What is Ultimate Wellness?

In short, “ultimate wellness” will look different for every individual. The idea of ultimate wellness occurred to me years ago. I even incorporated the term and name into my yoga business back when I was still teaching a lot.

Ultimate wellness is never an end destination but rather something that is strived towards through the process of committing to growth. It continually evolves and is something to work towards every day through a series of commitments and continual self-examination and learning.

Working towards ultimate wellness requires identifying what is important in your life then aligning your daily activities to match that ideal. It also involves setting larger life goals to work towards each day, week, month and so on out to what your ideal life and ultimate wellness would look like ten years from now. The key is to make small choices each day support your priorities and contribute to your larger goals.

This process eventually produces change and creates life balance, which is what ultimate wellness is all about. Identifying the priorities and goals that will lead you to ultimate wellness is like having a personal mission statement that makes every life decision a little aeasier.

How to Work Towards Ultimate Wellness

Quite often when we think of making changes in our lives, they can seem too big and daunting. We end up doing nothing because the large end goal is just too much to imagine it's possible. However, if you set your goals and them break them into smaller steps or choices, it becomes much easier to make progress over time.

First though, we need to identify the things that are most important to us in order to create goals to support those priorities.

Identifying What's Important

There are three main areas to look at when it comes to identifying priorities: mind, body and spirit. Mind encompasses things like relationships, career, finance and nurturing creativity. Body focus is mostly nutrition, fitness and what we think of as physical health. Spirit includes mental health, spirituality and self-care.

A helpful way to identify which of these areas are most important and what types of things we need to do to prioritize these things in our lives is to think about what kind of life you envision yourself living ten years from now. Key areas of your life to consider for the 10-year vision are work/career, physical health, mental/spiritual health, finance and relationships. Need help identifying your values and 10-year goals? Subscribe to our newsletter below and receive your free Core Values and Ten Year Goals Worksheet. 

Setting Goals to Align to Your Life Priorities

Think of goals as smaller steps in the direction of the things we've identified as important for the 10-year outlook and a way to keep us on track on a daily basis. For example, if we've identified being very physically healthy in 10 years as one of our life priorities, we set smaller goals in service of that priority.

This could include goals such as walking every day or losing 10 pounds…it all depends on what you define as being “physically healthy.” In order to achieve the intermediate goals, we need to make a series of choices each day that support those goals as well. The daily choices might include eating in a specific way, choosing certain foods over others and blocking off 30 minutes each day on my calendar to go for a walk.

It sounds simplistic, but the process of writing out goals and then making daily choices and habits to support them has been shown to be much more effective than simply wishing for change. It may also take significantly longer than the often quoted “21 days to a new habit,” recent research actually suggests new behaviors take “between 18 to 254 days (median is 60 days)…” and from personal experience, habits are easy to lose if don't practice behaviors consistently.

So here are your three simple, but not easy steps to ultimate wellness:

1. Identify what's important by imagining what your life looks like in 10 years.
2. Set goals in relation to creating the life you imagined.
3. Make daily choices in support of those goals.

Need help with pursuing your wellness goals? Contact us about Ultimate Wellness Coaching.

We'd love to hear from you if you complete the values and goals exercise. What are your greatest wellness challenges? What have you identified as important in your life and what are your 10-year goals? Inspire others by sharing!