There’s a bizarre character in the M. Night Shyamalan movie Lady in the Water. He’s a bodybuilder who only works out one half of his body. As you would suspect, he looks like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on one side and Pee-wee Herman on the other.
I rightly laugh at that ridiculous picture, but how often have I taken the same approach in my own personal development routine? I may work hard to expand my mind but ignore my body. Or be in peak physical shape but neglect the health of my soul.
I think a foundational building block of personal development is balance. I’m not saying that every area of my life is of equal importance. For example, I’d rather be emotionally healthy with average intelligence than a depressed genius. That said, I believe working on myself as a whole will yield more satisfying results than a hit or miss approach.
So what are the areas of my life that I should be paying attention to? The answer to that question may vary depending on the person, but here are the top 5 areas that I monitor in my own life (in no particular order):
1. Physical health – eating right, regular exercise, getting enough sleep (for more see my Temple Health post here)
2. Mental health – playing brain games at lumosity.com, reading challenging material, thinking critically on important issues
3. Emotional health – watching movies, playing music, expressing creativity, taking a weekly Sabbath
4. Relational health – time with family and friends, meeting new people
5. Spiritual health – prayer, silence and solitude, time in nature, appreciating beauty
There are also what I call “second tier” areas that, while not as important as my top 5, still merit attention:
1. Financial health – giving to causes I believe in, saving for the short term & retirement, staying out of debt, enjoyment spending
2. Occupational health – having a meaningful career that I enjoy, having an appropriate work / life balance
3. Organizational health – effective time management, a balanced & sustainable schedule, a decluttered home
When I’m feeling depressed, grumpy, stressed or generally out of whack, I try to step back and do a quick mental review of these areas. It’s usually pretty easy to see which ones are out of balance and need a little TLC. Having this checklist not only helps me find a way out of my funk, it gives me a gauge to measure my progress on my personal development goals. It helps me become a better version of myself.
How about you? Which of these areas are feeling out of balance in your life? Choose one simple thing you can do in those specific areas to give them some attention. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.
I had an impromptu conversation with a good friend a while ago. She’s in her thirties, highly intelligent and inquisitive about life. She grew up going to church but stopped after high school. Since then, by her own admission, she hadn’t thought much about God until recently. She said she had a question for me. It went something like this:
“When I’m in nature, I feel like there’s something else out there with me. It’s like I’m sensing something bigger than myself but I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure if I think that’s God or something else. How can I tell?”
A clarification before going any further. The point of this post is not to try to prove the existence of God or to convince anyone to believe like I do. I consider myself a “faith and reason” person, meaning that I believe in God because of some very personal, subjective experiences I’ve had and also because of some intellectual reasons that I find compelling. But sharing those is not my goal here. I just want to give one of many potential frameworks that you could use to address the God question if you are like my friend.
Sometimes when we’re wrestling with what we believe about something, having someone else ask us specific questions about that topic can help clarify our thinking. So I asked her a series of questions:
You may read those questions and have different answers than my friend did, which lead you to a different conclusion. Either way, I think the “is there a God” question is an important one for each of us to answer one way or the other. Why? Because it has pretty big implications on your worldview, the way you see life and your place in it. And your worldview has a huge impact on your choices and actions, on how you live and who you become.
I was walking a labyrinth on the campus of Denison University in Granville, Ohio, last summer. A labyrinth is a walking path with only one winding route to the center. Unlike a maze, there are no wrong turns, no dead ends.