Sherritta

Looking Forward: Wellness Perspective

August 8, 2020

Everyone’s talking about experiences of 2020, though the year is not over. For many, it has been humbling, horrible, and horrific. For others, it has been a time of reflection, reminiscing, and recklessness. Furthermore, many have also experienced 2020 as a year of growing, difference-making, leveling up, and planning. The key to the latter experiences are that each one concerns a constant process of doing something.

Hopefully, and with respect to the constant process of doing something, we are learning to better ourselves and others in multiple areas of life. Considering the multiple areas of life may be practiced via a wellness perspective.

A wellness perspective allows for compartmentalizing and interconnecting life areas.  It is used as a framework to reflect on personal functioning in each area of life and to illustrate how the functioning can be bi-directional. Bi-directional here means that the functioning in one life area will impact the other and that same life area can also reflect that impact. The impact may be healthy or hindering, positive or negative, good or bad.  Essentially, the decision on how to describe the impact is personal. The decision being personal is a composite of a person’s identities (e.g. whole self or the concept of holism) and an interpretation that is developed through those identities.

Wellness life areas may be considered as: wellness-circle

  • Spiritual
  • Physical
  • Intellectual
  • Financial
  • Occupational
  • Emotional
  • Environmental
  • Social

 

 

Each of the above life areas is deserving of attention in order to improve it. The improvement is based on the notion that functioning in each life area is interconnected, impacting one another in some way form or fashion.

So what?

  1. Break the life areas down into descriptions of which is the most important right now
  2. Self-evaluate how you are doing in each area
  3. Think about how one life area impacts the other
  4. Develop a plan to improve how you’re doing in each area (possibly starting with the one that you think needs to most improvement)
  5. Activate the plan for one life area at a time on a daily basis
  6. Account for daily progress (e.g.,  what was done to improve functioning)
  7. Re-evaluate how well you are after all life area plans have been activated and executed

Thank you for reading!

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