Early Members received this email on February 1st 2025. It's an invitation to give us your feedback!

Dear Desk Dweller,

A special welcome to you if you are a new subscriber. Last week, we sent out a first e-mail. The contents of the e-mail are now publicly available on our website, in case you missed it. The TL;DR of it is: we are continuing our work for Desk Dwellers, obviously, but we require your help and feedback in the process. That is the topic for this e-mail.

We will first explain our vision, and then ask you to answer a couple of questions.

What do we want Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers to be?

Maaike will explain a little bit of background behind the initiative first.

Maaike: "I have worked in IT for almost 14 years, but I never found it fulfilling. I wanted to truly help people, and one way of doing that was to become a strength training and nutrition coach. I have now successfully coached people towards a different lifestyle, but I want more. I want to reach more people, help more people!

However, I don't want to say to people: you MUST go to the gym, or you MUST lose weight. It won't work. Most people are aware of what they SHOULD do, it's just that they have challenges unique to them that hinder their ability to really permanently change their lifestyle.

The thing I learned during my time as a coach so far is that change really has to come from within. There has to be a strong why. Motivation waxes and wanes and is therefore unreliable, it's about slowly figuring out how to create new habits. And being kind to yourself while figuring this out.

The key factor for my clients who successfully overhauled their lifestyle that I've seen is: FUN. My clients found things that helped them and they also liked doing them. They saw those things as an addition to their life, not as something that was taken away from them for the sake of health. Punishing yourself towards a better lifestyle isn't going to work. There has to be a positive feedback loop.

So that's what I envision for this community: let's work together to find positive feedback loops, so your overall health benefits. I will not tell you what to do, I'll only give suggestions. Every Desk Dweller can choose which things they want to work on that will set in motion a positive feedback loop in their life. I have a framework for this, that I will share at a later point.

Even though I won't tell you what to do, I do have ambition for Desk Dwellers! I would like the community to have a bias for action, to actually do something, try stuff out. Not just talk about changing lifestyle, but getting to work!"

To give this vision shape, we would like to create a forum. This will support the group feeling, and can be a place to set up challenges for Desk Dwellers to participate in. We will also work on the knowledge base, which will grow over time.

Give us your feedback!

But, maybe we are totally off base here! Our request to you is this: Could you reply to this e-mail, and answer some questions? We will not send a new e-mail for a week, so if you can carve out time somewhere in the following 7 days to answer our questions, we would be very grateful. Your response helps us to create the community in a way that benefits everyone.

Questions:

What are you looking for in Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers?

Do you think a forum is a good tool for Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers? (If not, what would you suggest?)

Do you have other suggestions for us, based on the vision you've just read? Does your vision contrast from ours? If so, please explain!


You can cut and paste the questions + your answers in a reply e-mail to info@deskdwellers.town

If you have no time in the next 7 days, no worries. We appreciate every bit of feedback we get, but don't feel guilty if you want to lurk for now.

The next e-mail will dive into the framework Maaike has developed that allows you to look at your health in a holistic way.


Have a great rest of your weekend!
Maaike & Oliver