Little Words of Encouragement

I’m a runner, and I love to track the data about my training. My wife might tell you that I’m slightly obsessed about “my data”.

It should thus come as no surprise that I backed Vi, a personal AI trainer, on Kickstarter last year (even when I have a strict rule of not backing hardware projects on Kickstarter because no one ever ships on schedule).

The Vi intrigued me because I wanted to see how it could use my data to personalise some recommendations to improve my training. I also made that decision knowing that “machine learning” or AI isn’t an obvious solution because regardless of the amount of data anyone has, a human still needs to point the machine in a direction to the discover insights.

Before the Vi, I’d also never used any other “smart trainer”. Last year when I was training for my first marathon (and where I ran almost 2000km in the calendar year), I had a real-life human coach that helped me tweak my training.

When the Vi finally arrived a couple of weeks ago though, I immediately set out for my first run to discover its AI awesomeness.

I learnt something completely different though.

It is clear that the Vi’s AI capabilities are not yet significant in changing my running or training, yet I’ve thoroughly enjoyed running with Vi in my ear. There has been one reason for that: little words of encouragement.

On the first usage, Vi asks you to say your name. “Adii” isn’t the easiest name to pronounce, so Vi instead asked me to pick a generic word from a list as a nickname. I picked “Rebel”.

Now — while running with Vi — she often says things like “Great work, Rebel!” or “You are into your hustle now, Rebel. Keep it up!”. These prompts are, without a doubt, based on my actual running, but they’re still not necessarily intelligent. It feels great hearing these.

Similarly, Vi celebrates milestones with me. Whenever I reach a new personal best, Vi would say “Awesome work, Rebel. You have just run your fastest 5km”. The truth though has been that none of my runs with Vi has been personal records; they have just been records running with Vi (since Vi doesn’t consider any historical, pre-Vi runs). Regardless of that though, it was still really encouraging to hear this, and my experience on my run was great.

This got me thinking about how big a difference it makes to all of us when we hear little words of encouragement from others. Or when you get a kind word in a challenging situation. It has the ability to lift us up and change our experience in that situation.

This means that the inverse is true as well: How can we help or support others with little words of encouragement, kindness, gratitude or empathy? If we focused on creating this positivity within and around our lives, how much of a ripple effect can it have? This applies to all of the people around us: family, friends, team members or anyone that you interact with regularly.

My mom always told me “If you don’t have something nice to say, rather be quiet”. I’m not sure I agree with this because sometimes we have to have hard conversations.

But for all other conversations and interactions, words of encouragement, kindness, gratitude or empathy is so much better.

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