How to Achieve Wellness Through Bloom’s Whole Person Development Method

Leadership

Oct 13

We all define wellness differently based on factors that range from health to economics. However, as executives and entrepreneurs, wellness also factors into your performance, your relationships at work and home, and your ability to define your goals. Health, stress, and finances are factors many of us often think about, even if we lack a clear plan of action to unite them.

Bloom’s Whole Person Development Method strives to provide this plan. Those who practice the method are aware of gradual shifts in their awareness, empathy levels, and perspective, all factoring into the goal of growing from the Current Self into the Desired Self. Wellness – both in terms of how we define it and how we achieve it – is integral to this process.

What is Wellness?

Wellness is difficult to define, so we’re going to start with what it is not. Wellness is not the same thing as success. It’s not the same thing as fulfillment. Wellness has less to do with how you feel about the extrinsic goals in your life – your perspective on your relationships, your performance in your job – and more to do with the intrinsic qualities of being you.

Wellness is how you use your body and mind to create a positive personal environment. If this environment can successfully contain your work, home, and personal lives, it fits the definition of wellness in Whole Person Development.

Relationship with Money

Money is a major stressor in everyone’s life. As entrepreneurs and executives, you spend money to make money by calculating investments and planning for the future. This brings you greater success but also brings greater stress over money.

Acknowledging your relationship with finances is a major aspect of how Whole Person Development defines wellness. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau uses the term “financial well-being” to describe how we feel about our money situation now and moving forward. The test they offer to measure financial well-being may help you become more fiscally responsible.

However, it cannot acknowledge or coordinate your relationship with money in the broader scheme of your life. Whole Person Development helps you become aware of how you treat money and how prepared you are to face the future. It allows you to put finances in the context of broader, lifelong wellness.

Relationship with your Body & Mind

This broader sense includes your physical health, education, and anxiety level, all of which factor into wellness. Whole Person Development teaches us to become better attuned to our senses, to experience ourselves in our environment at face value, without judgments. Anxiety can often result from expectations, a cycle which is particularly common for successful, hard-working, Type A personalities, which many entrepreneurs are.

The difficult first step in achieving wellness is to become aware of your senses and surroundings and learn to accept them. Accepting our senses helps us use them to complete our goals, rather than distract ourselves from them.

The Takeaway

There are many aspects of wellness in Whole Person Development, which strives to guide us towards the Desired Self while accepting that the process will be different for everyone. This is why its idea of wellness, like so much of Whole Person Development, focuses on relationships.

Rather than the relationships we have with each other, however, wellness isolates how your health and outlook influence your relationship with your body and mind. As entrepreneurs, your instinct is likely to control, rather than accept your surroundings. Wellness in Whole Person Development balances our primary intrinsic relationships – with our body, mind, and finances – so that planning for the future moves us closer to our goals, rather than to our anxieties. The result is success, not only in work, but within ourselves.