How do we begin taking an honest look at our mental and emotional health? The first step is to increase our awareness of it. Setting time to consider specific questions like What thoughts or emotions did I experience today? What are some of the patterns and narratives? Do I tend to focus on work, relationships, or health? Is my emotional state relatively stable? Or does it change dramatically throughout the day? Am I able to flow from thought process to thought process, or do I ruminate and obsess over topics until I resolve the perceived uncomfortability? What emotion would I say dominated my day? On a scale of 1-10, how intense was it? Questions like these can help give a better picture of where we are each day.

How do we begin taking an honest look at our physical health? The first step is to increase our awareness of it. Setting time to consider specific questions like How much did I move today? What were my energy levels? How much coffee/caffeine did I have? How long and how well did I sleep?  How did I feel today after meals (over-full, satiated, hungry)? Questions like these can help give a better picture of where we are each day.

Building purpose is the foundation of change. Finding purpose and meaning in our lives is probably the number 1 thing that we see individuals trying to answer with Therapy and Coaching. It’s a personal and individual journey to find this answer. The past few weeks we have talked about goal setting and visualizing the changes we want to see in our lives. The way to build real consistency and increase success is to find the true purpose and meaning behind the change. This week we will discuss how to deepen our understanding or why changing our lives is truly meaningful to us.

Once we determine a goal, it is important to visualize the change we want to see in our lives. The most common use of this is to utilize it to help with goal setting by backtracking from the visualized change to the starting point to break down goals into manageable chunks.

Build Your Best Life Step 1: Have a deep and meaningful understanding of where we want to be. The first thing we have to do is develop a baseline. In this case, a basic goal to get us started. Most people start with a general goal like, “I want to feel better” or “I want to lose some weight”. The first thing we need to do is to break the goal down to something more specific.

Imposter Syndrome is the feeling that secretly we are not qualified, not good enough, or not like others. Today we take a deeper look at this common human experience.

Mental flexibility. What does that even mean?

For us, it has been the willingness to let there be more than one outcome. An opportunity to model this has already been raised with our our new content series, Building Your Best Life. In it we proposed these three steps:

1. Deep and meaningful understanding of where you are.
2. Deep and meaningful understanding of where you want to be.
3. Develop a plan or map to get from #1 to #2.

As we have worked on developing the content series further, we have recognized that it would really work better to reverse #1 and #2, to look like this:

1. Deep and meaningful understanding of where you want to be.
2. Deep and meaningful understanding of where you are.
3. Develop a plan to get from #2 to #1.

We recently started a new series titled, "Build your best life". In it we outlined a formula, or road map, for change. The mission of Cole Wellness is to promote emotional wellness and physical health through counseling, health coaching, and personal training.