Greetings, Purposeful Hearts! Welcome back, and I hope your week of watching your values at work was productive! As a recap, we began this vision-crafting process by summarizing your personal passions, and we dove into your top five guiding values last week. Today, we’re taking a slight turn and looking at your goals with respect to the Six Dimensions of Wellness, as outlined by the National Wellness Institute. I’ll walk you through each dimension briefly, but it’s your task to immerse yourself into each dimension and flesh out what it means for you and your life. Ready?
The first wellness dimension is your Emotional Wellness. This category refers to your ability to detect, understand, and regulate your feelings. If you’re familiar with the research on emotional intelligence (Daniel Goleman’s work is among my favorite), then you likely understand what is meant by emotional wellness. Do you engage in self-reflection? Do you have strategies in place to help you deal with stress? Do you try to identify and empathize with others’ emotions? These are likely indicators of your emotional wellness.
The second dimension is your Career/Occupational Wellness. Are you in a job that you love? Does your work feel like an extension and expression of who you are at the core? Do you consistently find value and meaning in your work? I hope so. When we can’t answer these questions affirmatively, our sense of wellbeing tends to decline. It’s important for a purposeful life that your work and values align consistently.
If you make exercise part of your daily routine, you’ve already embraced the third wellness dimension, Physical Wellness. Regardless of your current health and exercise habits, we all have deep-level longings related to how we want to feel and function on a daily basis. These longings are important, but they only represent one-sixth of the picture. Balance is the goal, and you may need to adjust your personal habits to match this allocation of your time.
Fourth, Social Wellness refers to your relationship with the people and communities around you. Are you actively engaged? Do you expend effort to nurture, develop, and even seek out these relationships? Are you motivated to work through conflict with grace and diplomacy? From a leadership perspective, your social wellness activities set an example for those around you, and your goals should embrace this calling to care.
Our next wellness dimension is Intellectual Wellness. This category involves engaging your mind in problem solving, continuous learning, and creative thinking activities. It means exposing your brain to new ideas and new thought patterns. It also means using your ever-increasing knowledge to bless the world around you.
Finally, Spiritual Wellness looks at your faith life, your worldview, and your understanding of the meaning and purpose behind why you’re here on this earth. Talk about a deep measure of personal wellness!
As we pull these Six Dimensions of Wellness together, here’s your task for this week: write one goal for each of the six dimensions. What would you like to say about your progress in each dimension at the end of this year? Keep track of your work, and I’ll see you next week! Go get ‘em today!
Comments