Can you believe it’s already July? 2018 is moving at lighting speed and before you know it, it’ll be January again and we will be staring at the year’s list of resolutions either amped because we succeeded, or a little meh because we fell short of our mark. As a self-proclaimed Type A personality, I had to learn years ago to slow my roll when it came to goal setting. Have you ever had the moment where you had to tell yourself, to “have several seats?” Well I have and it was humbling at first, but after I processed the feels of failure it became liberating and also increased my faith. The saying is totally true: “Man makes plans, God laughs.” There is so much out of our control these days between natural disasters to politics to general world crises it can feel like nothing is in our control. The good new is we do have control over a few things: our attitude towards our work, how we treat people, how we treat ourselves, and every day we can choose to take daily steps to push us further towards our big vision.
The mid-year mark is a great moment to stop pushing for a moment, stop, breathe and reflect on what you have accomplished thus far and also take a holistic look at your wellness. One of my favorite exercises to do to assess the current state of my wellness is the wheel exercise. If you’ve never done it is requires us to create a circle (as pictured) with various areas of well-being as slices of the pie or spokes on the wheel. These areas can include: finances, relationships/social, health, work, and spiritual well-being. We can score these areas from 1-10 and place a dot in each section (with zero at the center and 10 at the outside of the wheel). Then we connect the dots and see how close or far away from a circle our wheel is. What’s amazing about this is that it is like a snapshot of the current state of our lives. We may be crushing it at work, but our relationship department is horrible because of family or partner issues. Or our health could be poor, and that could be lowering our work score because we don’t have the energy to perform at our peak.
When we learn to measure our success by how full our wheel is, we not only remind ourselves to move beyond the superficial, but we are loving ourselves enough to want wholeness in every aspect of our lives. If you have never made a wellness wheel I challenge you to make one today. Once you assess each area of your life, start brainstorming on daily actions you can take to improve in the categories that fell short. As seasons change some categories will always fall below the goal, and that is okay. The aim should not be for perfection, but reflection that leads to real action that can help us live the lives of our dreams. -Xo Raw Girl