Your emotional health: 3 main indicators to watch
How to self-manage your emotional - mental health using personal spirit
If you watch the news, you absorb the anxiety attached to global political action. If you don’t watch the news, you absorb the anxiety of others who do.
So what can you do to stay emotionally well even when the world feels like there are crazy people in charge, all of whom have forgotten that we live on only one planet?
Emotional Health = Mental Health
My thirty-something years of experience running a boutique consulting business (which is financially volatile), combined with life’s interruptions, led to three main indicators being the most important to monitor. They were introduced in a previous post) and apply to business decision-making environments, which I will do in another post.
Note: the percentage numbers are arbitrary. Think of it as a radar graph.
Personal Spirit Informs Organizational Spirit
Personally observe in your private life:
1. Your initiative: Are you someone who sees what needs to be done and does it without being told? Or do you need to wait until you have no other choice?
2. Your sense of control: Do you feel you have direct control over outcomes that impact your life? Or is it easier to ask AI or influencers for character and life-defining directions?
3. Your outlook on life: How do you see the world? As something that happens to you? Or as something having hidden potential waiting to be discovered?
These three domains were part of research done by Dr. Val Kinjerski in 2006 re: spirit in the workplace (covered in the next post) and codified in One Smart World (founder Bob Wiele). As a facilitator, I found these indicators also captured the spirit in the workplace, which is an aggregate of all employees.
From a decision-making leadership perspective, it is the result of the degree of security, trust, and emotional mastery of those in authority and the systems and processes put in place that unconsciously produce engagement or a lack of.
Bob Wiele, founder of One Smart World, defined the indicators as:
Outlook: “A belief that an optimistic, constructive approach to life enables one to find the positive, hidden potential and meaning in any situation, task, or person. Your outlook on life, whether positive or negative, predicts how you experience life and what you get back from life. If you have an open, positive, optimistic outlook, then you will likely experience other people as friendly, cooperative, and kind. If you have a closed, negative, pessimistic outlook on life, then you will often experience others as angry, upset, and difficult to deal with. What you send out, you will get back.”
Sense of Control: “A belief that one can exert personal control, through one’s own efforts, to impact on an outcome.” He goes on to say, “When you start to feel helpless and overwhelmed by all of life’s complexities, regaining and maintaining a sense of being in control is vital for your personal health and well-being.”
Initiative: “Initiative is an active way of operating in the world. It is not just doing your job well. Initiative involves going above and beyond the confines of your job description or your role. The ‘above’ part means that the person who takes initiative sees the bigger picture of the situation. The view is from the bridge, not the trenches. The ‘beyond’ part means going beyond the boundaries of convention to seize the opportunity to act. The attitude is: “Someone should do this and I am going to take the initiative to get it going.” Another aspect of initiative includes creating a better solution for someone else. True initiative is not about self-promotion. It is about making a constructive difference for the greater good – for another person, for the team, for the organization, or the community. The initiative must be seen to be relevant and valuable by others in the organization, not just by the person taking the initiative.” [Read the full article by Bob Wiele.]
Definitions aside, how do these three big indicators help you maintain your emotional and mental health?
Maslow had something to say about that!
In light of the disturbing pattern of avoiding things that make us collectively uncomfortable, including the hard reflective questions that confront the sense of anxiety and peace, I am willing to say that without a strong personal spirit, genuine connection, and resilience is hard to achieve. Emotional health is elusive. Mental health will suffer for the simple reason that the heart (the fuel for getting things done) is weakened. When the heart is weakened, emotions are compromised.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio stated, “the conscience serves to widen the reach of the mind of the organism, and with that improved the life of the organism whose mind has a wider reach.” Imagine the possibilities!
How to use this information to stay emotionally balanced?
Sense of control: If you’re feeling helpless, lose hope, or despair, take immediate action to move your body. Start with where you have complete and total control. When recovering from my aneurysm after I left the hospital and re-entered the bigger world, restoring grounded reality came from hiking on rough terrain. This had several benefits. 1) my brain had to calculate distance so I had to focus. Rewiring took place. 2) I was doing something (taking initiative) that activated and accelerated healing. Start simple. One or two steps. Add more daily.
Outlook on Life: It is easier to avoid what confronts your beliefs about how the world works or to buy into the doom and despair dominant in the world today. Maintaining a healthy outlook on life means observing what you are paying attention and the emotional charge.
Positive, neutral, negative
Since the brain’s neural real estate is highly attuned for negative events (a safety valve), catching your mind in that act of catastrophizing enables you to redirect your thinking to healthier, more energetically (positively) charged thoughts. This isn’t about staying positive, as the ship is sinking. It is about knowing you are in control of how you think and feel about what is happening around you. When life serves up lemons, do you make lemonade?
Initiative: In my former life (in another galaxy) as a schoolteacher, I had a sensitive Grade 7 student named Bobby who was crying in class. I dismissed the rest of the class, keeping him behind. After the class emptied the room, taunting him for crying, and speculating on what he’d done wrong, he and I had a real chat. His mom had just given birth, and he felt like he could do nothing right. We came up with 2-3 ways he could help his mom out. Months later, his mom came to thank me for talking to him.
It had little to do with me. The young teen thought things through, saw what needed to be done, and then did it before his mom asked him.
That’s initiative.
He just needed some insight. He did the rest.
Faced with a perplexing situation, how would shifting perspective to see things differently open new possibilities?
My aim in sharing what I’ve learned from having life go sideways more than once is to transmute the events in the world today into ways you can maintain and self-manage emotional and mental health. Intuition can be separated from knee-jerk reactions or snap judgments. Better decisions result.
People do not act on how they think; they act on how they feel. How you feel is a direct outcome of the strength of your personal spirit faced with tough events. By extension, master how to observe yourself in different scenarios, and you will become very effective at reading the invisible signs of organizational dynamics.
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