TOWARD A BETTER YOU

By Dr. Michele Poff

Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. Psychological. Relational. Financial. Intellectual. Professional.

Which of your major life areas could use a boost? For a lot of people, a new calendar year offers a prime opportunity to make some changes toward a healthier you. What’s your pleasure?

Taking a small step toward self-improvement every day means large gains over time. You don’t have to do it all at once, nor should you.

Physical. This involves diet, rest, exercise, and posture. How can you…

•    Eat better to better fuel your body’s needs and processes, using intake strategies that work with your own body’s metabolism?

•    Make sure your rest is adequate not only for refueling, but also that it gives you space for personal reflection and development?

•    Incorporate exercise better into 

your lifestyle, in ways that support your (aging) body’s overall health and needs for strength, balance, and flexibility?

•    Bring more attention more often to standing erectly? You have to engage your back muscles!

Emotional. This involves developing your emotional intelligence and particularly anger management. 

•    Keep in mind that anger is quick, and its aim is to destroy whatever triggered it. The only way out is to use your other part of your brain to talk yourself down.

•      One goal may be to never speak 

when angry – because as mentioned, your only focus is to destroy whatever triggered you. Nothing good comes from these heated conversations. Things cannot be unsaid. When you get angry, walk it off. Walk and walk and walk as long as you need to walk until you feel yourself not angry any more. Even if you have to walk for miles…

•      Emotional intelligence is essentially appropriate emotional responses for whatever situation you’re in, and it involves later assessing the appropriateness of your emotional response for that situation. 

Spiritual. How is your prayer and/or meditation practice?

•    Keep in mind that a mindfulness meditation practice of just 20 minutes a day improves mood and well-being, improves physical ailments, reduces stress and anxiety, grows brain cells in areas of contentment and focus, and reduces age-related myelination. It’s a secular practice – just focusing on your breath. If you can get this sort of practice going, better health in all other areas will much more easily fall into place.

Psychological. I’m sorry to say, we all come out of childhood with real emotional wounds that we need to heal, and we all suffer new wounds in the course of living life. If we don’t consciously do something to heal those wounds, they don’t just go away. Instead, they continue to emerge inconveniently, as unreasonable triggers. 

•    You can address these wounds in a variety of ways. A mindfulness meditation practice goes a long way toward healing. 

•   Mental health practitioners also help a lot in these areas. 

•      Kundalini yoga can also help push these old wounds out of the way.

Relational. It is often said that happy relationships improve our overall quality of life. We enjoy more and even heal faster. How is the quality of your ongoing personal and professional relationships? Is there anyone you need to forgive within yourself? Are there fences that need mending? If you wait for the other person to make a move, you will most likely remain in the stasis you’re currently in. Do you need to set your ego aside and move past an uncomfortable past encounter? We all deserve to live in peace in a civil society. Are you perhaps impeding on anyone’s ability to do that? 

•      Adjusting your diet to ensure you’re getting all of your nutrients can improve your mood and agreeableness, in turn improving your relationships as well. 

•    Adopting a practice of mindfulness meditation will also improve your mood and agreeableness, and if you focus on building compassion, that will also help improve all of your relationships.

Financial. What does your financial sphere look like? Is it satisfactory to you? If you’re not earning “enough”, why not? Money is a certain energetic frequency. Thoughts, actions, and emotions are varied energetic frequencies. You can align all these frequencies, which is the basis of manifestation. 

Many manifestation masters explain this more fully. What is holding you back? What thoughts, beliefs, and practices are in your way?

Intellectual. Read any good books lately? Learned anything new? Stimulated your brain and pushed your belief systems in new ways? Encountered – and actually considered – new or adverse information? It’s okay to change positions when new information comes to light. It’s wonderful to venture into new fields of knowledge for no reason than because they are there. What sparks you?

Professional. The world of work is changing rapidly. It’s going to be a great idea to upskill. Learn a new skill or improve existing ones. Leverage AI tools to help you advance.

The new calendar year is always a good opportunity to make a small life improvement. Go small so it’s easier to make it stick. Add more as you go.

Find a teacher if that calls you. Working with an instructor can push our growth exponentially faster and further than we can often achieve on our own. If it’s not time for that yet, check out a book to learn more about whatever catches your eye.

Your changes don’t have to be major or profound. You don’t have to tell anyone. They can be internal if you want, such as “I’m going to stop being so judgmental and think more loving thoughts toward everyone I see.” That sort of shift will bring you a great deal of inner peace in itself, not to mention the positive ripples you send out when you think those thoughts and send those vibes.

As it turns out, helping people with these kinds of self-improvement steps is where I focus my professional energy. I have a full program called The Alignment Portal (www.thealignmentportal.com) that’s designed to strengthen all of these areas in myriad ways. I have also just published a book called Style & Strategy: For Powerful Writing & Speaking to help students and business professionals improve their communication skills in writing, speaking, and presentations – to help people level-up their communication mastery skills in a communication world suddenly overrun by decently skilled bots.

If we don’t make any changes, things don’t change. If we don’t try to heal, we keep our emotional wounds alive. Change can be small – but mighty. It’s so worth it.

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Michele is a professional writer and editor living in the Central Coast region. She works primarily with nonfiction projects, often science-based. She also offers a well-being program to individuals and organizations that combines microlessons on critical well-being topics like emotional intelligence with live meditations for maximum empowerment and peace: www.thealignmentportal.com.