Plan to Flourish

Over the past few weeks, I have discussed the concepts related to promoting physical, spiritual, and psychological health. These three areas are all required if one wishes to flourish. So now I will share with you where I stand in each of these areas, and what I plan to do to improve them. I do this, in part, with the hope that my plan may give you incentive to look at your own life and look for ways you can improve your wellness. Hopefully my plan of action can give you ideas that you can implement in your own plans.

So lets start by looking at my physical wellness. I need to start by assessing it and finding out where I stand on a scale of 1-10; one being lowest, 10 being highest. But of course we have to look at a couple of areas and average the scores out because physical wellness includes quite a bit of things. I would rate my fitness at an 8. I am at a healthy body fat percentage and am very active. My lifestyle habits I would put at a 5 and quickly increasing. This is because my diet is rather poor (not compared to most people but compared to what it should be for me), and I do not get enough sleep at night. Then there comes my health, as in illness or lack there of. This I would rate a 9 as I rarely get sick and am able to eliminate illness quickly when it does pop up. So if we average those 3 numbers together we have roughly 7.5 which would be above average.

Next we must set a goal. My goal is to drop from 17 to 12% body fat in the next 6 months. How am I going to accomplish this? I need to take my nutrition and sleep seriously. No matter how active I am, I cannot eat pizza 3 days a week. I cannot drink more than once per week. I cannot eat sugar more than one day a week (to reset my metabolism). I need to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night. 5 hours and a 2 hour nap later that day does not cut it. Part of taking this seriously is making sure that there is no room for error. I can not let one cheat day turn into two. I cant let going out to dinner with my friends turn into a binge meal. The most important part is that I need to keep this up for more than a month. It needs to be a long term commitment to myself if I really want results.


So after physical, I will look at psychological wellness. This area may be much more difficult to evaluate by yourself but we are going to try, using the same 1-10 scale as before. We will look at self esteem, self understanding, and feeling of purpose. As far as my self esteem is concerned, I would rate it as a 6. I like myself but battle with the constant feeling that I should be better. This came from growing up as a overweight and socially awkward individual. I am now in much better shape and am extremely social, however my self image has not changed from that of an overweight, shy young person. This leads to self understanding. Here I would rate myself a 9.5 (I will never give myself a 10). I am able to understand exactly why I do what I do from a psychological standpoint. I can break down all of my idiosyncrasies and feelings and know exactly where they stem from. This doesn’t necessarily make it easier to fix however. Then there is my feeling of purpose. Here I will give myself a 7.5 because overall, I know what I am supposed to do with my life. I am meant to be a healer and a teacher. I am meant to guide others. That being said, I often get side tracked on exactly how I am going to do it. It is common for me to want to add new and different things to my resume instead of focus on one path and walk it completely. Lately I have found the path I feel best able to walk, however I still catch myself looking down different paths but as of yet have not strayed. Averaging up these numbers would leave me with a score of nearly 8 (7.8). I see this as being pretty good but of course there is always room for improvement.

So here we will set a goal. My goal at this point is to improve my self esteem. I need to stop viewing myself as simply adequate and see myself how I want others to see me. This will take a great deal of visualization and affirmation practices. I need to constantly remind myself that I am awesome. I will also have to challenge myself socially and override any fear I or hesitation that I might have. Basically I need to ignore the sense of inadequacy that creeps us during social situations.

Finally we come to spiritual wellness. This will be an interesting area to assess. I will only be looking at 2 pieces of spiritual wellness using the above 1-10 scale. Spiritual belief of knowledge and spiritual practice. When it comes to spiritual belief and knowledge I will give myself a 9.8. I have studied all of the worlds major religions and many of the minor and obscure faiths. I know how to perform some very advanced meditation techniques and am acutely aware of peoples spiritual energy. I even have access to some very skilled spiritual mentors. This, however, leads me to spiritual practice in which I give myself a 3. I may know quite a bit but I simply do not practice it. I rarely meditate or pray, nor have I studied spiritual maters in some months. The only thing keeping me tapped in is my martial arts training (though I took several months off from that as well). I have become too tied into the physical world (work, school, money, friends) and have neglected my spiritual health. Averaging everything out I am left with about a 6. Sure its ok I guess but I feel it needs a great deal of improvement.

Now I must set a goal. My goal, after reading the above, should be obvious. I need to greatly increase my spiritual practices. I have no reason not too. It is not that I am too busy, it is simply that I allow other things to distract me from where my focus needs to lie. I am going to blame technology for this one. I need to stop watching TV when I have time to relax. There’s nothing worth while on anyways. I should take time to meditate and draw and practice my martial arts before I waste time with media. My time needs to be spent meaningfully and it is going to take quite a bit of effort to get me back on track. This effort, I feel will be more than worth while.

Now here we get to the hardest part of all. How will we assess our progress six months from now? I feel that assessing our progress may be actually pretty easy. All we need to do is look at that scale (1-10) in each area we already evaluated above and look at how they have improved. List specific things you feel have improved. This is not the time for generalities. The really hard part is not actually measuring our improvement. The hard part is sticking with our plan long enough to see results. Even remembering to re-assess ourselves six months from now will be a very difficult task. For those who stick it out, re-assessing will be easy, as we like to see results while we work on something and therefore constantly look for improvements along the way.

So here is the real question: will you stick it out? Is wellness that important to you that you will put the effort into improving all areas of your life? As always these examples are based on myself and the suggestions and steps I take may not work for you. Continue to look for ways in which you can improve yourself. No body’s perfect…but we sure can try.