I recently blogged about My Journey of Physical Fitness To Date. In that post, I mentioned that I had turned to the gspn.tv community for encouragement and accountability as it relates to the goals that I had shared with them.
Today, I would like to share a glimpse of the type of encouragement that I have been receiving from the community. In this post, I’m also going to propose a way that we can all inspire each other.
One thing that I’ve been doing through this journal has been to post regular updates regarding the number of steps/miles I’m walking and the amount of calories consumed during meals or a total at the end of the day. I’ve been posting these both my Facebook and Twitter profiles.
Here are just a few examples of the things I’ve shared online and the type of interaction that I have had with the community related to these updates.
Of course, I’m not only sharing my triumphs. I have also shared when things were not going so well. To show you just how valuable this sort of encouragement and accountability is, just take a look at this exchange…
What you don’t see in the exchange above is a Twitter Direct Message that I had received from my friend, Stephen Cross. I usually delete direct messages after I’ve responded to them. However, he said something about how he was wavering in his decision to walk on the treadmill that evening. He suggested that if I would resolve to not cheat and drink a bottled water instead, he’d resolve to get on the treadmill. Keep that in mind and look at the last post on the image above.
All the updates that I’ve been posting the Facebook have also been posted to Twitter. Something happened yesterday that I certainly didn’t expect at all! Have a look at this:
Now, as many of your know, I’m a total geek! However, I realize that not everyone in the gspn.tv Community is a geek like myself. That doesn’t keep me from sharing my love for all things geeky! And that is why I want to explain the significance of the Twitter post from my friend John Buehler. Where you see pound sign “#” in front of a phrase such as “#keepupwithcliff” that is called “creating a hashtag.”
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags to you photos on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag
The best part about hashtags is that it is a very easy way to create a “group” of sorts on Twitter. For example, I had got a huge chuckle out of John’s “#keepupwithcliff” hash tag, so I tweeted about it. Then, immediately, a few others in the community jumped on board by using it, simply to carry on the humor just a little bit further.
However, the nice thing about #hashtags is that you can search for them on your Twitter Home Page and on Twitter Search. Do me a favor, CLICK HERE and read the pop-up image from the bottom-up, in reverse chronological order.
The image you just clicked showed the exchange with the #keepupwithcliff hash tag that John had created. Now I know that John had meant this as a joke, or maybe not. My friend, Daniel, posted that the #keepupwithcliff hashtag “…could be for any Cliff-inspired aspirations! Like leaving our full-time jobs in insurance?” That exchange gave me a great idea that I believe could be a great, additional, way for the gspn.tv community to encourage each other to live more balanced lives.
I would like to propose the use of a new #PABL hash tag. That #PABL would stand for “Pursuing A Balance Life.” Basically, the concept is that whenever you post a status update that is related to your pursuit of a more balanced life, simply add #PABL to the end of the update. These posts don’t have to be limited to heath/fitness. Here’s another example of a #PABL post….
What will happen if you do this? First off, you can search for #PABL on twitter at any time to see what others are doing in their pursuit of a more balanced life! This could encourage you and is an easy way to find posts from other community members where you can encourage them!
If you wanted to, you could add this search to your home page on Twitter. To do so, simply follow these steps.
1. Log into Twitter & go to your Home Screen.
2. Type in “#PABL” into the search box on the right & click the search button.
3. Click the “Save This Search” link at the top of the results:
4. Now you will see #PABL as a saved search on your home screen.
I don’t think I need to go into great detail on how I think this could be beneficial. I think what I will do is simply publish this blog entry and make an announcement about it and see how it goes!
If anyone ever asks you what the #PABL stands for, you can simply sent them to http://gspn.tv/pabl and it will forward them to this post.
