Storytelling for Behavior Change in physical activity

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Filipe
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Morouço, Pedro
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/8676

When two distinguished professors get together to tell us one hundred stories with the purpose of helping us to be happier, we should pay attention. In addition to the scientific demonstration that storytelling enhances behavior change, the authors make this change occur through physical activity, which responds more effectively to the challenges that the modern world poses to us. Starting from the theoretical/scientific knowledge of the benefits of physical activity for our happiness and choosing storytelling as a privileged mechanism to instill this behavioral change, Filipe Rodrigues and Pedro Morouço manage to take us on a journey down the memory lane, in which we come across stories we heard as children, transporting us to a time when it was so much easier to be physically active. At the end of the journey through the one hundred stories told in this book, we arrive at a destination called happiness. The pedagogical way in which each story is presented and the moral complement to it, lead us to a world of fables and allegories, easily understood by everyone and which compels us to have a more ethically responsible and physically active attitude. By pointing happiness as a destiny, Rodrigues and Morouço follow in the noble footsteps, for example, of America´s founding fathers when, in the Declaration of Independence, they state that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” When I accepted the honorable invitation to write these brief lines that serve as a preface to the book “Storytelling for Behavior Change in physical activity”, I thought, from what I knew about the quality of the authors, that I would have the privilege of reading a magnificent book before other people. Now, with the book already read, I just want to share it and to advise everyone to read it, so that they can have the same privilege that I had. The privilege was not having read it before the others. The privilege, now in range of everybody, is only to read the book. Believing that happiness is a feeling that grows as it is shared, I hope that many can read this book so that we can all share the happiness that a lifestyle that combines a more active physical behavior and a more responsible moral attitude brings us. To all who have read this preface to the end, I ask you to do yourselves a favor: read and share this book and, therefore, just be happy!