Creating Conversations for Healthy Habits
Bonnie Smith’s game that she created in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program involved putting together a team of people to promote healthy living, including a day of healthy habits seminars. Titled ‘Creating Conversations for Healthy Habits’, Smith’s game was inspired by her life experience losing weight and getting healthy – Smith is passionate about ending obesity and giving people the opportunity to live healthy lives.
Drawing on her own experiences with weight loss and wellness, Bonni Smith created a powerful project dedicated to creating healthy conversations during her first year in Landmark Education’s Team Management and Leadership Program (TMLP). Working with a team of health coaches, Bonni coordinated with her local hospital to create a day of talks and demonstrations called Conversation for Healthy Habits with the goal to unite people in a conversation for good health and wellness.
Bonni shares, “as an obese child I felt alone and frustrated and didn’t feel I had the appropriate knowledge or resources to create balance in my life or a strong feeling of community to help me along the way. Conversation for Healthy Habits is a cooperation of people from different callings who are up to empowering each other as leaders and creating health and wellbeing for the community.”
Since the initial event, she continues to host weekly Habits of Health classes at the local hospital. Bonni continues to find new outlets for her program, including working with the Girl Scouts of America in Broward County, Florida. In fact, they have requested Conversation for Healthy Habits to be a part of the curriculum in alignment with Michelle Obama’s initiative to end childhood obesity. And she’s not stopping there! Bonni is committed to have Conversation for Healthy Habits a part of other communities. She is working with professional associations in human resources and the medical field to incorporate “lunch and learns” and is focusing on physician offices as a resource for the community to fight obesity and bring Conversation for Healthy Habits to everyone.
Bonni’s project was highlighted in a one minute video that she made and was presented with other videos of projects at a quarterly meeting of the TMLP. She’d never made a video before, but after watching some instructional videos on YouTube, Bonni reports, “I got that anything worth saying can be done in one minute, which taught me how to get to the point.”
Determined not to lose her new skills, she now creates videos for other people up to making a difference in health and wellbeing, including one for a funeral home that holds classes on bereavement and gratitude. This has fostered new partnerships and goodwill. Bonni shares, “it gets really exciting when the game goes viral. You just don’t know where your commitment is supposed to take you.”
As a result of the teams and communities she has created, Bonni has become a respected expert in her community and has stepped into several advisory boards that open up new avenues for Conversations for Health Habits. Her clients are continuing their healthy living conversations and some have even begun to coach people in their communities. In a nutshell, she is creating new communities and teams around what’s important in her life all the time.
“Teams are the only way to get something accomplished and I am clear from my Team training that it is never about me. I am always grateful and acknowledge the people that show up in my life. So many things are opening up — it’s so outrageous and humbling —it’s as if the community was just waiting for me to do this.”