Life continues to throw us curve balls. How are you reacting to unforeseen challenges. In this episode, authors Kimberly Layne, Twiana Armstrong and I share our thoughts and experiences about how we are maintaining healthy habits to create a wellness baseline that gives us resiliency while navigating challenging times.
Find Kimberly and Twiana here:
Kimberly Layne: https://www.kimberly-layne.com/
Twiana Armstrong: https://linkedin.com/in/twianaarmstrong
#leadership #wellness #habits #health #Roaring20s #Roaring2020s
[Video Transcript]
[Twiana Armstrong]
Leaders as you strategize about finishing the year strong, take stock, what successes are YOU checking off your personal leaderboard? Your organization relies on you to show up at your best, physically and mentally. Recent studies recommend parents include mental health exams in their children’s health checkups; examinations that check for anxiety in kids of elementary school age and examinations that check for depression in teenagers. When you stop and reflect on these recommendations, adults should include mental health exams in their checkups, as well. We can all agree that our lives are jam packed, each day brings experiences that we may or may not control. Your personal leaderboard must list key performance indexes, KPIs, that promote habits and behaviors that focus on you taking care of yourself. As you take stock, are you performing at your peak, physically and mentally? Your KPIs should indicate daily, weekly and monthly healthy behaviors that you consistently perform and consistently track. Take advantage of your organization’s wellness perks and benefits, regularly schedule vacations and retreats to refuel and see your medical expert for health and wellness checkups. These KPIs keeps you performing at your best!
[Matt Schlegel]
Thanks, Twiana.
It’s so important to create habits that allow you to maintain good physical and mental health.
I really I try to do that. I try to eat well; I try to get regular exercise; I try to make sure that I get eight hours of sleep.
But sometimes life just throws things at you that disrupt your patterns, and your resiliency in those times depends on your base, where you’re starting from. That’s why it’s so important to make the investment in yourself to establish that healthy base while you’re well. When you start from a good base, you’ll be better able to navigate through challenging times.
And I just went through one of those challenging times with my mom’s health, where all of my routines ended up being disrupted. I had to spend time over at her place and then sometimes at the hospital. My eating habits were disrupted, as well as my exercise habits, and my sleep habits; everything got disrupted, and I could feel my ability to maintain composure and keep my anxiety levels down start to fade as that went on for what ended up being around two and a half weeks.
It really tested me, and I can’t imagine how I would have managed if I were already in a stressed state going into that.
Thankfully I was at a good starting point, and thankfully she’s now recovered. Since then I’ve been able to resume my normal patterns, and now I’m starting to feel much better myself.
You don’t know when something disruptive is going to come at you. It seems like disruptions are becoming more and more frequent all the time. That raises the stakes for maintaining a healthy baseline when you can.
Kimberly, what are your thoughts?
[Kimberly Layne]
Matt and Twiana, thank you for sharing your insights into self-care, especially amidst change. Very often when life happens, we abandon self-care. I like to look at change as a test in self-care. In essence it is teaching us to honor our core foundations of wellness in order to best get through it.
I recently read a book by Matt Kahn who is considered as much as a spiritual influencer as the Dalai Lama and Eckhart Tolle.
In his book, the universe always has a plan, he discusses that change, and adversity, is really an opportunity. Very often when we have change in our life, or when ‘Life Happens” such as an elderly parent now requiring our presence and extra care, our company goes through a reorg and we are no longer employed, or we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic and an isolated lockdown, we assume this kind of outcome as disappointing, an inconvenience and even a set back to our life.
Matt on the contrary encourages us to realize and know that change will always leave us in a better state than before the change. We may feel at first the loss of our job, or a divorce is excruciatingly devastating, but very often years later we realize it was the best thing that happened to us. Realizing that there is a gift we cannot see in the midst of the pain, fear, and inconvenience can permit us to not abandon our habits of self-care, but to actually reach for those moments of self-care, knowing the outcome will be fine and we will be eventually too.
I will even take it a step further. when so called “Life” takes over, we should view the challenge by (1) accepting and knowing it is a gift unseen. (2) Reach for self-care to help us through the process as we know we will better for this experience, and (3) By accepting our circumstances even to the point of being thankful for our adversity, we can fast track through the adversity and challenge.
So, stop resisting, start accepting, reach for self-care and be thankful for the adversity and you will get to the other side much quicker.
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