The Moderate Conundrum?

We recently published a post at Slope Health about the power of moderate exercise and I’ve had a question pestering me- how to do you generate passion and excitement about moderation?

The politico in me had this nagging thought about how hard it is to turn out moderate voters. There are plenty of examples of elections that generated different results from the pre-election polling (The Shy Tory Factor, The Silent Majority, the 2016 US election), but it is not clear that those were the result of passionate moderates.

In fact, I remember an interview with John Avlon about his book Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics where his response to an interviewer’s scepticism was to laugh out loud. Not the best sign.

As I thought more about it, I remembered recent examples of a moderate core mixed with the right message: Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron (dare I say Joe Biden) are moderates who campaigned with a compelling message that inspired people.

Then I thought about brands like IKEA, Zara, Glossier, and Warby Parker and many others that directly challenged the idea that the only path to getting quality was via an extreme (read: expensive) option.

The key to these moderates’ success is that they created a message that inspired. People’s response was “Yes! That is what I’ve been looking for” and it is that passion for the shared vision that drove their success. I mean, it’s not like there weren’t stationary bikes prior to Peloton… they created a vision and a narrative that moved people way more than the stationary bike collecting dust in their Grandmother’s house.

And so that is our charge at Slope Health- evangelise the vision for how the world should be. For us, that means changing the narrative that extreme exercise is the path to being “healthy”. It’s not. The science is very clear about this. The science also tells us that small amounts of light or moderate activity impact our quality of life. It reduces fatigue and stress. It increases energy levels. That directly impacts our everyday lives. That is powerful.

Here’s to the power of moderation!