What is your wellness strategy?

This week's article is all about you. It’s about your wellbeing. It's about how to look at wellbeing differently, and it's to remind you that if you don't prioritise your wellbeing first, then making wellbeing a priority for your workplace, school, team or staff is not only even more challenging but kind of contradictory to the whole purpose of supporting wellbeing as a whole.

At times we might think looking after, prioritising, or knowing what to do for our wellbeing is hard. You might convince yourself you don't have time, or that you're not as important as someone else, or maybe you tell yourself you’ll wait until the holidays to look after your wellbeing. You could be saying these things because you don't know where to start or it could be because you don't know how to make it happen in your already busy day.?

If you are a believer that working on wellbeing is hard, I want to share with you that it doesn’t have to be it shouldn't be.

Working on your wellbeing is not hard, but it may require some hard work.

There is a difference between these two things, with the truth of what we believe hiding in the stories we tell ourselves. In fact, the story we choose to believe around wellbeing is what supports us to be able to take action or not. If you’re telling yourself it's hard if you’re telling yourself you don't have time, if you're telling yourself you're too busy, then guess what? It's going to be hard, you won't have time and you are certainly going to make sure you are busy.

Truth is, working on your wellbeing should actually be easy and feel good (this doesn’t mean though it doesn’t require some hard work to get started). It should align with your values, it should become easier over time, and as the things you work on become part of your daily habits and rituals, your state of wellbeing improves.

If you aren't aware, my business is called The Wellness Strategy. The word wellbeing doesn’t appear in the title and there's a reason for this.

According to the Oxford Dictionary wellbeing is referred to as a state and wellness is about action.

Wellbeing? - the?state ?of?feeling ?healthy ?and?happy

Wellness ?- the state of being healthy, especially when you actively try to achieve this.

I'm a big believer that action is what creates change, and if we want to achieve a state of wellbeing around happiness, health, fulfilment, meaning and purpose then we have to take meaningful, intentional, action. The action you take is your wellness strategy and what leads to your desired state of wellbeing.

So, what is your wellness strategy?

Do you have daily habits, actions, or rituals that support you to feel how you want to feel? Or are you hoping your state of wellbeing will improve on its own?

This is a case of underestimating the small things that contribute to our overall state of wellbeing.?

When you break your strategy into bite size pieces and chunks what you realise is that by engaging in a wellness strategy, your desired wellbeing state happens as a result of this. However, if you're not intentional with your strategy, your result may not be what you want.

Your wellbeing strategy needs to be planned, and whilst it may require hard work, it shouldn’t be hard. Yes, you know you should exercise more and perhaps it might feel hard, yes, it may feel a little tricky to initially set boundaries, and yes, it may cause a bit of stress, to begin with as you stop checking emails in the evening. However, as you build these habits, you will realise the hard work becomes easier and once established all these things combine to make up your wellness strategy and support your overall wellbeing.

Your daily actions, habits and rituals are always impacting your wellbeing. Therefore, taking time to consider the wellbeing state you're trying to create and how to do this is essential.

To finish, I would like you to consider the following question:

‘Do you have a wellness strategy to support your desired state of wellbeing or are you hoping that ad hoc, sporadic activities and events will be enough, hence, leaving it to chance?’

If this has resonated with you, and I imagine for many it has, I want to invite you to become part of ELEVATE or reach out for some 1:1 wellbeing coaching via [email protected]

Your approach to wellbeing matters, and can’t be left to chance. However, sometimes we only know what we know, and we need to actively be working on this, building our knowledge, understanding and capacity to help us take action, drive change, and build a strategy that works.