my only responsibility to myself is that I ensure my behaviors align with my values as often as possible. So take your identity statements. I want to be a person who, fill in the blank, and think about what values support that person. For example, I want to be a person who is a good listener. Personal values of mind that I can attach to this identity are one of open-mindedness

and inner peace. Knowing that I want to be a good listener, I have to think about these values. What does it actually mean to be open-minded? right? And how does that translate to being a good listener? I have to understand what open-mindedness actually looks like in action. It also contributes to inner peace. What are the behaviors that actually lead to inner peace? How do I be a centered and grounded person so I'm in a position to actually listen? I'll come back to that in a minute. But these are the type of questions that you need to start to ask. So on a sheet of paper, and you'll get in the show notes, you can link to these

little exercises, but on a sheet of paper, you're going to want to write down your roles. So for me, a few of these would be mom, scientist, health educator, daughter, and friend. Have those roles in kind of a little cloud, and you're going to refer back to them. List and define your values, and these, again, are actionable things that you believe are important in the way that you live and you work and are in some way tied to your identity. So by becoming aware of your values, you can better align your behaviors. And the more you practice those behaviors, the more you prove to yourself, the new identity or this identity, this person you aspire to be in the world is true. Again, your values are going to or should reinforce who you aspire to be in the world.

All right. So now that we've covered identity and values, we're going to get into the third component, which is anchors. These are your most powerful daily habits that set the tone for your personal readiness. Think of anchors as kind of your non-negotiables. These are foundational behaviors that provide you with the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual grounding to reinforce your identity and your values. So once you've gone through the identity and values exercises and have some time to sit with what you learned about yourself, the next step is to identify habits that you've accumulated or even ways of thinking that are in harmony with who you aspire to be in the world and

reinforce your values or are actually in conflict with your identity and your values. For example, if your aspirational self that is who you want to be in the world, your identity, is a person who exudes health and vitality. The next step is to write down the habits you currently have that are in direct service to that identity. These will be your anchors. Then make a list of behaviors or habits that are in direct conflict with that identity.

Try to be ruthless here. In a podcast I have coming up with high-performance coach Angela Foster, She talks about the concept of hidden commitments. These are deep-seated, often unconscious beliefs, mindsets, or a way of being in the world that operates under the surface and might actually contradict or prevent you from practicing your identity. For example, you come home after a work day and you share a couple bottles of wine with your roommates.

The hidden commitment is socialize and rewind with your friends after work. And this might be a great thing for many reasons, but it also might be counterproductive to your overarching goal of exuding health and vitality. So think about all the overt habits and the hidden ones that contribute positively to your version of personal readiness and the ones that detract from your version of personal readiness. Once you've gone through the work of auditing your habits and actions and hidden commitments, you've taken a powerful initial step to building awareness and working toward alignment.

There is no question that overall satisfaction and quality of life is inextricably linked to the degree of harmony that exists between your identity, values, and behavior. Since we are all human, we will have instances in which we don't show up, perform, think, or act in accordance with our values. however, the clearer you are about your life, the easier it will be to recognize when these moments of misalignment are occurring. And as such, the faster you can get back on track and restore safety and stability to your nervous system.

And this is one of, I think, one of the greatest opportunities using data is sometimes misalignment shows up in the data. before you actually consciously recognize it. And I don't know that, you know, everyone might think about data in that way, but you can, I think a simple example is when you get sick. Whoop will often detect it, you know, many days before you actually feel any symptoms. Whoop knows something is off with your body. And I think that same can be true for just, you know, how you're moving throughout the world.

If how you're moving throughout the world isn't aligning with, who you aspire to be, that is going to cause some dissonance. And that will actually show up in your heart rate variability, and it will show up in your resting heart rate and your sleep. And so just, you know, not stressing or getting anxious about it, but paying attention to some of those objective data points and those physiological signals can just be another data point to kind of help you understand if how you're living is really in alignment. Because I think what's really powerful is that your body will actually revolt when there is that dissonance. And I think just a reminder that that anxious energy you might feel in your heart and your mind and your body, where there is this mismatch, is really there for you as an opportunity to make necessary changes.

Okay, so the fourth and final component is outlets. outlets are the necessary people, places, and things that are tied to a sequence of actions that allow us to exert behaviors and develop habits that help reinforce our identity and our values. And so the final step is to identify the people, places, and things that exist in your life currently that will help contribute positively toward your personal and rightness, as well as the people, places, and things that are detracting. So at this point, you've got a lot of notes, you've got your identity, and you've got your values that feed and buoy that identity.

And I think it's also, again, just important to note what roles you inhabit where this identity and where these values show up or feel most pronounced. You will link kind of the habits and routines you identified that truly allow you to live these values more honestly. And then you'll also recognize which habits or routines are currently keeping you from living these values. So really understanding, okay, what is it actually that I need to let go of? And now finally, you're going to want to think about these outlets. And there's a couple, I think, important considerations. Who in your life will be impacted by these changes? Okay. So if we think of outlets as people, places, and things, there are going to be

people potentially who might resist this new or reinvigorated identity. You need to be empathetic, of course, but also be firm. You have every right to have a point of view about your own life. And in order to be the fullest version of yourself, sometimes change is necessary. Where the empathy comes in is that you also need to make sure that you're communicating these plans so that people can understand that this change is really about you. So using eye statements when articulating the change and your plan is really important and how you might need to alter or eliminate previous hidden commitments, routines, or behaviors. You also might want to consider what new relationships you might benefit from that will allow you to truly live this new identity. And that also might

mean what relationships are not actually serving you. Another consideration is around places. What places need to exist in order for you to practice this new behavior? Do I need to develop a new expertise or learn a new skill? Is there sufficient chance for this behavior to occur consistently? And what is most important about the behavior? Is it consistency? Is it accuracy, precision, or some combination of the three? Is there sufficient chance for this behavior? to occur consistently? If not, what needs to change? How close can you get to repeating the behavior in an optimal way? How many times this behavior need to be repeated in order to feel like you are living your values in that this behavior is reinforcing some aspect of your identity?

So these are all questions related to outlets that you need to kind of answer in order to fully embody this identity and live your values. When it comes to personal readiness, we absolutely need to ensure that we have the outlets in place that help make it easier to create matches between our behavior, identity, and our values. Remember, this isn't a goal. This is a way of being in the world that is going to contribute to your personal readiness, not just for the next 30 days, but forever. Once you have gone through the work of understanding, identity, values, anchors, and outlets, you will have a framework. to show up in the world in a way that is truly rewarding to you.

The single commitment of monitoring daily how my behaviors align with my values and how this feeds my identity is the most powerful, impactful, self-empowering, and liberating strategy I've deployed in my life so far. I hope you found these insights helpful, and we wish you the very best on your journey today and always. If you enjoyed this episode of The Wooop Podcast, please leave, a rating or review, please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at WOOP, at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast,

email us, podcast to Woop.com. Call us 508-443-495-2. We'll answer your questions on a future episode. If you're thinking about joining Woot, this is the best time ever because you can now sign up for free for 30 days. That's right, a free trial. It's the full membership experience, and you can decide at the end of 30 days whether you want to become a member. New members can also use the code will to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. That's just WI-L at checkout. All right, folks,

that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.