Make an Assessment

When do we prioritize our time to take a look inward at our own health and wellness? We don’t. At least we don’t until it is to late, and we’re in a corner. Or, when were completely in the throws of sickness. By then, we’re reacting and are usually not in a place to learn from the challenge itself. We’re just trying to get out of it. Our deficit becomes our undoing rather than our catalyst to improve.

I love what my time with Holstee‘s month of wellness taught me back in March 2017. We start with making an assessment. Take the six most common measurements of the total picture of our wellness, rate it on a scale of 1-5, and then launch from there to become more self-aware of your health deficits.

You don’t need a Holstee membership to take the self-assessment. Below are 6 dimensions they do recommend and ones I’ve found across all my studies of wellness:

• Physical Wellness
• Spiritual Wellness
• Environmental Wellness
• Emotional Wellness
• Intelligence Wellness
• Social Wellness

In your ranking of yourself on each one, the lowest number “1” is where you are completely lacking and it’s a weak spot to “5” where you are completely self-aware, feeling really good with your commitment as well as competence in the dimension.

We will dive into each dimension in later posts together, right now, just get a great baseline from where to start the next part of your assessment. Once you’ve ranked yourself out it’s time to go deeper into why you scored yourself the way you did. Be honest with yourself in the next step of your assessment and direct. Lying or fooling yourself will only create a major road block and blind spot later in your life.

I found for the next step of assessing getting into a space that is quiet, turning off notifications, and really eliminating any potential distractions (I put on noise canceling headphones to lock out everything)  was a great way to focus on me. Using our Pomodoro learns from previous posts I set a timer for 25 minutes, stopped when that timer went off, walking away to do something else for 5 minutes. This helped me free up mind. Then I came back, sat down for another 25 minute session. Again, stopping for another 5 minute break away, restarting the 25 again until I had completed the work. Make it a commitment to yourself.

Wellness is not a ‘medical fix’ but way of living – a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit. – Greg Anderson, Author and Founder of the Cancer Recovery Foundation

The deeper dive requires you to take a inward look with questions you cannot answer with a rating scale or multiple choice. Some of those questions might look like this:

What was your worst score and why do you think it’s in that state?

What do you think success might look like for your worst score?

Which one did you rate the best and why do you think it’s in that position? Anything you can learn from what makes this one stronger than the others and apply it to the worst?

I usually pick some journaling application or book to write out my answers. To be transparent as we work through this together my worst was in spiritual wellness and my strongest was in physical wellness.

With spiritual it’s in the state it’s in because I don’t prioritize it as well as I do the others in my daily work. I need to spend more time in that space of spiritual work as I do with physical wellness I give more spaces of my time to.

With physical I’ve made it a huge priority with my marathon training planned out for 90 days every week, eating differently, and just plain giving it a lot of purpose and intentionality. Much more so than any other dimension. If I can use this same best practice in my spiritual work, it would change to be a equal strength versus a deficit.

Now that we have the perspective we need, next post we will dig into building some plans around our learns. We will create purpose that will build our habits. This will give us rich learning and self reflection touch points that will rebuild our habits to not be such polar opposites.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to leave in the comments your outcomes. I’d love to use your personal learns in my next post which should go live Sunday this weekend.

Have a great weekend!

Shawn