If There Is no Winner, Why Keep Score?

Each day during the Whole Life Challenge, you’ll pursue the 7 Daily Habits — and earn points for completing them. 5 points each for Nutrition, Exercise, Mobility, Hydration, Sleep, Well-Being Practice, and Reflection.

Given this daily scoring, you’d be forgiven for thinking the score itself is the point of the Challenge.

That line of thinking goes something like this:

• Score higher and you’re doing better.
• Do better, and you “win”.
• And winning is the point of playing games.

And while this may be partially true (should you find it motivating), it’s important to know that we don’t keep score because “winning” is important.

Instead, we keep score because:

• Understanding where you are is important.
• Pursuing personal improvement is important.
• And having the accountability of a daily check-in is important.

In other words, the primary role of your daily score is to show you how your current lifestyle stacks up against one in which you’re doing everything you can to live a healthy, balanced, connected lifestyle. Once you have that comparison in hand, it’s easy to see how you might improve — getting the opportunity to improve your hydration, to sleep a bit longer, to experience a few less slips come mealtime. And once you see how you might improve, the very act of recording your score every day helps you do so, keeping you accountable for improving.

Put more succinctly, your score is a tool for improvement (and it’s not for anyone but you).

As such, there are some important things to keep in mind when you’re scoring during the Whole Life Challenge:

• Your daily score isn’t a judgement, it’s a record. It simply shows you where you are (and where you’ve been) in adopting the 7 Daily Habits, helping to motivate you to get where you’re going.
• Because you’re keeping a record, you’ll want to make sure that you score yourself every day of the Challenge — whether your score is low, high, or somewhere in the middle.
• As you examine lower scoring days, do so with self-compassion. Know that they are a reflection of the demands of daily living (and the difficulty of self-improvement) rather than a comment on your character. They also represent opportunity rather than failure, embodying the possibility of future progress.
• In the end, the point of the WLC isn’t the score — it’s the adoption of Habits. While you may find that scoring motivates you to adopt the 7 Habits faster, realize that the point of the Whole Life Challenge is to make healthy, mindful choices a permanent (and automatic) part of your life.
• Take the long view. Adopting a single Daily Habit takes time, never mind 7. You may require all 6 weeks of the Challenge, and then multiple Challenges, before you’ve learned how to fit each of the Daily Habits into your routine.
• If achieving a perfect score makes you miserable, perhaps it isn’t a “perfect score”. As you pursue the Challenge, be content to make small, meaningful changes to improve your life (without causing yourself unnecessary suffering). Treat each new day and each new Challenge as the opportunity to take a step forward, to build on what came before.

Of course, if you have any questions about Scoring, you can email us - support@wholelifechallenge.com - or hit us up on live chat from any Whole Life Challenge web page, even this one. We’d love to hear from you, and we’re always here to help.

- The Whole Life Challenge Team