What is wellness to you?

Wellness to me means more than just being healthy. It means more than nourishing my body with good food and exercising regularly. Obviously this is essential but to me wellness means ensuring that all the things of value in my life are working in harmony so that I can be the best me that I can be.

One of the essentials of wellness is being empowered, through knowledge and information that allows you to make choices. Ask yourself, what are your key values? Are you living them visibly every day at work and at home?

If I say that I value ‘family happiness’ but then I am working long hours and am so stressed that I never have quality time with my family, and when I am with them I am not really present, or am impatient as I’m too busy thinking about all the other things that I have to get ‘done’, then I am not really living my life aligned with my true values, am I?

Why Identify and Establish Your Values? Your values are made up of everything that has happened to you in your life and include influences from: your parents and family, your religious affiliation, your friends and peers, your education, your reading, and more. Effective people that I have had the privilege of meeting personally and/or professionally, recognise these environmental influences and identify and develop a clear, concise, and meaningful set of values/beliefs, and priorities. Once defined, values impact every aspect of your life and is the first step on your journey to wellness.

• You demonstrate and model your values in action in your personal and work behaviors, decision making, contribution, and interpersonal interaction.
• You use your values to make decisions about priorities in your daily work and home life.
• Your goals and life purpose are grounded in your values.

My key values for example are Authenticity, Family, Freedom, Achievement and Health with the ultimate life goal being Happiness. I check in with my body daily and I know when I am not at my best by how I am responding to work and life demands. I’ve discovered that when I’m not at my optimum it’s usually because my priorities are out of kilter so I recognise the need to devise a plan to re-establish the balance in my life.

As one of my values is Achievement and another one is Freedom, I get frustrated when I feel constrained. I would not be at my best if I had a role where I had narrow guidelines with minimum flexibility. In my role at Aurora Spa I am lucky enough to work autonomously and in a team environment with people I respect who work hard to achieve our team goal/s. This provides the freedom I need to function at my peak.

I am a working mum so my ability to manage my time is vital to my wellbeing. I enjoy my demanding career and the fact that it allows me to work from home surrounded by my husband and two young children, but this also makes it difficult to obtain ‘me time’.

I have learnt the importance of reaching out and asking for help when I need it. Knowing when to delegate prevents you from becoming too overwhelmed and stressed. For example I ask my amazing Mum to manage school drop offs and pick ups, and pay a cleaner to save me two valuable hours of dreaded housework on the days that I am under pressure or on a tight deadline.

It’s important to organise your life so you have a healthy mix of quality family time and quality ‘me time’. Make sure your achievements don’t come at the expense of your relationships or your health and nurture your body and mind. This is a simple holistic approach to living.

I like to refer to the old KISS acronym and I adapt it for me to be Keep It Simple Sexy (as we are all goddesses at our core). It is way too easy to make things far more complex than they need to be, which contributes to your stress.

There is a glut of information out there on how to eat, how to exercise, how to parent, how to become successful, how to handle stress and how to be happy. There are experts on everything. You are your own expert. Only you can define what values are most important to you, the values you believe in and that define your character. Be sure to live them visibly every day at work and at home. Living your values is one of the most powerful tools available to you to help you be the person you want to be, to help you accomplish your goals and dreams, and to help you lead and influence others. Don’t waste your best opportunity.