October, 2021, Lisa Williams, Founder/CEO FitForward Corporate Well-Being
October is Health Literacy month and it’s a reminder of why I wanted to start FitForward in the first place. Besides helping my busy colleagues make healthy decisions while traveling for work, it was really important for me that the information that I shared with them could also be shared with their families so they could have healthy habits together. This meant, creating a program and communicating in the simplest way to ensure understanding. This is what health literacy means to me.
What I learned in the corporate training world, especially when it came to managing difficult projects, is that communicating clearly for understanding and breaking up the project into manageable tasks was the way to achieve goals. This is the same way I wanted to create programs for our members.
Healthcare and wellness is full of complicated language and complex systems, and let’s not forget how emotional it can be for a person to focus and understand when confronted with something they weren’t expecting.
I believe health literacy is promoted through trust, and that’s why I am unyielding when it comes to my staff being experts in their field. Through individual consultation, we support understanding of what our members’ health and wellness goals are. Our members trust us to guide them with practical health steps to accomplish those goals, whether it is to stop smoking, eat healthier, lose weight or manage a critical illness. Our organizational clients trust us to support their employees in their health journeys. Our health challenges, our workouts, and courses are easy-to-follow – and dare I say, translatable to members’ families.
Healthy employees mean healthy organizations. Healthy people mean healthy families, and this is the legacy I want FitForward to leave with everyone that takes part in any of our programs.
#healthliteracymonth