Well-being
Most of us would agree that ‘well-being’ is doing the things that are good for us, regardless of our personal perspectives, cultural beliefs and our physical and mental condition.
The best way to practice well-being is by taking care of our ‘whole selves’. That is, the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and relational.
Well-being is currently a hot topic, as it should be. Many of us have opinion about it, while others avoid or actively hide from the subject of well-being. But whatever your position, there is no doubt that well-being is profoundly influenced by everything that goes on around us.
So what makes up wellness.
The Mental Heal Foundation looks at wellness from five perspectives. They are:
Being connected - talking and listening
Giving - time, words, presence
Being aware - taking notice (mindfulness)
Keeping learning - embracing new experiences
Being active - doing what you can.
When I look at these perspectives, they give me plenty to think about.
We tend to think of well-being as activities that we add to our lives, e.g. if we learn to meditate, it will result in an obvious external and noticeable change.
My approach is different. The answer is to start the process, by taking away, and thinking about wellness at a deeper personal level. After many years of working with people, it’s easy for me to recognise and understand that first impulse to add external practices to attain fulfilment and happiness. But it’s never sustainable and in fact when we do this, we ignore our deeply entrenched internal practices and behaviours.
What do I think this means? Well, if we’re serious about realising our goal of achieving genuine wellness, we need to ‘seek’ out the practices and behaviours that actively stop us from becoming happy and fulfilled.
We don’t always understand the considerable impact of internal decisions on our everyday well-being. We need to lead with the internal decisions which will add to our wellness. It’s what happens internally that will have the most significant impact.
Genius You is designed to support you to find that internal pathway to wellness. We start by helping you to understand the influence of your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Then with this understanding, we can help you reset your ‘operating system’ and use it positively to change external behaviours.
I reached a point of clarity a few years ago. I could see the cause and effect of my behaviour and how this impacted how I felt. At this point, I knew that to be truly happy and healthy, I had to practice three things:
Goodness, to myself first and then to others
Kindness, that’s reciprocated
Honesty, by being true to myself first so that I could be true to others.
A fully functional operating system gives us the potential to become a ‘perfect machine’ and reach our ultimate individual level of well-being.
As they say, great things take time. Change on this scale doesn’t take place overnight. It requires guidance, support and an effective process, which allows us to turn things around and lead incredible lives.