Level Up Your Wellness: A Gamified Approach to Personal Growth (My first newsletter)

Unlocking your full potential through imagination

The Cortext

Hey there! I’m Cordell II and welcome to the Cortext.

Are you looking to level up your wellness game? If so, you've come to the right place.

In this newsletter, we'll be exploring the power of gamification when it comes to personal growth and wellness.

Whether you're an athlete, a busy professional, or simply looking to improve your overall health, you'll find plenty of valuable insights and practical tips here.

What’s on the MENU today:

1. Health/Wellness Tips

2. The benefits of using gamification to improve wellness

3. How to create a personalized gamified approach to wellness

4. Techniques for tracking progress and staying motivated

5. Tips for incorporating wellness activities into daily life using AI tools

5 Tips for a healthier body

Researched some science backed exercises and tips to try from one of my favorite Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, owner and Ceo of Huberman Labs.

Here are 5 easy exercises that can be done at home to improve overall physical health and fitness.

• Morning sunlight with a walk

  Take a nice 10 min walk and catch some rays

• Get essential fatty acids

  Intake fatty fish like tuna or salmon

• Take care of gut microbiome with fermented foods

  Think Kimchi, pickled foods, or kombucha (drink not food but it works)

• Get cardio in 150-180 min a week

  Get on a treed mill -Walk up and down your stairs

• Minimum of 5 sets (set # a week per muscle group of resistance training

  For example push ups, crunches, or pull ups.

Gamification Technique: To make these exercises more engaging and fun, try turning them into a fitness challenge!

Set a goal to complete each exercise for a certain number of days or weeks, and track your progress along the way.

You can even get your friends or family members involved and turn it into a friendly competition to see who can complete the challenge first or achieve the best results.

By gamifying your fitness routine, you'll be more motivated and more likely to stick to it long-term.

How to create a personalized gamified approach

Being frustrated with the amount of procrastination that was showing up in my life when I wanted to accomplish a task or solve a problem was depressing me and I knew I needed to figure a way to get myself to focus in a fun way.

September 2020, I stumbled on the idea of gamification through a challenge. At that time I had no clue this concept would play apart in enhancing my wellness and personal development journey.

Travel back in time with me on this journey as I recount my personal tale of giving up Fried Foods, which ultimately led to a cascade of challenges that forced me to re-evaluate my identity and completely overhaul my approach to life.

It’s a clear day with blue skies, a dance filled schedule (i dance/choreograph professionally) and good times. Of course, here I am doing my daily scrolls through social media, and on Facebook I see my friend Phil posts about starting a 30-day challenge for no fried foods and wanting others to join him.

I love food and friend foods at that time was definitely a part of my diet. I thought to myself “Cordell, bro, you have been in need of getting consistent with something for your own benefit, this seems fun and it’s not a huge task why not try to be consistent for 30 days on 1 thing.”

Fine, fine, fine, let’s do it, I told myself. If I do this, I will reward myself with a bomb meal from wherever I want from a nice restaurant for sticking something this specific out for what feels like the first time in my adult life.

What I was desiring was to believe in my word with myself more, stick something out for 30 to prove I could do it, and shoot maybe there will be some health benefits to this. This will undoubtedly help me jump kick my procrastination.

Seeing hot sizzling fried chicken and having to say “nah bruh” was hard af! There were definite days where I struggled more than others.

It didn’t help being a extrovert and being around so many people that were eating at places that had fried foods. I would salivate at the thought of comfort food like chicken fried steak.

Fast forward 30 days…

I freaking did it! I freaking did it! I freaking did it! How cool is this? I just proved to myself that I could go 30 days without something I had been consuming my entire life.

This win was the beginning of my road developing a system that optimized personal growth and self- mastery my own way. It all started with a challenge.

• Create or take on someone else’s challenge you can make your own

• Creating your own approach to gamification can look how you tailor it

• Keep iterating until you find something that works well with your lifestyle

Gamification Challenge: Walk for clarity

What is a walk for clarity?

A walk for clarity to me is a walk for peace of mind and the help in aligning the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

I noticed that I would get bored, bogged down with work or projects, family life, or just need to reset my state of being.

The walk is my way of honing and becoming aware of myself and my own thoughts. This helps me move better aligned throughout my day.

Why do it? 

Daily challenge to get out of the house for so you can:

• get clarity on ideas

• see solutions to problems

• work on grounding and connecting to nature

• release stress and let the mind wonder

Who should do this?

Anyone can participate in this challenge! We will be doing this all of May so join in and get walking!

When is a good time to start?

The time to begin is NOW.

The beauty of the challenge is you can start where you are at.

My recommendation is start small and build by creating a habit loop.

(I will go more into that in the next section where I introduce a book I recommend and how I use it help create gamified systems.)

If you’re a beginner try 100 steps or 3 min. a day for 7 days.

If you do more that’s a plus.

The goal is to create the habit loop and become a person that goes on walks daily. The time will increase as the habit is solidified by the action of going on the walk.

If you do more advanced I suggest trying for 30 min a day like I do or setting a specific number of steps. An influential creator named Dan Koe whose content I enjoy, stated he does 10,000 steps and it helps him a lot as well.

Gamification Technique:

In order to gamify this challenge a thought is download fitness apps for example a fitness/step tracker like you could add to your phone or apple watch etc.

We want to do the action of walking daily, reward ourselves, and create a loop that makes the fun habit worth sticking to and solidifying.

Here are some options you can use: I am not currently getting any sponsored by any of these watches or items just some products to start with if interested:

Personal Development Tips

Cordell’s Weekly Book Recommendation

• Atomic Habits is a book I read that explains how habits are formed and maintained using the "cue craving response reward" framework as one of its main concepts.

  It provides practical strategies for changing and improving habits, based on scientific research and real-life examples.

  The “cue, craving, response, reward” framework is a model for understanding how habits are formed and sustained. It consists of four elements: a cue, craving, a response, and a reward. The cure triggers a craving, which lead to a response, and the reward reinforces the habit.

  I used this concept in creating the habit loop of going to set up my walk for clarity.

  Gamification technique to promote habit formation: Create a habit tracker and turn it into a game.

  Use the "cue craving response reward" framework to identify the cues, cravings, responses, and rewards for each habit, and create a chart or graph to track progress.

  Each time a habit is successfully completed, earn points. Set a goal for how many points to accumulate each week or month, and when that goal is reached, earn a reward.

  The reward could be anything that is motivating, such as a new workout outfit or a day off from work.

  By gamifying habit formation, it becomes more fun and engaging, and increases the likelihood of success.

AI tool integration for personal development

As this is my first issue of my newsletter, using atomic habits to push me through small increments of completing what seemed to be like a task that might just kill me was beneficial.

What has been extremely helpful has been my use of Ai tools such as ChatGpt, Microsoft’s Bing and Midjourney (I used this tool to create most of the visuals you see from my posts here and on social platforms)

I believe that in leveling up your wellness, using technology in this digital era is paramount in optimizing a great workflow and keeping me sane in this new world of mass content creation.

In more newsletters that I will release out weekly on Sundays, I’ll be diving deeper into tools I integrate into my workflow that supercharge my ability to produce an amazing newsletter for you all and keep pushing in the pursuit of keeping life fun and simpler.

I am so grateful for you all for joining in on this new journey with me as i transition into a full-time creator. So much so I’m creating a section for us all to interact with one another!

Gamifying learning is a huge step in taking control of your future, so why not take advantage of the amazing tools we have available to us and have fun in the process.

Community Engagement

• Q&A section: What’s a takeaway from the content today you would like to know more about?

• Get personalized advice from me in a 1:1 Call (Free 20 min. consultation)

Shoutout to you readers who have made significant progress or achieved success in your wellness.

Let’s rally together as a community and share in the betterment of our quality of life.

What a fun time we had together

Thank you for joining me in my first ever newsletter! This took a lot of tears, nights of trial and error and support from so many of my friends to complete.

Lots of getting over imposter syndrome and choosing to have fun and enjoy the process over the completion of this project.

I’m excited to play in the personal growth space, level up our wellness and increase our quality of life together! We did it! The newsletter is out and were on our way to better health and a better life.

• Keep up the good work!

• Stay engaged and participate in upcoming challenges and games

• Share this newsletter with others who may benefit from it.

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🔦 Creator Spotlight

Check out and subscribe to my friend and empatheticly brilliant creator Richy’s Newsletter it’s a fire read!

Resolutionist Report

Conquering your Goals, Habits and Purpose with the power of Resolve

That was it for today. Have a great week ahead and I'll see you again soon!

— Cordell Weathersbee II

PS: Help me out by sharing this with a friend