Wellness and Wellbeing For the People.
Too many times do I see the word “wellness” with a countryside background and people getting into ice baths or sitting in meditation.
And sure, that can totally be wellness.
For some people.
I think the way our society has talked about living a life full of wellbeing has utterly ruined it for the vast majority of the world.
We’ve made wellness into a dreamy space where we spend half the day in a spa and the other half sitting on a meditation pillow while the mist rolls through the mountains behind us in Nepal.
Or, it looks like a 4 AM start in the gym so that we can be back to eat breakfast with far too much protein and wash it down with the newest health and wellness drink mix you heard about on your podcast last week.
Social media has forced us to watch as these people on the far end of the spectrum tell us how to live our lives if we want to be well.
The catch is that we far too often compare ourselves to them and write them down as the baseline for wellness and wellbeing.
And I for one think that it’s gone too far.
For me, the goal of writing this newsletter and my coaching is simply to make wellbeing more realistic for everyone. I prefer to meet people where they’re at and build a life that feels healthy to them, not to that one buff dude with 900K followers on Instagram.
But what does that even mean? If wellness isn’t about shaving my head and becoming a monk but also making it to the gym and yoga class before my high-paying job, then what is it?
What real, everyday wellbeing looks like.
The concept of wellbeing is essentially “feeling good and functioning well”.
With that broad of a definition, it’s hard to grasp what it can actually look like for you, rather than grabbing onto the ideas that other people put out there.
I suggest a four-step framework to getting a good grasp on what wellbeing can look like for you. So forget about what Instagram told you, and turn inwards for just a minute.
1. Define what being and doing you means
To know what wellbeing means for you, you need to know who you are.
Simple and easy first step, right?
Identity work is tricky, and it’s a hell of a long process as well. But the good news is, we all know ourselves pretty well so we’re the best people to be doing this job.
If you want to know how to be well, you need to understand what your wants and needs are. If you can highlight the things that you want from life, the journey to wellbeing has a direction to travel, rather than shooting blindly in the dark.
One of the best ways to do this is to identify your values. What do you care about in life? What guides the decisions you make?
Values-Driven Wellbeing
Work with a list of values (Google holds a treasure chest of them) and try to narrow down your top ten. From there, try to choose 3-5 that are the most important to you.
Put each one of those values in its own area on a piece of paper and start a bit of a mindmap.
From each value, brainstorm and jot down the ways you live out these values in your life.
For example.
If your values list looks like this:
Fun
Community
Family
Grit
Ask yourself things like:
How do I have fun?
Where does my sense of community come from?
What do I like doing with my family?
What do I do to reinforce my strength of character (grit)?
Write everything down. Even if you think something might bring you closer to a value of yours, you’ve never tried it, but it sounds fun.
This gives a great idea of the activities and areas of your life that you need to focus on in order to live a values-driven and balanced life (one of the keys to getting to wellness or wellbeing of any kind).
2. Design a life full of balance
A balanced life is a happy life.
Too often, we get caught up in one extreme or another and become convinced that all we need to do is pour our heart and soul into that single thing.
Again. Balance.
Balance is the only thing you should be going to the extreme with.
Us humans are stupidly complex and have so many needs that it’s impossible to meet them all with one quick-fix answer. It’s kind of like thinking that you can just eat salads for the rest of your life because they’re “healthy” and you’ll become your own blue zone.
If you just eat salad—or say you immerse yourself in running—you immediately disregard so many other key factors of life.
Wellness is multi-dimensional and I find the Eight Dimensions of Wellness model to be insanely helpful to try and achieve a level of understanding and practical action toward balance, and thus, toward happiness.
The idea in this model is that you have eight different realms of wellness and wellbeing to care for:
Physical
Emotional
Spiritual
Financial
Environmental
Social
Intellectual
Occupational
I’m not going to go through them all here—I’ve already done that over here—but I do want to look at the importance of balance.
When you think about balance, it’s about adding weight to one side or the other in order to bring the other side back to center. With eight different sides, we’re constantly adding to different areas to play around with how they impact the others.
This is where a mainstream model of “immerse yourself in this” can really come up short and do more harm than good.
Focusing on going to the gym every single day is great, so long as you’re keeping in touch with everything else. But if that’s your only action to maintain wellness, you’ll see how the physical wellness can start to pull from the areas you’re making sacrifices in, just so you can be at the gym.
Balance, y’all.
It’s the key to a good life and it’s what some of the world is struggling with the most right now.
3. Shut out the noise
Just ignoring everyone else and listening to yourself can be the hardest part.
Especially as I sit here essentially telling you what to do with your life.
But what I want to tell you most is to forget about chumps like me and to listen to yourself. Being well looks and feels different for each of us and not everyone can relate to what works for you.
I don’t know what you need. But you do.
All I do is offer you a space in which you can work through your own thoughts with a bit of guidance.
What I love so much about coaching is that it’s entirely focused on you. It’s nothing about me, my opinion, or my story. There’s no advice. There’s only you, your thoughts, your processes, and your own insights into what needs to be done.
It’s fun. It’s transformational. I’m here if you want to find out what it’s like to make big changes.
4. Put it into practice
Once you’ve identified the parts of your life that bring you closer to your values, you can take a serious look at what you’re doing well and where you may be coming up short.
Be easy on yourself.
And then be good to yourself.
Be good by starting to make a plan. Start to identify things you can add to your life that can bring you closer to your values and bring more balance in all dimensions of wellbeing.
This is where you start making actionable steps forward. It might not even feel like a lot, and that’s even better.
Influencers make it sound like you need to bench press your own weight, travel to Thailand, or meditate for 40 hours a day to find wellbeing.
But that’s just not true.
Your own wellbeing can start with small steps. Even reflection is a step you can take without even getting up from where you’re sitting right now.
Wellness and wellbeing don’t actually like big romantic gestures. They prefer slow progress with small changes to get to bigger ones. Big changes can throw balance into turmoil. Slow changes allow for adjustment, flexibility, and constant assessment.
Wellness and wellbeing are for you
This is for you and you alone.
Don’t let it be about the person trying to sell you a 5-digit retreat that claims to solve it all.
Those are nice and all, but if you really want to take steps towards wellness, start small and start with yourself.
I propose this framework as a way for people to start doing things independently. Of course, I want clients to coach. But I more so want people to recognize that they are capable of making great things happen all on their own.
