Towards a Healthier Life

Challenge & Selection

Let me start by telling you who am I and what do I do for a living to be able to breakdown further on  why did I choose STORYTELLING to be the main tool that I’ll utilize in order to achieve my end goal  here. My Name is Maxim and I’m an Architect for an Oil and Gas Company. I used to work in a Remote  area which is located nearly 300 km form the nearest city around. That said, people tend to loess  themselves to depression and bad habits since we can only visit our families and home towns once or  twice a month due to the great travel distancing once have to take in order to do so. I have chosen a  very tough challenge to take on which is ‘how can I put people back on a healthy life track” based on  that, I initiated a line of communication with people in an informal and small social gathering, which  kept growing with time due to the area being a remote one, and eventually everyone got to know each  other and started forming these large gatherings after work where they would spend most of their time  chatting, snacking, playing cards and smoking cigarettes. In my opinion, Storytelling could be best  utilized by successfully managing to listen to your subjects and carefully analyzing/understanding their  needs and mind set in order to be able to align your stories with their own coming off as boring or dull.  The reason behind using this tool was that I myself used to be an overweight, depressed and smoking  individual, which made want to change people’s life by sharing my story and life choice.

Application

As mentioned earlier, I have started listening more to my coworkers and their own stories while in the  middle of a meal or during a card game. I have listened to all different types of stories from different  people in society, knowing that not all of us come from the same background nor same culture. Some  told me about their newborn and how it’s difficult to raise a child and be around with such a job,  others talked about how hard is it to have four kids and never being able to watch none of them grow  up close and the struggle of being around and being a part of it while they do. Then we have those  people with the parents and loved once being all alone by them selves and having no one to tack care  of them since they are either sick or just too old to be left alone with out a family care which led to  the situation they are in right now. And some other guys have just told me that they lost purpose by  being here and they felt outcasted and overlooked by society and that noting matters or it does not  make any difference weather they smoked or got over weight, they will still be working in a remote  area “at the edge of the world” as he said. Days passed then I have decided to start telling my story  and turn the table around and change those guys lives for the best. I started by telling my story on how  did I used to work night shit while attending school to be able to afford all tools and equipment’s  needed in order for me to pass collage. I talked about how hard it was to wake up first thing in the  morning and attend collage from 7am to 4 then work from 5 to 11pm in order to buy a laptop which is  required by my major, or afford to pay for the large print out of the projects.

Insight and Approach

I told them how depressed I became and how I gained weight and became 116 KG after being 79 KG,  how sometimes I would be eating expired food just because I can’t afford to buy any other meal. Then  I came to the realization that if you want to change anything start by changing yourself, I started  working out at home, had too sandbags that I used to left weight and went on by doing pushups and  setups. I have quit smoking for good and started running till I got to the point where I ran 20 KM in an  hour, dropped my wight back to 79KG however this time, fully of muscles and totally fit. Started  cooking smartly by adapting healthy diet and greeneries. Then I started telling them about the impact

of energy and how you can attract the best in life to you if you start working on it and ready your self  for when the opportunity comes knocking. And how I was able to secure a modeling jobs and ad photo  shots here and there. Which paid enough to make me leave my part time job comfortably. After we  wrapped up that evening and I told them about my daily routine of hitting the gym right after work, I  was shocked to see the guys rounding up around the gym right after work awaiting me to start  instructing them on a run. After a while, almost every single one of our large group starting going to  the gym where I developed a workout routine to everyone with a specific diet. People started getting  fitter and feel much better which in turns affected their own work performance. The management  reached out to me after a while and I have told them the whole story which resulted in them taking a  new discussion to pay the weekly flight expenses for all employees to go see their families.

Writing this paragraph made me realize how strong can story telling be and how can a person life style  and goals can be achieved by only putting the hard work in and believing in your own objectives and  endeavor in order to obtain your desired target

