My daughter Mallory who occasionally blogs here is teaching aquafit in London, Ontario at a pool where she also works as a lifeguard. I’m hoping she’ll write something for us about her experiences teaching aquafit.
Last week I was planning to go and spend the day with her, attend her class, have lunch and maybe go on an afternoon hike. All good, except the weather had other ideas. So much snow! Guelph got some snow, but London got a lot more.
School was canceled, the university was closed and a winter weather travel advisory advised against all non-essential travel. Sadly I had to admit that aquafit with Mallory was non-essential and stay home. That’s especially true since she was coming to Guelph on the weekend.
Oscar the Grouch and snow
But once I got thinking about aquafit, I decided to attend a class here in Guelph at my fancy gym. I’ve been thinking lately about physical activities I’m good at and also ones that feel good. Anything in the water feels good.
Aqua Bootcamp is at 9 am on a weekday and so it’s a class I can’t ever attend while I’m doing my regular job. I have a seriously inflexible schedule as Dean. But on research leave, I can write in the evenings and read books on the weekend, and take aquafit on a weekday morning.
I love the different groups of people in the pool for aquafit. First, there’s the pregnant women. Second, there’s the injured athletes and people recovering from surgery. And third, there’s the older women.
I’ve been in the first two groups in the past. Maybe now I’m part of the third? I mean the young edge of the older women, but still.
That feeling like I might be part of the older group wasn’t helped by the music. The retro hits were all from my youth–The Talking Heads, the B-52s, and Prince. What’s next? The Clash?
It’s like when the boppy tunes of your youth are playing in the grocery store. Do I think “uh oh” or do I dance in the aisles? I’m hoping for dancing.
Aqua Bootcamp is certainly popular. One of the women in the class remarked that we were lucky to get spots. The regulars all set alarms to sign up for class because the online advance registration fills very quickly. “I feel like I got tickets to a Taylor Swift concert,” she said.
The regulars definitely have their routine down pat. Someone asked if I was in the second row or the first row. I didn’t know there were rows. Each person seemed to have a preferred spot in the pool. They were friendly and they assigned me a spot. I tried my best to stay put.
There’s a lot more aqua options now then there used to be. There’s aqua yoga, which I really like, aqua bootcamp, and even aqua Zumba. Love the Zumba idea because no one can see if you’re getting the moves right.
It took me a long time to realize that enthusiasm isn’t necessary for success.
Sure, enthusiasm often makes things easier but it can also be hard to sustain.
And, despite what my ADHD brain tries to claim, it is completely possible to forge ahead and take the actions you need to take even on days when your project is the most boring thing you can imagine.*
Yes, this is a bit like my Give It A Try advice from last week but that was mostly about getting started on a given day. This post is more about repeated efforts.
Before I fully understood how my brain worked, I used to fall for the idea (that lots of so-called gurus like to toss around) that if I *really* wanted something then I would naturally be able to do it. That if I wasn’t enthusiastic about a project 24/7 then obviously I didn’t actually want it bad enough.
Basically, I thought that my varying levels of enthusiasm were a SIGN of something.**
One night, years and years ago, I finally cleared some mental space and some time to do some writing and I found myself utterly without enthusiasm for my words. In my boredom with myself, I got on Twitter and directed a tweet at three of my favourite writers seeking an infusion of writing energy. I don’t remember exactly what I asked and two of the writers responded with friendly, kind and joking responses.
The third one, though, she responded with some absolutely brain-changing words for a writer in need of encouragement:
When it’s all over, the words that you dragged out one at a time in tedium read exactly the same as the ones made of white hot inspiration. ~ Ursula Vernon
Ursula Vernon is a prolific writer in a variety of genres and she gets stuff done.
If she also sometimes dragged out words in tedium then I could totally do that, too – it didn’t mean anything about my skill as a writer.
I didn’t need to worry about my wavering levels of enthusiasm, they were just part of the process.
Now, I’m not saying that I can always make myself write when I want to but there is freedom in not having to concern myself with generating enthusiasm. After all, if I have to generate enthusiasm and then generate energy to actually write, I’m doing twice the work for the same result.
The same thing is true for the tasks you want to do in service of enhancing and expanding your life.
Sure, enthusiasm for your tasks is great when it’s there and it is perfectly ok to drum some up if you can.
But it’s also ok to carry out those tasks in tedium today (or any given day) and just get them out of the way.
Your exercise doesn’t have to leave you energized and glowing every time.
Your meditation doesn’t always have to bring a sense of serenity.
Your plan to drink more water doesn’t have to feel exciting today.
Your journaling practice can be utterly revelation free this time.
And sometimes your practice will just be a placeholder, something to connect yesterday’s task with tomorrow’s, one more stone in the path leading to where you want to go.
Sure, if you always feel unenthused and you can’t figure out why you are bothering, take a closer look at what you are doing and why you are doing it.
BUT
… if you are having occasional bouts of indifference or even frustration, let me rephrase Ms. Vernon’s advice to apply in this context:
The practice you do in tedium will be just as helpful for you as the practice done in white hot excitement.
So Team, today (and whenever), I invite you to give yourself the freedom of being unenthusiastic, of letting the task be a placeholder, of letting the process carry you through your practice. It will be helpful to you, one way or another.
And here, as always, is your gold star for your efforts – whether they ae enthusiastic, kind of phoned-in, absolutely enormous, or so teeny that only you can tell they are complete. Your effort counts.
Go Team Us!
A small drawing of a long tailed gold star with overlapping thin black lines in the background. The drawing is propped against a dark green surface standing on a white desk.
*Before my fellow neurodivergents descend upon me, I’m not saying it is EASY and I am not saying we need to ‘just do the thing’, I’m saying that enthusiasm is not necessarily a requirement for action. I do recognize that we may need to dig deep in other, neurodivergent-compatible ways to summon the ability to proceed without enthusiasm.
**Varying levels of enthusiasm/a complete lack of enthusiasm for a project *might* be a sign to look at your plans a little more closely but it’s probably just the normal ebb and flow of feelings around a long term activity.
So last week‘s Planuary post was very much about physical wellness- about how I’m going to add pushups and upper body yoga into my routine – and this week’s post is about mental wellness – how I am going to (re)implement a stress-reducing practice into my days.
Sidenote: I haven’t actually added the pushups and yoga into my day-to-day yet. Planuary is a deliberately slow process but I will let you know when and how I proceed with the pushup plan.
So my next part of Planuary is about reflection – reflective journaling to be precise.
This isn’t me, obviously. Their writing is tidy and their nail polish isn’t chipped. Image description: a person’s hands are shown writing in a coil-bound notebook. They are wearing a brown sweater and dark nail polish.
For over a year, I was doing long journal entries via voice dictation every day.
It was really useful for my brain and I found that processing everything aloud reduced my stress levels overall.
Then, I just kind of got out of the habit.
There were several reasons for that but the main one was tech-related.
I was using Google Docs for journaling but I use it for a lot of things and it got to be really annoying because it doesn’t have a good way to organize your files and my journal entries were popping up at times when I did not want to see them.
I tried switching to an app instead and while that was better for keeping my journal in one spot (and letting me choose when to see it instead of having it sprung on me), the app itself keeps crashing on my somewhat outdated phone. So, I would be chattering away to my journal and then discover that I hadn’t been recording for ages.
So I tried recording in Google Docs and then copying and pasting the entry into the other app but that made every journaling session a two-step process and my ADHD brain started protesting at the waste of time. (Yes, I know it was just a few seconds but sometimes my brain just won’t.)
Because of the ‘longer’ process, I started delaying my journaling time until later. (In this case, later is ‘the not now’ – a possibly fictional time in which the thing I am trying to do will be magically easier and hassle free. This is a common ADHD trap.)
And that turned into hardly journaling at all.
But I have been really missing the stress-reducing nature of the journaling process – especially when I can use voice dictation to process everything verbally.
So, I want to get back into the reflective journaling habit in a way that works with my brain instead of against it and here’s my plan for doing that:
Record into Google Docs every day for a week and then cut and paste into the app with good organization. Sure, there will temporarily be a single journaling document with up to a week’s worth of reflection in it but I think I can live with that. Also, my brain is fine with a ‘every Friday we cut and paste’ kind of task even though it objects to doing that daily.
Do my journaling as early in the day as possible. Journaling at night is never going to happen for me. I can do short entries but I don’t seem to get into the same rhythm at night and it doesn’t have the same stress-reducing effect. So, I’m going to turn on voice dictation for 10 minutes as soon as I can during the day.
Keep a list of questions to ask myself. I don’t often get stuck for a journaling topic but I want to be prepared, just in case.
Unlike the pushups, I can and will start this practice right away.
As I was considering why I feel drawn back to reflective journaling, I realized that, not only did it help me to reduce my stress levels overall, it also used to help get my brain into ‘time to start work’ mode and anything that helps me with work-related task initiation is good for my mental health and for my overall well-being.
For the next few days, I will be borrowing from approach to my writing practice and applying it to developing fitness habits.
As you have probably guessed, I often write these Go Team posts on the day they are posted.
And I like working this way because it feels interesting to my ADHD brain and it feels responsive to how I am feeling on a given day. I have some preliminary ideas in a folder and I have some ideas rattling round in my head but I don’t really have a big plan in place.
What I do have, though, is a routine and, sooner or later each January, I end up writing about it.
And that day is today.
You see, some days, even with ideas rattling around in my head and with some preliminary drafts in a folder, nothing feels quite right to write about.
Some stuff feels too big to take on today and other things feel too small, like I need to finish thinking them through. Some stuff feels boring and some stuff feels like I have said it too often already.
And, on those days, when I am at loose ends and I am not sure what I want to write, I lean on my routine.
My routine goes like this:
Make a cup of tea or get a glass of water
Get my little bits of paper (half an index card, cut with very little precision, just in case you are wondering)
Get something to draw with (today it was a pencil and some markers)
Decide whether to draw small stars or big stars and then decide whether they will have faces
Set a timer (13 mins in my case) then start drawing and let my mind wander (sometimes it wanders over pre-existing topics, sometimes I just let it go wherever it wants.)
By the time my drawing is finished, I almost always know what I want to say and basically how I want to say it.
Now, I have a lot of practice writing in general and a lot of practice writing Go Team posts so I am not really starting from scratch here.
I know that I have the skills to put a post together at any given time and all I need is to get my brain up the on-ramp.
So, having this routine that reminds my brain what I am supposed to be doing and then keeps my hands busy while I think really makes a big difference in the process of getting a post written.
I think the same thing can be true for fitness and wellness habits.
Expanding and enhancing the things you want in your life can be based in a routine (or multiple routines, really, but maybe start one at a time.)
Perhaps there are a series of things you can do to get your brain (and your body) into exercise mode. (e.g. set an alarm and when it goes off, you fill your water bottle, grab your sweater, put on your shoes, and head out for a walk.)
Maybe you can unfold your day towards your meditation time. (e.g. after supper, you light a candle, wrap yourself in a blanket, and lie on your mat while you listen to a guided meditation.)
Your new less stress habit could start with a routine that feels connected to removing some worries. (e.g. when you get home from work/finish work for the day, you change at least some of your clothes, wash your face, brush your hair, and then do some specific breathing before writing a list of things (work stresses) you are parking for the evening.)
Obviously, you’ll have to be the one to determine the steps of your routine and you will probably have to experiment with it a little.
And it will help if your routine feels like it is moving you toward the action you want to take.
In my case, I need a star for my post, drawing stars feels easy so there is a low barrier to getting started, and getting the star done is bringing me closer to finishing my post.
I could have a routine that involves stretching or listening to music, or something else and that *might* work but if I am feeling especially twitchy on a given day, those things might feel like added tasks instead of part of a process.
So, Team, today, I invite you to consider your routine, your on-ramp for your practice.
What can you do to make it easier to do your new practice?
What actions will move you forward, even if, like me when I start drawing, you haven’t fully decided where you want to end up?
What actions, activities, or rituals would help carry you toward your practice even if you feel indifferent towards it on a given day?
Please don’t put pressure on yourself to figure all of this out right away (my star drawing routine was a happy fluke at first) but stay open to ideas to include in your on-ramp to your practice.
And here are a whole bunch of gold stars to celebrate your efforts to create a routine, to trust your routine, and to adjust any routine as needed. These stars also celebrate any efforts you make today to be kind to yourself, to make space for yourself in your own life, or to make decisions that make sense for you today.
Go Team Us!
A small drawing of a whole bunch of irregular, cartoonish stars of various sizes sprinkled across a blue background with black trim. The drawing is propped against a blue mug on my white desk.
Most people don’t think about it this way, but it’s true that from a physical performance point of view, there are advantages and disadvantages to having a larger body.
An aside: I say “larger body.” I know there’s still a lot of debate around use of the term “fat.” Personally I’m okay with fat as a self descriptor. However, I know not everyone is. Therefore, I’m going for more neutral language.
For past discussion of this point, see here, here and here to start.
So what’s distinctive about my larger body?
I’m pretty naturally strong. Lots of large people are. There’s a reason there are weight categories in lifting. I put on muscle easily and everyday I walk around carrying a fair bit of weight on my frame.
On the bike, hills are my nemesis, followed by long endurance efforts. Sprinting is my thing. I’ve got the muscles I need for short, all out efforts. You can see that in the Zwift Camp Baseline report on my strengths and weaknesses
Some things are much more difficult for me given my size. That’s true for anything that involves bodyweight moves, like pull ups and push ups. Ditto running. Ditto some yoga positions. Indeed, some yoga moves are pretty much physically impossible in their unmodified versions given my bulk.
Yoga hammocks
There are activities like lifting and sprinting that play to my strengths. Rowing is another sport where size helps.
There are also physical activities that feel good because they assist with moving my body.
Swimming is an obvious example. Really any physical activity that involves the water feels good. It’s very low impact and the water supports my joints. Aquafit is fun for this reason.
The TRX is also my friend. The TRX suspension system allows you to take some weight off your joints.
Lately I’ve been loving anti-gravity yoga. That’s yoga in a silk hammock. It is also known as aerial yoga. It involves performing yoga poses while suspended in a hammock. Anti-gravity yoga can help improve flexibility and do more challenging poses without putting pressure on your joints. My knees love it.
Yoga in a hammock. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
So the TRX, anti-gravity yoga, and anything in the water. They all feel extra good.
How about you? Are you a larger bodied athlete? What feels good for you?
“From desk-bound days to skyrocketing screen time, our jampacked lives leave little room for movement. The Make Room to Move Challenge, proudly supported by Sun Life, aims to help people across Canada make room and get active in their daily lives.
Download or open the free Optimity app to join the Challenge, then track your physical activity (“move minutes”) within the app from January 13 to 31, 2025 for your chance to win the grand prize!”
What is the make room to move challenge?
Let us know if you’re taking part, in the comments below.
Have you given any thought to the stories you are telling yourself about your goals, your plans, and your habit-building tasks?
Stories are one of the main ways that humans help make our world and our lives make sense and, so, we create stories for ourselves – consciously and unconsciously – all the time.
This can work for us or work against us, depending on the circumstances and on the stories that we are telling.
If you have struggled with fitness practices because of various circumstances in the past, your brain might have settled on you as the common denominator and created a story about how you ‘just aren’t good at exercise stuff.’
But if you grew up in a physically active family who had a knack for teaching physical skills, your brain might have developed a story that ‘all exercise is easy and people who struggle with exercise are just lazy.’*
So, imagine that the first person has decided to start a new exercise program doing dance videos at home and they either don’t realize that they have this story in their head or they just think that the story’s conclusion is a fact.
They are facing a lot of extra obstacles there, aren’t they?
If you think that you just aren’t good at anything in a given category, it’s going to be hard to find the resources to try. Our fictional person is going to struggle to find a dance video that feels easy enough for them. They may pick something that is so simple that it bores them. Or they may pick something far too complicated and then assume that the problem is them (rather than the level of experience required for that video) and accidentally reinforce their internal story.
Now imagine that the second person decides to try something new and they find themselves struggling with it. According to their internal story, their struggle can only result from their laziness and that’s just not helpful. Calling themselves lazy could mean they are going to push themselves harder without getting more information (which could lead to getting hurt) or it could mean avoiding the activity all together to avoid the ‘lazy’ label and end up missing out on something they might enjoy.
Either way, the story of alleged laziness is unhelpful at the very least and possibly even dangerous. And it is definitely unsympathetic to their struggles and to other people’s struggles. (Starting from a ‘people who struggle are lazy’ perspective is not a good way to make friends!)
Maybe your stories aren’t as defined or extreme as those examples but they can still have an effect on your approach to planning and building a new habit that will enhance or expand your life.
And it is worth noticing and questioning the stories that we are carrying around with us all the time. You don’t have to spend hours picking through your own brain but you can notice when a definitive but unhelpful statement arises and try to shift it a little to support your plans.
If part of your story is ‘I don’t like mornings.’ but mornings are literally the only space in your day when you can complete the exercises you want to, then it is an unhelpful story. What could you do to shift that story a little? (Even a small shift, like saying ‘I don’t like mornings and I still get up to exercise.’, can be helpful.)
If part of your story is ‘I’m too fidgety to meditate.’ but you really want to experience the benefits of mindfulness, then it is an unhelpful story that shuts your plans down immediately. Perhaps, you could shift your story to ‘I’m too fidgety for sitting meditation and I’m going to look into other mindful activities.’
Overall, we’re awash in stories about how things are, how things ‘should’ be, and the ‘right’ way to do things. We often internalize these ideas (and then build internal narratives around them) without realizing it.
These stories can make our practices, our plans, and our challenges far more difficult than they need to be. It is worth it to take a moment to notice any unhelpful narratives and to ask ourselves questions about where they came from, how much (if any) if the narrative is true, and whether we can dismiss the unhelpful stories or reshape them to support us instead.
As a professional storyteller, I am very aware of the power of stories, the way they engage so much of our brains, and the way they stick with us, popping up again and again. Our brains don’t necessarily distinguish between helpful and unhelpful stories, they just present them when they seem relevant.**
So, Team, today, I am inviting you to notice and reconsider your stories around your plans and your practices. What kind of stories do you have around habit-building/fitness/mindfulness? What do you tell yourself when you struggle? What makes something easy or hard for you? How do you talk to yourself about your plans and ideas?
If you notice a story around any of the things that you are trying to add to your life right now, pay attention to it. If it is a helpful story, is it good as it is or would you like to add details that will make it more helpful?*** If it is an unhelpful story, can you reframe it or do you need to figure out how to dismiss it and replace it will a helpful one instead?
As always, Team, here are your gold stars for today’s efforts, no matter what they are. If you are noticing stories, adding an extra minute to your practice, or seeking support for a challenge of any kind, your efforts count.
Go Team Us!
A small drawing of lots of gold stars on strings ‘hanging’ from the top of the image. There’s a black frame around the edge of the drawing and the spaces between the stars are filled with small dots. The drawing is propped against my green water bottle on my wooden table.
*For the record, I don’t think people are lazy overall. Undoubtedly there are some people who just can’t be bothered to do stuff and will try to get out of putting in any effort. However. most of the time, the person being characterized (or characterizing themselves) as lazy actually have a lot obstacles to face, internally and externally, and being called lazy doesn’t help. The word itself can be a good descriptor but if you are using it as a weapon against yourself or someone else, please reconsider.
**Yes, I am oversimplifying quite a bit here. I am not a psychologist, scientist, or any kind of a medical professional and this isn’t a scientific description. My understanding of this comes from my experience and personal research into stories, storytelling, creativity, and creativity coaching, as well as my experience with my coaching clients. If you want to go deeper into your internal narratives, please ensure that you have appropriate support for that journey. Be kind and gentle with yourself.
*** Adding specific examples, sensory details, and strong action words can help stories to feel even more real. Plus, it’s fun to enhance our positive stories!
It seems to me that January is turning into a varied and tricky obstacle course, with new twists and turns each year. What kinds of new challenges lie in waiting for us? My favorite new silly challenge that I’m NOT doing is alphabet eating: starting with the letter A, eat only foods that day that begin with A. And so on.
Filling up on apples and asparagus one day, followed by bananas and broccoli the next seems harmless enough. But some other popular challenges not only fail to offer health benefits, they may be actually harmful to us.
Yes, I’m talking about the annual January Detox talk.
As you all know, I’m not an expert in medicine, nutrition or diet (which nonetheless fails to deter me from writing about them). So today I offer you advice from an expert– Megan Maisano, a Registered Dietician Nutritionist who (among other things) has her own Substack and also contributes to a Substack I read a lot– Your Local Epidemiologist.
So, without further ado, I turn it over to Megan. By the way, she was sooo nice to 1) respond so quickly to my request to reblog her post; and 2) praise FIFI for the good work it does. Definitely go and check out her Substack here, subscribing if you’re so inclined.
In my Go Team posts, I tend to spend a lot of time reminding you (and myself!) that it is ok to find things challenging and I like to share ideas for how to face those challenges in a way that lets us be kind to ourselves.
It’s true that making change/expanding our lives will involve some challenges but those challenges are only part of the story.
Changing/expanding/enhancing our lives also involves FUN.
It can be exciting to add new elements and activities to our lives.
It can be fun to have new experiences and try new things.
It’s interesting and inspiring to build new skills.
There are all kinds of great things that happen in the habit-building process.
And just as it doesn’t serve us well to pretend that the process is easy, it also doesn’t serve us well to treat it as an unrelenting ordeal that requires extensive work at every turn.
Just as it is important to prepare for challenges, it’s important to recognize the fun in our new habits, to add extra fun where we can, and to celebrate the good feelings that arise in the process of expanding and enhancing our day-to-day lives.
So, Team, today I am inviting you find the fun part of your habit-building process and inviting you to add extra fun wherever possible.
Here are a few places to start:
Do you get to listen to good music, a good book, or a good podcast while exercising?
Is it fun to look forward to your practice or your workout?
Do you enjoy the feeling of working your muscles, of sinking into your meditation, or getting your words out of your head and onto the screen/page?
Is it good to be outdoors? Or is it good to be exercising indoors when it’s cold outside?
Do you get to spend time with different people? Or get extra time alone? Or do you get to choose good company each time?
Do you enjoy how you feel after your practice?
Is learning something new fun for you?
Can you put a gold star sticker on a chart for each practice?
Do you enjoy how your workout/practice clothes feel on your body? Do you have anything special or fun that you wear during your sessions?
Are you playing a sport or game that you enjoy?
Do you get a sense of satisfaction from taking good care of yourself?
Are you proud of yourself for learning how to rest?
Can you pat yourself on the back for learning to recognize that you have more energy on some days than on others and that that is perfectly ok?
Can you add any elements that will increase your fun – different lighting, a candle, a fuzzy sweater, better socks, really good recovery snacks?
Some of the the fun of the habit-building process will be obvious, some might require a bit of digging, and some might be a conscious choice on your part but it all counts as fun and it all adds to your enjoyment of your practices.
So, go ahead and colour in the edges of your journal when you are done writing, call your friend so you can both brag about how great your workouts were, wrap yourself in a warm blanket for meditation, wear your ‘Maybe Swearing Will Help’ shirt* while you do your strength training, bop around your kitchen to 80s pop songs.
In fact, do whatever fun thing you want to do in the habit-building process. There is no virtue or glory in pretending that the whole thing is a joyless slog of challenges.
Nothing is lost by celebrating the good parts and it’s always good to add more fun to your activities.
So, Team, here is your gold star for your efforts today, whether those efforts are to celebrate fun, to add fun, to find existing fun, or to promise to keep an eye out for fun in the future. (You can also have a gold star if you think fun is pointless, I’m not gatekeeping here.)
Go Team Us!
A photo of a small drawing of a gold star with thin black lines radiating from the edges of the star to the black outline at the edge of the paper. The drawing is leaning against a dark green upright surface on a white desk.
*Yes, this is strangely specific. Yes, I do have a tank top with that phrase on it. 😉
It’s 2025—a new year for making resolutions and embracing growth. But before you tackle these goals, I want you to dream with me. Let’s go to 10ish months from now when bosses of large and small companies alike begin preparation for corporate holiday parties. Yes, we just passed this season, but I want to share what a company I work for has been doing annually for their Christmas party. And I want to share it now out of generosity, for you’ll likely want to borrow the idea for your next holiday shindig.
I work part-time as a report writer for a small environmental firm in the oil and gas sector. Every Christmas, to kick off the holiday break, all staff members, including employers, make their way across the city to a humble curling rink called the Shamrock—a clever name with a nod to the sport’s namesake stones. Here, they gather in teams and hit the ice to begin a multi-game curling tournament.
Seems simple enough, but what makes this event special is the personable and hilarious happenings that take place in the lead-up and throughout.
First, there’s the battle for Golden Tickets. These tickets, while not inviting you to an all-you-can-eat chocolate factory, serve as a form of immunity (hello Survivor watchers). Earned through winning trivia, participating in Hot Ones challenges, or other such activities, Golden Tickets allow the holder to place a star player on their team or, for sabotage, move a star player off another team. As many only ever curl at the Christmas party, or for staff members like me who had never played before, a Golden Ticket could make or break your team’s success.
The coworkers in charge of these lead-up events, especially our power-woman of a safety officer who orchestrated all of these seamlessly with the main event, put personalized efforts into making them fun and inclusive. For example, if someone wasn’t able to be in the office for a trivia event, they had an online option. One coworker even set up watch parties for the classic Christmas movies that were to be one of the trivia themes. In doing this, some of them even disqualified themselves from a Golden Ticket win.
This brings me to the draw. The draw, conducted over a lunch hour in the office, involves all staff and is what determines the teams for the curling tournament. Assembled by assigning skips (those actually versed in curling) as captains and fishing the rest of the names out of a hat, the teams remain randomized each year to keep them competitively equal. There are, of course, those who ride their competitive nature strong and have been known to bribe their way into a stacked team— I may or may not have been traded off a team for a 6-pack of craft beer—but it’s all part of the fun.
Once teams are established, a hush spreads over the office as teammates collude in whispers about what their costumes could be. That’s right. Costumes. Tournaments can be uninviting if you’re not the competitive or athletic type. Knowing that there can only be one tournament winner, this office has devised two alternate manners of winning. One is through the toilet bowl—a final game between the teams with the least wins in the tournament. The other is through the costume contest. So, if you’re a team with questionable curling skills, you can choose to pour your efforts into the costume contest.
This year’s costumes did not disappoint. One team handcrafted themselves into Sim characters, another turned themselves into Christmas presents, and another kept to the sports theme and dressed themselves to look like some of the most popular athletes from the 2024 Summer Olympics: the Turkish pistol shooter, the Australian breakdancer, and the French pole vaulter—PVC pole positioned at the junk included.
Though the competition was fierce, I am proud to say that the team I belonged to won the contest with Grinch-inspired outfits. The tallest of us was Max, our skip was decked in a very convincing Grinch outfit, and the two of us girls were Whos. I believe it was our obvious effort on our hair that snagged us the win.
Taking my first crouch at the hack (what you push off from to curl), decked in Whoville attire.
A woman with decorative hair and wearing a long, red sweater crouches low at the hack on a curling sheet. She holds a yellow curling rock in her right hand and a balance tool in her left.
After the sporting and costuming, the staff enjoys a catered buffet supper in the rink’s upstairs lounge; and with perogies included, you can bet supper was enjoyed by all.
What follows is an enjoyable half hour of raffle draws. For simply attending and remaining at the Christmas party, each staff member is given a raffle ticket. These tickets offer everyone a chance to win one of a dozen prizes.
This part of the evening is special as it showcases the good relationships maintained between the company and their vendors and clients. Due to the company’s size, many clients and vendors know multiple staff members and are recognized when they step into the office. Phone calls are personable, and presents are often hand-delivered. A lounge table stacked with gift baskets, appliances, and other desired goods is a direct result of these friendly partnerships.
Sadly, neither my husband nor I won any raffles, but watching others win was still enjoyable.
Cheering each other on for raffles is one way to feel staff cohesion, but the best team-building activity of the night was probably speed darts, courtesy of the curling rink’s two dart boards. With all participants divided into two teams, the goal was to hit every number around the board in successive order. Once someone got their dart in space 1, we moved on to space 2, then 3, then 4, and so forth until the first team hit all the numbers and successfully hit the bullseye to win. It was a blast, though minorly dangerous. I highly suggest finding dart boards on opposite walls.
The Christmas party capped off with casual visiting and a little dancing when a song hit just right. A full-day event spent with coworkers was as enjoyable as if spent with friends. I look forward to doing this again.
So, with the holiday season approaching us in 11 months, you now have a head start on what to do: book a local curling rink, have some fun with your coworkers, and challenge yourself to make the most of learning new activities.
Stephanie Morris is a transcriptionist and writer based in Alberta, Canada. She is a wife, mom of two, and owner of writing services company, Words & S’mores. As a fancier of history and literature, she aspires to blend the two in fiction and nonfiction pieces. To follow Stephanie’s writing adventures, find her at @words.and.smores on Instagram or visit her website wordsandsmores.square.site.
