Premise:
I was invite to deliver a workshop on how to set up your year to be “Your Best Year Ever” recently and here is what I had shared with them in terms of how to think about or approach this task.
I believe in order for any year to be our best year ever, it needs to be balanced and see success and growth in all areas of our lives. And I think the key areas that we need to consider are as below:
If we have a year where we are able to balance our health and wealth and become wiser than when we started the year, I would think that we would have had a pretty good year.
Let’s explore this a bit further.
Healthy:
I believe that there are 5 areas that we need to focus on when it comes to our health – Physical Health, Emotional Health, Social Health, Intellectual Health and Spiritual Health.
Let’s look at each one of them in a bit more detail.
Physical Health: There is no doubt in any of our minds the importance of our physical health. A fit body is fundamental if we really want to do see any kind of success in any field.
The mind-body connection has shown that our mind functions at our peak, when our body is healthy and taken care of. So, if we want to make this year our best year ever, we need to be in better shape physically, than we have ever been thus far.
Let’s take time to invest in our physical bodies – exercise, eat better, sleep better, move and relax.
Emotional Health: Emotional health of mental health is all about our ability to deal with stressors and learning to be comfortable with who we are. It is also our ability to understand and deal with our emotions – positive or negative in an appropriate manner.
While this sounds pretty fundamental, I have seen many people who are extremely successful in their professional lives, have great spouses and families but are lonely and unable to deal with their own selves. So, let’s not be one of those.
Let’s learn (if necessary) to understand our emotions and take care of our emotional health throughout the year. This might mean doing regular check-ins with ourselves to understand what we are feeling, why and what to do about it.
Social Health: We are social creatures and therefore need a support system around us. We perform at our best when we are surrounded by people who are cheering for us when needed, who celebrate with us our wins and take care of us when we are feeling low.
Do we have a support system like that at work? Do we have a support system like that at home? Are you a part of such a network for your friends? Do you have someone you could call at any time of the day/night to talk?
One of the insights that the longest running longitudinal study on happiness suggests that we are at our happiest when we are grateful for what we have and when we are helping others. So, find some time to help people, spread some kindness. It is a good investment to make for your self if nothing else.
Intellectual Health: Intellectual health is all about learning new skills. We are living in a world surrounded by smart machines and intelligent algorithms. Things change around us at breakneck speed.
So, what are doing to keep ourselves updated? What new skills are we learning?
One such skill that can form the foundation for future success and can pay off the investment in time, energy and effort multiple times over is to learn how to learn.
Irrespective of how young or old we are, we need to follow our curiosity and learn something all the time. The world we live in has the tendency to make people and things irrelevant very fast and following our curiosity and learning new skills keeps us sharp and relevant all the time.
Spiritual Health: By spiritual health, I don’t necessarily mean that you follow any religion, but you can if you have faith in one. I mean the ability to connect to something bigger than ourselves.
A spiritual practice could be a meditation practice or a mindfulness practice or a walking practice or gardening or anything else that connects us to something bigger than ourselves and induces a feeling of awe and calms our minds down. Wealth:
Wealth
All said and done we live in a material world and accumulating wealth is still an important part of our lives, irrespective of how much ever we already have. It is a measure of the value that we have created in the world.
I think there are three kinds of wealth that we need to think about – financial wealth, relational wealth and creative wealth.
Let’s explore each one of them a bit more.
Financial Wealth: This probably needs the least amount of explanation as to why this is important and what we can do to do well financially in any given year. Almost everyone I know has a financial goal – stated or otherwise at the start of the year, barring those, who have enough financial wealth for them to care about adding more at all. So, let’s move on to the next one.
Relational Wealth: I define relational wealth as the number of deep relationships that we have with people. This could be with our spouses, parents, siblings, in-laws, colleagues or friends.
And when I mean deep, I really mean deep. People who can and are vulnerable with you and those with whom you can be vulnerable and open yourselves up completely, without fear of judgement or retribution.
We don’t need too many relationships like this but having none or next to none is a recipe for loneliness. We can’t have the best year ever, if we are lonely and are unable to share ourselves and our successes with our loved one’s. So, identify the key relationships in your life and invest in them.
Creative Wealth: In my experience, creative expression by itself is its reward. However, it has a lot more benefits for us. One of the key requirements for us to have the best year ever is to be able to solve any challenge or problem that comes our way during the year (and rest assured it will come, we just don’t know when and in what shape).
The more creative we are in solving them the better leverage we can have in terms of impact. And we can’t just be creative on a given day. It is like a muscle. It needs constant exercise and care.
We need to find a way to flex our creative muscle. We can do this privately or publicly. We can use any form of creative expression – cultivating a beautiful garden, creating blog posts, clicking pictures, teaching something new or something old in a new way, create videos, draw, paint, talk, make beautiful powerpoint presentations, cook..
You get the idea. The more we practice our creative muscles that better are our chances of being creative when the need truly arises. If you are a leader, this is even more critical as your team needs you to be not only at your creative best but also to help them be at their creative best.
Wisdom:
This is probably the odd one out in this list. However, it is probably the most important area for us to invest in and get better at, if we want to continue to live the best year ever, every year.
I think there are three kinds of wisdom that we need to focus on – practical wisdom, philosophical wisdom and generational wisdom. Let’s look at each one of them in a bit more detail.
Practical Wisdom: This is the kind of wisdom that tells us what is working and what is not. This helps us be aware of our social contexts and build our socio-techno-political awareness. This is learning how to improve our productivity, not in percentages but in multiples with minimal effort.
This is about knowing how things function within your world, in a practical sense. Who is the one who is really in control. Knowing who wields the real influence and how to influence them.
This kind of wisdom can be gleamed and continue to grow by using the art of reflection. I have shared more information on how to do this here, here and here.
Philosophical Wisdom: This is all about pondering what is our purpose and what are our values that we will live our life based on. Pondering over such issues has always been important.
If we know our true purpose and know what we value and what we will do and what we will definitely not do, makes life easier to live and some tough decisions easier to make. Kings in the past have known to have either themselves been philosophers (Seneca) or surrounded themselves with philosophers, who would help them ponder and answer these big questions.
We can benefit from the same as well. A good coach could also help us in this regard.
Generational Wisdom: This is all about remember and reconnecting with our ancient wisdom traditions. While we have progressed in many ways, from a material perspective, I believe that we have not made enough progress when it comes to how wise we have become as a species in the past few generations.
So, our grand parents and ancestors still have a lot that they can teach us that is not only relevant but also important. Can we reconnect with them, their teachings and how they lived? We can pick and choose what is still relevant for us and leave the rest.
In conclusion:
In conclusion, I highly recommend that instead of having end goals, which is a specific number or some measurable KPI, we have process goals, which help us build practices, which when practiced well enough can get us way past any goals that we can set.
There are only two things that I would still like to share.
One, one can’t have so many goals and not feel overwhelmed. So, to address that, I recommend that you have a goal for each one of the contexts that you live in. When you are in your office, just focus on your financial practice. When you are at home, practice to build deeper relationships with your loved one’s, etc.
Find a context for each one of your practices, so that at any given point in time, you are only focused on and are working on that one practice. This will help you in overcoming this overwhelm.
Second, identify what is blocking your progress (usually a core belief that you might hold) and work on removing that. We will make significant progress if we do that before we put in more energy and effort to improve the practice. I pray and wish for this year to be your best year ever.
