3 Essential Ingredients for Creating Great Health
If you know me as a coach, you’ll know by now that nose breathing is where it’s at when it comes to health performance. But just as a quick reminder, let’s find out why nose breathing is so great and then give you 3 top tips for nose breathing.
Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep are the obvious three ingredients for creating great health you might think I promote but you could be surprised to hear that they are not the most important. All of these key areas to health are important action points; action is only one ingredient necessary for building great health. You also need to prepare for that action and reflect upon it. Preparation, action and reflection are what’s required for Great Health.
1. Preparation
Great Health is no different to any other meaningful pursuit, it requires elements of dreaming and planning to attain it. What is Great Health to you is different to what I may want. For you it could just be feeling well enough to not have any pain or symptoms of disease. For another person it might be having enough energy to go to work, come home, have a past-time, play with the kids and still have some reserve energy. Great Health could also be doing all of that and having the physical, mental and spiritual strength to pursuit physical challenges in life, like sport, endurance events or taking an adventure. Regardless of how you define Great Health, it must be meaningful to you. The idea has to put a glint in your eyes, a smile on your face and make the hairs stand on the back of your neck. It has to excite you. This is all part of the planning phase. Most of us know it as dreaming and dismiss it as some ‘no good’ process but dreaming is where all Greatness is created.
Turning your dreams into reality is the second part to preparation. Creating goals and an action plan suddenly gives you a clear path to realise your dreams. You begin to realise that what you want is possible with a plan. However, there is a paradox to planning - It is important to take your time to plan and at the same time, not to take too long! Paralysis by analysis is common to some planners. If this is you, make sure you are implementing your plan even as you are writing it.
2. Action
A plan is only as good as the paper it is written on. Far too many people long for great health, a few even plan it. Less people act to create Great Health. Many people don’t realise it but Great Health is a concept available to us all. You can be pain-free, have tons of energy and take on challenges which inspire you…. If you want it. Taking action is the ingredient that brings the whole idea to life. Action takes the concept out of your dreams, off the page and into reality. It animates the plan and magnifies the dreams. Action is the special sauce of all dreams. When we act, we become explorers. We discover the reality of our dreams and we begin to ask questions of ourselves.
3. Reflection
Contemplating our action, plan and dream is like looking at a short-movie of our idea of Great Health. It gives us the opportunity to ask deeper questions of ourselves and our life. Taking time out to ask questions and reflect on the whole process is the final key ingredient to creating Great Health. It is necessary because we often get so lost in action that we forget the direction where we are going. We become too engrossed in the details of eating well, exercising and improving sleep and we forget the bigger picture. Measurements like HRV and the BOLT Score become obsessively important to you. Counting calories, fretting over enough deep sleep or making sure you got 10,000 steps instead of 950,000 imbue an energy of anxiety and worry rather than empowering you. When this happens, we got lost in the maze of action and often lose our way. Taking time out regularly to ask ourselves questions and align ourselves to our dream and plan counters this negative loop. It helps us to see our dreams clearly, stay on course and discover our version of Great Health. Asking yourself the following questions on a regular basis can really help you keep your eye on the ball and head in the game:
• Does the journey of Great Health add to my life and to the lives of people around me?
• Is this what I really want?
• Am I prepared to shift my perspective and my life to achieve Great Health?
• Can I be smarter or more efficient with my action?
Although Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep are the obvious action points. They are not the be all and end all of creating Great Health. I hope you can now see for yourself that there is much more to the recipe of Great Health than meets the eye. It’s more important to decide what is Great Health for you and how to achieve it. I call this the planning phase. Acting on your dream is the most obvious ingredient for Great Health but being careful not to get too focused on these tasks is critical too. Reflection is the final essential ingredient to the process. It helps you to see the forest from the trees, the dream from the action. Together, these are the three core ingredients for creating great health which will sustain you for you life.
Tagged as: Health
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