BEING WELL
Sunday July 8, 2018
Oops … I didn’t know I’d passed by ‘best before date’.
Yikes …
I did one of those longevity surveys online. I was absolutely truthful about my health, my progress on weight loss and blood pressure, my lifestyle [oddly it didn’t ask anything about family health or longevity] – it said my life expectancy was 65. I’m one month from 67.
Feeling healthier and stronger than I’ve been in decade, I’ve revised my life expectancy target from 95 to 115 with no plans to expire before that. Just in case, I better type faster …
Wellbeing is like one of those things we describe as: “I’ll know it when I see it”.
It isn’t that we can’t describe it if we try really hard. It’s just so much simpler to avoid describing it at all. Why is that? Are we afraid to be right, or afraid to be wrong – afraid we’ve set our sights too high, or set them too low?
Wellbeing is a state of mind, agreed?
Or is it a state of body?
Is it imagination, or a fictional suspension of disbelief? Luck, design, genetics and our own actions factor in too, don’t they?
Again, well being – what is it really? Sometimes I wake up with a bushel of it but it’s gone by noon. Some days I don’t wake up with it but it arrives like a prize package all wrapped in excitement the way bacon wraps a filet …
But most days it might as well come in a plain brown wrapper because it no longer (maybe it never did) have a familiar look. I was re-listening to some recordings from a sales course I took a few years ago – a few minutes at a time each time I hop in my vehicle; I found it interesting how many of those ‘tips’ I’ve incorporated into my daily/weekly work practice. At the same time I found myself looking back on recent years, client relationships and ‘where the business came from’ and I found much of it came from other sources in other ways …
Reflection on ‘what went wrong’ is pretty common in many organizations and for sales people who lost out on a proposal call to someone else. What I like to do as well, and I think more usefully, is examine what went right? What worked? What makes the difference? Aside from a few self-congratulatory thoughts, it’s deeper I have to dig. And digging pays off.
Examining what is at the root, at the core, of things that work well, relationships that work out and efforts that pay off reveals that when I do my best of anything – for myself, for clients, for friends – it’s because I’m focused on something more foundational than the ingredients in the relationship or the transaction at hand. I’ve invested something of myself. Not money, but caring. Not work, but thinking. Not strategy, but seeing things through someone else’s eyes. I’m doing those things better than I’ve ever done. I was thinking – then dismissing – that it would have bene nice to read a ‘how-to-book’ on these things when I was very young. If there was, would I have found it? If someone gave it to me, would I have read it? If I read it, would I have understood – let alone adopted – the wisdom of it?
I see it now. I can get there from here. There is time, not too much and none of it is guaranteed.
There will always be time to waste. The trick is to take care of what is important first and second, and third and so on. I cannot die or retire – I have too much to do!
