At Paceline, we’re all about Unified Wellness: connecting health and finance. “We’ve turned your most valuable asset—your own health—into actual currency,” says Paceline founder and CEO Joel Lieginger.
During a recent event in Los Angeles, Paceline hosted a panel discussion around Unified Wellness featuring Lieginger, Megan Roup, founder of The Sculpt Society, and Lauryn Nwankpa, the managing director of Brand Citizens, a social impact strategy consultancy. Here, some of the most compelling takeaways:
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
On Unified Wellness…
Joel Lieginger: If you can have your health, you can be more productive, you can be happier, and you can have a longer, healthier career. We can bring financial health into that to make sure people are paying attention to their finances much more regularly. Everyone has a credit card that they probably never look at. But we all interact with our health and wellness every day. And if you can put those two things together in a very native way (like in the Pacline app), it suddenly makes sense to look at the material financial rewards you’re earning by living a healthy lifestyle.
On the importance of daily, consistent movement…
Megan Roup: I’m really big into committing to less so that you can show up for more when it comes to fitness. It doesn’t need to be an hour-long workout to make it count. I would so much rather my clients get in a 10-minute workout every day than one long workout a week because it’s building that habit.
And that’s also why I love what Paceline is doing with a weekly goal of 150 minutes of elevated heart rate activity. You break that down, that’s 21 minutes a day. That could be a walk outside, a quickie on your go-to fitness app, whatever that looks like for you. But it’s building that habit that is really important.
On investing in yourself…
Lauryn Nwankpa: I ran track in college and that was my identity for all of my childhood and in early adulthood. These were team sports that had accountability, kind of a forcing function to get up early and move your body multiple times a day and to eat well.
Trying to tap back into that structure [post-college] was really hard for me, honestly. And I had to reframe it from being like, “Oh well gosh, I have to get up in the morning and go to the gym,” to “You know what? You get to invest in yourself in this way. You have the privilege and the access and the ability to invest in yourself in this way.” And I really changed my mindset to think about it as being a way to honor myself.
On tying financial incentives to movement…
JL: What Paceline exists to do is give you an added reason to want to move more regularly. I think that the most obvious expression of that right now is in 3 and 5% cash back1 through the Paceline Card, which is the richest rewards credit card offer out there, and it’s driven by your physical activity.
MR: If we can tie financial incentives, whether that’s the rewards or cash back, [to movement] that is going to be so powerful. And I’m really excited to see how that incentivizes so many more people to move their bodies daily.
