It’s Time for Wehl Love – Every Act Counts!

A New Decade of Wehlness, Good and L-O-V-E

At Wehl, we’re excited that it’s a new year, a new decade AND that our wellness app has been live for one year! It turns out, it’s harder than expected to build a healthy, non-addictive and socially-conscious platform. Let’s just say it’s been a long road to get here but we’ve relied on faith, passion, community and our purpose to keep at it.

We believe online time that helps us improve ourselves, encourage others and spread good is time well spent! That’s why we’re on this mission to use the power of social support to Inspire Wehlness and Spread Good, Together!

To celebrate our one-year live anniversary, we wanted to add a new feature to help further our mission and impact. That new feature is Wehl Love.  We want to start this new decade off right by declaring it to be the decade of wehlness, good and plenty of Wehl L-O-V-E!

Making Wehl Love the New Norm

Let’s face it — in today’s world, caring about our health, acting preventatively and taking a natural, holistic approach to wellness is still not the norm. In fact, you can be seen as down-right WEIRD if you show love to yourself by choosing to make healthy choices that support your health and prioritize the environment.

And for some reason it seems to get even WEIRDER if you show love and care for the wellness of others. WEIRDER still if you don’t know that person in real-life.

We think it’s WEIRD not to take action to show love and care for your own health, the health of the planet and the health of other human beings. That’s why, we’re opening up the conversation about wellness and checking in with each other online and offline. On Wehl, we come together to help each other because wellness is hard and we can’t do it alone. Wehlness for all and Wehl Love to all.

What exactly is Wehl Love?

Wehl Love is defined in our dictionary as the act of caring about and supporting the wehlness of others. It is not simply a fleeting thought, passive comment or noble idea.

At Wehl, we want to put the action into LOVE – we want to be loveRs of others and ourselves while remembering that we, and others, are loveD.

Wehl Love is the foundation of why we built the Wehl platform. It is inspired by a genuine care for other fellow human beings and an overall view that we should not only care more about the health and wellbeing of ourselves but also of others (and our planet too of course).

Wehl Love is supporting each other to improve and maintain wellness, not just when someone has illness.

My Wehlness Ain’t Your Wehlness But I Wehl Love You Anyway

Just so we’re clear on the definition, Wehl Love shouldn’t involve, or be seen as, judging, comparing, lecturing, scolding, self-promotion, or anything else but genuine care.  Wehl Love is merely a manifestation of our Wehl Community Manifesto. We will endeavor to always treat and accept others the way we would like to be treated and accepted, regardless of how similar or different their pursuit of wellness is to ours.

There’s no one size fits all, no magic pill, no virtual assistant we can hire to “do wellness” for us. Wellness is a lifelong journey of taking small, imperfect steps towards living a healthy, purposeful life. It can be difficult and it looks different for each of us.

Any of this sound familiar – “WHAT, you’re a vegan?!”, “You’re a paleo?!”, “You get up at 5 a.m. for meditation and prayer?!”, “You do yoga?!”, “You don’t do yoga?!”, “You’re not eating sugar?!” … You X, Y and Z?  We’re not here to tell each other what holistic wellness is, we’re here to support and empower each other to take steps towards figuring out what it uniquely means to each of us.

Wehl can help bring more health and wellness into your life. Our social platform provides invaluable social support to promote sustainable health. Research proves social support is the SECRET to keeping you motivated and encouraged to stay on the path to achieving your goals.

Wellness – What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Which comes first, the wellness egg or the love chicken? But seriously, love and wellness go hand in hand:

Love Through Wellness – By making healthy choices, sustaining wellness habits and generally caring for our personal wellness, we’re showing love to ourselves. When we’re caring for ourselves, we have more energy, patience, kindness and love to give to others. By supporting others to care for their wellness, we’re showing love. Love comes through wellness.

Wellness Through Love – By showing love, we’re contributing not only to the wellness of others but also to our own wellness. Showing love for others and recognizing our dependence on each other is part of our social wehlness. It’s about enhancing relationships, helping each other and giving back. Love is also part of spiritual wehlness as we work towards achieving our purpose and wellness potential while supporting others on their journeys too.

When it comes to wellness in your life, we encourage you to figure out what wellness is and what each of the components of holistic wellness mean to you. When you step back and simply look at the big picture, wellness comes right down to L-O-V-E for yourself and others.

What is the Wehl Love feature?

Our new Wehl Love feature is a visual representation of the Wehl Love we’re giving and receiving on the Wehl social platform. It’s a cumulative count of actions taken that can support the wellness of others (including comments, high fives, and helpful wellness tips). Regardless of the response that we get (or lack thereof), the giving still fills up our heart!

Every act of Wehl Love counts.  This new feature is one way for us to measure our wellness impact – which as a purpose-focused business and certified B Corp, is why we’re here.

As members of a cooperative community, we all contribute to the Wehl Love count. Members have a “heart” on their profile that fill ups, and stays up, the more they show Wehl Love.

This individual representation is a great way to encourage and motivate ourselves to show love and help others on their wellness journey. It’s a fun way to keep us accountable and track our social wehlness online.

How did the idea for a Wehl Love feature come about?

Humans are social beings meant to live in community and care for each other. Technology is never going to be the best way to communicate but we believe it can be much better. All of the design, features and most importantly the culture on Wehl are intended to foster good-old-fashioned online communication, kindness and love.

From the beginning, Wehl has been co-created with our early community based on needs, interests and feedback. We want the online experience to be as wellness-supporting as possible so we are meticulous about asking ourselves how each feature will affect the wellness of our members. The idea for the Wehl Love feature began very naturally as is the case with many of the features and strategies we’ve done to date.

It’s important to our mission that we support each other in wehlness no matter if we know the person in real-life or not. To help encourage this, we implemented anonymous “high-fives” – with the touch of a button you can send a “random act of wehlness” to encourage someone.  We love this feature but wanted to go even further and really make Wehl about communication and social support.

To be real (because being real is what we’re about here), we’ve been surprised at how difficult it’s been to share our mission, explain how we’re unique and ultimately encourage people to join in, share and engage with others. In particular, if someone posted on the platform but didn’t receive a comment, we’d say we need to show them some Wehl Love. And from there, it grew into the idea for a new feature and a collective measurement of social support.

Our goal is for Wehl Love to:

• Reinforce the mission, value and healthy culture of Wehl
• Support engagement and further encourage the idea of caring about the health of others – even if you don’t know them or their wellness is different from yours
• Add a unique element of fun and motivation for wellness
• Help to easily showcase and quantify positive impact
• Encourage us to show more love to ourselves and others by prioritizing wellness and supporting others too
• Overall, help us put the action into love by becoming lovers – in real-life and online

How can each of us practice Wehl Love?

To show Wehl Love online we can:

• Make a comment – Take a minute out of your day to pause and exchange thoughts and encouragement by actually typing a comment to show another person you care. If someone took the time to make a comment on your post, make a quick reply to send some Wehl Love back their way.
• Share a wellness “tip” – A tip is any short bit of wellness-related information that you have found helpful and that you think others might too. (For more ideas about what to share, check out this article).
• Give a high-five – With the click of a button, you can do a “random act of wehlness” and anonymously show support for others in the Wehl community.
• Send a thoughtful message – Check in with someone you care about. Include a link to an article about wellness that you’ve enjoyed or a particular tip you’ve learned on Wehl that you think they might find useful.
• Invite those we love to Wehl – Send them the link to Wehl.com so they can join and get social support to help them practice healthy habits, achieve their goals and improve their health.

 

To show Wehl Love offline we can:

• Be someone’s social support for wellness in real-life – It could be telling each other your goals and habits and checking in with each other regularly, scheduling a day each week to head to the gym together, or taking turns making dinner so that your partner can do some journaling or a meditation. Look for ways to offer wellness support and accountability to the family members, kids, friends, co-workers and neighbours in your life.
• Talk about wellness – Skip the weather chat; when you’re catching up with friends and family, check in with each other about health and wellbeing. Find out how others have been and what they’re trying or what new habit they’ve been doing to care for their wellness. If we truly want to connect and build relationships with each other, wellness should always be part of the conversation.
• Incorporate wellness into social gatherings – Plan an active outing or take a walk together before or after you grab a coffee or tea. If it’s dinner, do a bit of research and be the one to suggest a healthy restaurant. Wehl is a great place to start getting some ideas and inspiration from others about healthy activities, restaurants, cafes and more.
• Give a healthy gift – For a birthday or a special occasion, think about a gift that will contribute to the person’s wellness. We’ve had lots of great interviews with socially and environmentally conscious businesses that offer products/services that would make great, healthy gifts. This can support not only their wellness but may also support the wellness of others in need through a company’s commitment to give back.
• Insert your ideas here… 😊

Let’s get in the mood for Wehl Love

Love – such an easy word to spell and not always an easy action to take! To get us in the mood to show some collective, “let’s support each other” kind of L-O-V-E, here are a few musical love quotes:  (most powerful if you listen while reading of course)

• “I believe you and me are sisters and brothers, I believe we’re made to be here for each other, and we’ll never fall if we walk hand in hand, put a world that seems broken together again, I believe in the end love wins…Love will.  Love can. Love still. Love Wins…” – Love Wins by Carrie Underwood
• “If everyone cared and nobody cried, if everyone loved and nobody lied, if everyone shared and swallowed their pride, then we’d see the day when nobody died…” – If Everyone Cared by Nickelback
• “Peace and love to everyone that you meet, don’t you worry it could be so sweet …Be the love generation…” – Love Generation by Bob Sinclar
• “Can you practice what you preach, and would you turn the other cheek, Father, Father, Father help us, send some guidance from above, ‘cause people got me, got me questionin’, Where is the love…” – Where is the Love by Black Eyed Peas
• “Remember love, remember you and me, remember everything we shared, on this planet when we cared...remember unity, remember loving neighbors without expecting favors” – Together by Demi Lovato ft Jason Derulo
• “Cause the whole world is freezing, we need to warm it up with love” – Warm it up (with love)  by Brandy
• “We can’t fall any further, If we can’t feel ordinary love, we cannot reach any higher, if we can’t deal with ordinary love…” – Ordinary Love by U2
• “When you figure out love is all that matters after all, it sure makes everything else seem so small…” – So Small by Carrie Underwood
• “So I’m back to the basics, I figure it’s time I face this, Time to take my own advice, Love alone is worth the fight…” – Love Alone is Worth the Fight by Switchfoot

There’s nothing like some good tunes to get fired up and ready to go!

Can we scale Wehl Love?

It’s time to show Wehl Love and the more of it the better! Can we show, and grow, love for ourselves and others online?

How high can the Wehl Love count go? We have no idea what to expect…! It is, as it is with Wehl, a social experiment.

As of this moment, our Wehl love count is at… 

We hope showing Wehl Love will become a new way of living in this new decade. There is nothing more important than our wehlness – body, mind, spiritual, work, enviro, and social. And, there’s no better way to show love and kindness than to take an interest and care about the health of someone else.

What will the impact of Wehl Love be?

Let’s put the action into L-O-V-E together and find out! We’re certain the impact will be an infinite amount of more wehlness and more good – online and offline!

Wehlness for all and Wehl Love to all.

 

Join us on the Wehl app today and show the Wehl Love with us!