Jerry Seinfeld has a very funny take on personal responsibility…
“There are many things that you can point to as proof that the human is not smart. But my personal favourite would have to be that we needed to invent the helmet. What was happening, apparently, was that we were involved in a lot of activities that were cracking our heads. We chose not to avoid doing those activities but, instead, to come up with some sort of device to help us enjoy out head-cracking lifestyles. And even that didn’t work because not enough people were wearing them so we had to come up with the helmet law. Which is even stupider, the idea behind the helmet law being to preserve a brain whose judgement is so poor, it does not even try to avoid the cracking of the head it’s in.”
We, just like Mr Seinfeld, tend to think, in one way or another, that there is not enough personal responsibility these days. As health, fitness, and wellness professionals we tend to look at others through our own set of personal and professional biases in this regard… whether it is that obese person eating at McDonalds, the heart attack patient who goes back to smoking, or the overweight teenager who is so unfit that they can’t run to catch the bus… tsk-tsk-tsk.
I recently shared a post demonstrating my own bias with respect to personal responsibility from a few years ago. As an industry we can come off as somewhat indignant, and thoroughly self-righteous, when it comes to the sloth and gluttony of the general populace. However, our inability to relate to our non- health, fitness, and wellness counterparts (and there are a lot of them) creates an us and them mentality.
Of course, us versus them is a less than ideal mindset to effect real and lasting change in others (indignation and self-righteousness rarely help either).
Sure personal responsibility is important but simply criticising and castigating people for not having it seems like a poor strategy for achieving it. In fact, the better strategy is to remove the need for it... at least to the extent that it is possible.
For example, Microsoft opened up the personal computing market with Windows 95’s much simpler and more intuitive graphical user interface (eliminating the need to learn the much more complex DOS). Tandem skydiving opened up the novice skydiving market (eliminating the need for lengthy, intensive, and expensive training). Curves opened up the beginner female market with an uncomplicated, unpretentious, no-frills offering (eliminating the apprehension, uncertainty, and fear associated with traditional offerings).
In each of these examples businesses significantly reduced the need for personal responsibility to open up underserved, or unserved, markets.
The opportunity for the health, fitness, and wellness industry lies not in educating the masses on the importance of personal responsibility when it comes to our offerings but rather in improving our offerings to reduce, or eliminate, the need for personal responsibility in the masses.
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