InPowr Blog

UncategorizedArchive for the ‘’ Category

December 21st, 2007

Sympatico gets inpowrd!

Thanks to a recent agreement, inpowr will now be featured in the lifestyle/well-being section of the French-language sympatico.msn.ca site. It’s a major milestone and an excellent opportunity to grow the inpowr community with new members who are interested in well-being and personal development. For sympatico.msn.ca, it’s a great chance to attract new visitors to what is rapidly becoming one of Canada’s most popular portals.

Visitors to sympatico.msn.ca will be directed to inpowr via a banner campaign that focuses on helping people set and achieve their New Year’s Resolutions. We all know that inpowr was developed to do more than just help people achieve their goals (we’re more about helping people increase their well-being) but New Year’s is certainly a great time to start!

With the influx of new members from sympatico.msn.ca and all the great feedback we’re getting from current members, we’ll soon be adding two of the site’s most important sections: community and supporters. In a few short months, the inpowr experience should be complete and everyone’s patience will at last be rewarded.

2008 promises to be a great year for inpowr
and we certainly hope it’s a wonderful year for you too!

The inpowr team

December 14th, 2007

What do you wish for?

“Beware of what you wish for; you might just receive it.” So goes the old saying. The wisdom is that we don’t always wish for the things that are best for us. We get caught up in material desires, or pride, or performance. There’s a lot of evidence to support that idea. Countless studies have shown how lottery winners are no happier two years after their win than they were before their windfall. There’s also a lot of evidence that suggests we’re not all that sad when we don’t get what we want. Why? The answer to that question is the answer to this one: What makes us truly happy?

Check out psychologist Dan Gilbert on TED for a super interesting look at how we construct happiness. Gilbert suggests that the “synthetic” happiness we create for ourselves is every bit as real and enduring as genuine happiness. I’ll let you decide how you feel about his ideas for yourself. The point I’m trying to make is that we don’t always know if we’re happy, or why we’re happy or conversely, why we’re not so happy. And because of that, we’re often at a loss when we want to make ourselves happier.

inpowr was developed to help people enjoy greater well-being by understanding the relationship between their actions and their well-being. The process is simple. You measure your well-being, work on specific goals, measure your well-being again and then reflect on everything that happened while you were going through the process. That simple act of reflecting on the relationship between your actions and your well-being can be a powerful motivator and a great place to start if you’re trying to figure out what makes you happy.

Positive Psychologist, Dr. Martin Seligman has been studying happiness and well-being for decades. His Authentic Happiness website at the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center has a wealth of resources and measurement tools related to well-being and happiness. Take a peek. It’s an excellent site.

So why all this talk about what makes us happy? Because this year, when the jolly bearded guy asks me what I want for Christmas, I’d really like to come up with something better than power tools.

Best wishes to you.

November 9th, 2007

Beta is making it betta!

Thanks to your comments and suggestions, we’ve made a few changes in the past few weeks.

Home page:
As you’ve probably noticed, when you log in now, you go straight to the Profile section, which is now kind of like a dashboard.

In addition to the features that were already available in Profile, like adding text and images to show and tell the world who you are, the new version now gives you quick access to the entire inpowr site. Without having to navigate to other sections, you can create your game plan and set your goals.
From there, you can work on your goals, track your actions and measure your progress.

Actions:
We made a little change here, too. Now, when you get your email reminder to track your daily actions,
you’re directed straight to the Action page. Seems obvious, but we needed feedback from users like you to remind us.

From Progress back to Goals: keeping the process alive.
Here’s a frustration that many members commented on: at the end of the 21-day period, you go back and rate your well-being again. Then you put a check mark beside the changes that you feel were a direct result of your actions and you hit “save.” And the process ends there. It’s not supposed to. When you re-rate your well-being, you’re supposed to go back to the Goals section to see what else you can work on.

We’ll be correcting that problem shortly. In the near future, when you get to the end of the 21-day period and make conclusions about your progress, you’ll be asked whether you want to keep working on the same goal or set new goals.

Web platforms are like people: they’re always in beta.
Thanks for your comments and suggestions. And please: keep them coming.

The inpowr team.

November 1st, 2007

We want to hear from you!

You know when you’re on hold and you hear “Your call is important to us, please stay on line.” You think to yourself: “Yeah, right. If my call was important, they’d take it right away.” Or when you see a line like “Please share your thoughts/comments,” you think, “Yeah, whatever… everyone says that.” Well, for the record: WE REALLY MEAN IT!

We really want–no, scratch that–we really need to hear from you. The only way we can make inpowr as good as it can be is to get real feedback from members like you. So please, tell us about your experiences. Not just the functional stuff, like bugs or spelling mistakes. But the big stuff: we need to know what you first expected from inpowr and where the experience fell short. We need to know how you feel while you’re using inpowr: excited, motivated, discouraged, frustrated, etc. Do you feel as though inpowr is helping you in any way, and if so, how? What’s missing from the site? How can we improve?

In short, we need to hear from you! We’ll be making a few changes to the site over the next few weeks to make it easier for you to communicate with us, but until then, please… Don’t be a stranger!

e you soon…

Kerry