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Today at a glance:
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 19 seconds
Today’s WISER Newsletter is wisdom from one of you!
I love it when members of this community have a principle of wisdom to share to help us all get wiser, so when Harsh Mota reached out to broadcast a message to improve your wellbeing, I knew I wanted to share it.
And the timing is perfect, because I’ve just finished creating a FREE 7-day resource to reflect on your wellbeing.
You can download that later in the newsletter, but first, let’s hear from Harsh!
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.
Here’s a sample of what I think wellbeing feels like:
Doing what you enjoy without the physical hindrances.
Doing meaningful and challenging work that brings satisfaction.
Strong relationships with family, friends, and co-workers. Feeling of having psychological safety with your support system.
Feeling like you can tackle the challenges ahead of you comfortably without being totally overwhelmed.
Time and space to devote to hobbies you enjoy and feeding your soul in the process i.e. activities that make you lose track space and time.
Having mental clarity and knowing deeply where you are stand currently and where you are heading.
Consistent moments of calm, peace, and joy.
Sounds too good to be true, right?
Well, it takes intention, awareness, and a bias towards action to create ‘wellbeing’ into your life.
So, how can we design our life with the intention of ‘injecting’ wellbeing into our lives as a priority and not an afterthought?
🔄 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 towards building sustainable habits.
Remember, everything above zero compounds. Find ways to take small action each day and keep making progress.
🧠 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 for to create more wellbeing into our lives?
Ourselves.
By the time we’re about 8 years of age, 80% of the behaviours that we exhibit throughout our lives is programmed within us through the influences of parents, teachers, friends, community, and society.
We operate on autopilot for 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.
The questions to reflect on:
📝 Do I orient on the positive or the negative in most situations? Is the glass half full or half empty?
📝 Do I complain a lot and blame others for the situation I’m in, persistently
📝Am I serious all the time or have I still preserved the child-like curiosity and playfulness?
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.
🧭 Wellbeing is a journey. Don’t set hard targets.
When it comes to wellbeing, we’re programmed to set goals in a finite about 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. Which 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 on 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.”
📝 Journal Prompts
• What simple health routines benefit my wellbeing?
• Does my mindset support my wellbeing?
• Could I benefit from giving myself grace on my wellbeing journey?
Consider journaling through the above questions yourself.
A huge thanks to Harsh for sharing this message with us!
If you’d like to learn more about him, connect with him on LinkedIn here.
He’s just started sharing visuals too, which you can find here.
And if you have a wise principle that you’d like to share, get in touch with me here!
🌱 Download This Resource!
If you’re keen to experience better wellbeing, you’ll love this FREE download that I’ve produced.
I call it the One Week of Wise Wellbeing.
It features 7 prompts to encourage you to reflect on how you deal with stress, practice gratitude, consider your self-image and much more.
You can download it here:
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😊 Thank You!
Thanks for checking out this issue of the WISER Newsletter. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it!
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Catch you in the next issue!
Thanks,
Michael
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