Note: Written aboard a ship on the Danube River, traveling to Prague, Czech Republic:
Imagine a 3x3 Wellness Grid:On the X axis, we have three dimensions of psychological wellness:
1) Happiness - How much joy we experience;
2) Fulfillment - How much satisfaction and pride we experience;
3) Energy - How much inspiration and excitement we experience;
On the Y axis, we have three dimensions of wellness in life:
1) Personal Life - What we are doing to develop ourselves as individuals;
2) Interpersonal Life - What we are doing to maintain, expand, and deepen our relationships;
3) Work Life - What we are doing to grow and succeed in the work we undertake.
With this Wellness Grid, we have a handy weekly report card that enables us to track over time how well we are maximizing the quality of our lives. We also have a framework for tracking the synergies in our lives: the degree to which improving one area of life creates benefits for other areas. And, of course, we can track how setbacks in one sphere of life might be impacting others.
If we are consciously working on the nine boxes of the Wellness Grid, what we're really working on is intentionality: the expansion of our free will. The idea is to live life in a state in which we're fully awake, not functioning on auto-pilot. We maximize our trading psychology when we maximize our capacities for living intentionally. The big enemy of mindset is not stress; it's the absence of well-being. We all need routines to live life efficiently, but when all of life becomes a set of routines, we are no longer fully alive--and we fail to grow. Ideally, each week, we push ourselves beyond our comfort levels in all nine areas of the Wellness Grid.
Further Reading:
Tacking Your Problems Will Never Optimize Your Life
Gurdjieff, Turtles, and Trading
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