Balancing Wellbeing and Priorities
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Here’s a gem shared by Michael J Boorman, “3 Tips To Improve Your Wellbeing”.
It’s no secret that we’re in a mental ill-being epidemic and the topic of wellbeing hasn’t been more critical today than in any other time in history.
Everyone keeps talking about it, so what is wellbeing?
It’s such a personalized term that it represents different things for different people, but by and large, it refers to a state of overall health, happiness, and contentment.
So, how can we design our lives with the intention of ‘injecting’ wellbeing into our lives as a priority and not an afterthought?
1. Simple Health Routines
Humans are pro at complicating anything and everything. Without getting all entangled with the perfect diet, morning routines and exercise regimens, begin by understanding the context of your current reality.
Consuming more YouTube videos of billionaires and their lifestyles isn’t going to help you in any way. You’ve already tried that, haven’t you?
When it comes to wellbeing, the more you view it through the lens of incremental, the better off you’ll be. Do things incrementally better than where you are today.
Think of progress as not a number to be achieved but, to do better than yesterday.
If you’re looking to lose weight, alter one meal and make slightly healthier choices. Avoid that dessert for a change and opt for low sugar fruit like blueberry.
If you currently aren’t active much, start by introducing some walking into your day.
It could be a quick morning walk for 10 minutes before heading out to work, a 5-minute walk after your meals and making it a point to stretch a few times through the working day.
The less friction you have in executing the new behaviours, the easier it will be to create momentum toward building sustainable habits.
Remember, everything above zero compounds. Find ways to take small action each day and keep making progress.
2. Mindset for Wellbeing
What’s the common denominator in all our struggles?
You guessed it right, us.
We are the common denominator when it comes to all our life’s battles.
What then must we solve to create more well-being in our lives?
Ourselves.
By the time we’re about 8 years of age, 80% of the behaviours that we exhibit throughout our lives are programmed within us through the influences of parents, teachers, friends, community, and society.
We operate on autopilot for the majority of our lives. And undoing that early neural wiring takes effort.
The influences may have been well-intentioned, but if we aren’t too careful in examining ourselves closely, we may continue to act with the blinders on.
Recognizing that our beliefs needn’t be hard-wired for life is the starting point.
We spend most of our life in our head and the first step to laying the foundation of a ‘wellbeing’ mindset is addressing the blind spots that hinder a happy life.
We think adopting a mindset for wellbeing requires answering the hard questions of life, when in fact it’s the simple everyday orientation that creates sustained happiness.
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3. Wellbeing is a journey. Don’t set hard targets.
When it comes to wellbeing, we’re programmed to set goals in a finite amount of time.
“I need to read x books each month.”
“I need to lose x kgs till summer.”
It’s usually a period of a few months that people often target, but most fail miserably at it.
Why?
Because you can’t force behaviour change to fit your timeline expectation.
Change takes time.
Creating space and time to fit new habits into the existing routine is a process.
You don’t just wake up one morning and revamp your entire day, week, or month. Forcing changes may work for a few days or perhaps even for a couple of weeks.
But, long-term over haul in behaviours is a slow process. Evolution and adaptations require time and consistent commitment.
To fight the autopilot habits, you need to create small, sustained shifts over time. This is why our timelines fall flat in front of how humans are meant to evolve.
Wellbeing requires a lifelong approach.
Think about the changes you wish to make and approach the changes as a journey you’re going to set out on.
Keep learning about yourself along the way and tweak the way you think about these changes.
Having unreasonable expectations of the outcomes could be deeply disappointing and disincentivize actions towards those changes.
The old adage is timeless and holds true in the larger context: “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Another gem from Monte Pedersen about “Competing Priorities”.
In every organization, there are always two types of activities going on and they compete with each other.
The first is improvement activities.
They focus on how we become better as an organization. How do we become more productive, improve teamwork, increase sales, service more clients, increase revenue, improve customer service, expand into new markets, and make our organization more efficient.
These are the elements for how we get better than we are today.
When we are engaged in planning and strategy-related processes we are 100% focused on our improvement activities.
However, a problem occurs when we encounter the second activity.
Once the strategic thinking and projected planning are done, everyone mentally checks out and returns to their current work responsibilities and activities. These are the tasks we need to do to serve our customers, make our products, get people paid and so on. This is about - how we do things now. How do we keep the doors open and the lights on?
These two competing activities are not accounted for in most strategic plans and because of the urgency of the day-to-day needs, by default they take the spotlight and become the priority, leaving your improvement activities with nowhere to go.
You must take care of both activities if you are to succeed in executing your strategic objectives. Lose focus on the future and your future goes away with it.
When the daily challenges and accompanying fires become your purpose. You have no purpose….other than to survive as an organization.
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That’s a wrap on this week.
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