So, I have a confession to make. Lately, I have not been exercising consistently.
And as you know, I’m a health journalist and I extensively research and write about the latest science proving there’s a connection between our mind, body and health, I’ve even written an entire chapter in my book about the importance of sitting less and moving more… so I should know better. I have heaps of good intentions… but I don’t get to it. I know I’m not alone in my battle to follow through on my good intentions. If you’ve read my blog, or my book, or listened to previous episodes of this podcast then you’ll know that while many of us have the best of intentions to do healthy things like loose weight, eat better, exercise more, or even do something like stop smoking, unfortunately, depending on the degree of difficulty in what it is we’re trying to achieve, somewhere between 35 percent and 89 percent of us will fail, often within the first week. On this podcast episode you’ll hear my conversation with Peter Gollwitzer. He is a leading health behaviour researcher who is a professor of psychology at New York University. He has dedicated his career to working out how we can build a bridge to get over what is know as the intention-behaviour gap – which means even if you’re like me and you really really intend to change your behaviour it doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. Fortunately, he can not only outline four of the common reasons we fail to reach our health goals, but he can also offer simple, easy and proven techniques to help is achieve them. So, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Peter Gollwitzer and this one, I’m sorry to say does come with an upfront apology. The audio quality isn’t the usual standard I aim for on this podcast, but I hope you’ll bear with it none the less.