Envisioning Wellbeing for Yourself

Have you ever thought about what wellbeing or wellness means to you? If you could envision yourself at your personal best and experience your life in a way that feels really good, what would that include or what would that look like?

I recently was asked this question, and it did make me stop and think. It’s funny because I focus on living and feeling my personal best to walk my talk in my business, but this takes it a step further. I realized it was more than about my health, fitness and self care. It is also about what I want to experience from life. I want to be delighted in every moment. For me this means feeling my personal best, being fully present in the moment, receiving the best life has to offer with gratitude, giving my gifts to others in the world, and cherishing the time I have with friends, families, colleagues and my pets. These things are what I envision my wellbeing to be. What about you?

Creating a vision of what you want in your life becomes something to aim for. It isn’t wishful thinking beyond what you can have. You can decide which part of this picture is important enough to work towards now. Start by setting three and six months goals to reach milestones that will eventually get you there. You can even get started by setting specific weekly goals to reach these interim targets. Creating a vision of what you want in your life, milestone goals and weekly goals is the same process used by wellness, life, dream and career coaches to assist clients in moving towards a better life. You can do this for yourself.

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Get Pumped Back Up to Reach Your Goals

New Year’s is a time that rekindles the excitement of a fresh start. It offers a chance for a clean slate, new beginnings and the belief that a better year lies ahead. With it comes a burst of motivation to make changes in your lifestyle, which is the much needed catalyst for taking action and following through on your goals.

Now, four weeks later, that feeling of enthusiasm has probably gone flat. The holidays are a distant memory and the day-to-day realities have pushed most (if not all) of your goals under the rug. If you are like most, this experience is repeated every January until you give up on the idea of resolutions altogether, believing they don’t work and that maybe it doesn’t really matter if you make any changes after all. Am I close?

If so, you’ve missed an opportunity to take advantage of your desire to change and make use of that short lived catalyst to get you into action. Those moments don’t come around all that often, so they do matter. It could be months, another year or even many years before you feel inspired to make that major change again. Statistically most people give up on their resolve to meet their goals within two weeks, and this is borne out by gym use every January – peaking the first week and trailing back off by the end of the month.

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Don't Try to Rely on Willpower

Willpower is mind over matter, self-discipline and a resolution to control yourself. You probably know by now that willpower doesn’t really help you gain control over your eating or unhealthy lifestyle habits.

But are you blaming yourself for a lack of willpower instead of recognizing that willpower isn’t the right answer in the first place? Are you looking at someone else and judging them for their lack of willpower? People do it all the time, and it doesn’t help anyone. In fact it has the opposite effect. The more you, or someone else, exerts their will to force you to be better, the more you will resent it and ultimately resist it and do the opposite of what was intended. I’ll bet you can think of numerous occasions where this was true.

At a time when there is increasing pressure from employers, doctors and others to force people to lose weight and get healthy, there is an underlying belief that the problem with people who aren’t in shape is simply a lack of willpower. While anyone can will themselves to comply for a period of time, once they stop they will revert back to their old ways or even take on worse habits for an equal or longer period of time.

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Addressing the Struggle for Compliance

This week I attended a symposium hosted by the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners Healthcare in Massachusetts. Their focus is on the use of technology to support leading initiatives in telehealth, disease and lifestyle management, and personalized medical care.

What I heard was a frustration by the slow pace at which change is occuring in the healthcare system to address chronic disease, consumer-driven care and poor compliance by patients in disease management despite the advances in technology. Compliance was mentioned repeatedly as a significant problem, but from what I heard it is widely misunderstood by the healthcare community at large.

Compliance is not the right focus. A focus on compliance generates further resistance. A non-judgmental understanding of the issue is what is needed before compliance can be addressed and this needs to be understood not only by healthcare practitioners but also by the consumers of healthcare (the patients). Instead of a carrot and stick approach, people respond far better to baby carrots, apples and nudges when it comes to long term success of lifestyle changes.

Compliance has more practicality to short term results-oriented programs, and these have merit under the right circumstances but fail to demonstrate results for long term sustainability and more often lead to derailment, despondancy and complacency.

Read The Healthy Living Challenge: The Cause of Complacency to understand the real struggle with compliance, the complacency cycle that keeps people stuck and what will help them break free of their unhealthy patterns.