Actionable Steps to Developing An Authentic Holistic Well-Being Routine For Career

No one said having it all would be easy! If you are a rock star professional that is absolutely smashing it at work but feeling a little unbalanced in your holistic well-being, you’re not alone. 

Experimenting with and designing a holistic well-being routine that feels authentically you truly is the next level in your career maturity. In this article, we explore what a holistic well-being routine is, how you can create a routine that is uniquely yours and how to integrate your well-being routine into your personal and professional identities to live a happier and fulfilled life.

 

What Is a Holistic Well-Being Routine?

Most people spend 40+ hours a week working. Doesn’t it make sense to apply an approach that considers your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being for something you spend so much time doing?

I think so, which is why I became a certified Holistic Career Coach. A holistic well-being routine focuses on our whole being and considers inner experiences on the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual levels while at the same time acknowledging your outer experience and what you want to create in your everyday life.

A holistic well-being routine helps establish a sense of order, predictability, and calmness in a modern space where so many objects and people compete for our attention. 

 

Ask yourself: how are YOU prioritizing YOU?

Taking care of yourself does not mean being selfish or indulging yourself. Developing healthy well-being routines means taking care of yourself so you can live a healthy, fulfilling life, do your job, help others, and accomplish all you want to accomplish. 

You can take care of yourself by doing things that authentically bring you value and joy to remain physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy for the rest of your life. Enter authentic holistic well-being routines! 

 

Let’s Talk Authenticity 

Why is authenticity important in developing your holistic well-being routine? Because YOUR routine is YOUR routine, and no one else's. Routines need to feel good, resonate with you on all levels and encompass tools and techniques you can reasonably commit to practicing routinely. 

 

What works for one person, doesn't always work for another.  

When creating and refining your own holistic well-being routine, feel empowered to improvise, try new things, go off script, and fail! Find routines that work for you. If elements of your routine aren't working, give yourself permission to let it go and reflect on why it's not serving you. Keep doing this and you will find what works for you in an authentic way.

 

Discovering and Developing a Holistic Well-Being Routine 

 

STEP 1: Where are you now?

To develop new routines, we need to understand what is working, what isn't working, what needs to change and what could you continue to benefit from in staying the same. Now is the time to get real with yourself. Here are some questions to consider:

• Am I up to date with my health check-ups?
• Am I happy with my physical fitness?
• Am I eating well nutritionally most of the time?
• Am I getting plenty of sleep and feel well-rested?
• Am I taking regular breaks from my work?
• Am I saying "No" to others when I need to professionally?
• Am I forgiving my past mistakes at work?
• What am I passionate about at work?
• Do I have things to look forward to in my life outside work?

Reflective activities like the questions above often use our mental self to think and reflect but I urge you to consider your emotional, physical, and spiritual self too. How did answering these questions make you feel? What are your feelings towards the results? What is coming forward for you right now?

 

STEP 2: Where do you want to go?

You're a career professional, you likely enjoy knowing how success is measured. In this case, you must define your own success and ask yourself what success looks like to you in your well-being routine. What do you want to gain by creating and developing new routines? How will you know you achieved your goals?

Consider having specific and measurable goals in each of the 4 holistic areas: mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. Each dimension can have its own, unique definition and measure of success. This is the space to get creative and build something you believe in. 

 

STEP 3: How do I get to where I want to go?

This is your chance to experiment and play in the possibilities of how you might develop an authentic holistic well-being routine.

Create space in your mind and heart to try difference exercises and reflect on them to better understand what resonated with you and how you want it to show up in your daily, weekly, or monthly routines.

These opportunities are by no means exhaustive but a simple place to start. When you feel ready to go further out of your comfort zone, I want you to feel empowered and confident to do so. For now, if you’re just starting your holistic well-being journey, here are some of my most recommended activities. Enjoy.   

 

Journaling

Daily or weekly journaling is a great way to connect with yourself emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. If you are looking for journal prompts, check out my templates in the holistic well-being workbook. 

 

Deepening Our Connection to Ourselves 

There are loads of different physical activities that help us connect our holistic selves. 

Examples include- taking a hot shower, meditating, or going for a walk. 

To get started, I suggest that you identify one loving thing you can do for yourself today. It could be a supportive thought or action. Next, write down what you're going to do and when you'll do it. Writing it down increases accountability and makes it more likely that you'll follow through.

As you add more and more loving thoughts and actions to your daily life, they'll begin to crowd out some of your self-defeating thoughts and behaviors. With practice, connecting with you whole self will become second nature.

I urge you to try different techniques and reflect on how they resonated with you. The goal is to find several activities in varying time, energy, and resource commitment levels so you have a developed library of options available to you to use when you need them. 

 

Here are ten tips you can follow when you are on your journey to connecting with yourself:

1. Recognizing and accepting your feelings
2. Take time for yourself
3. Get enough sleep
4. Listen to your body
5. Eating right
6. Using self-talk
7. Challenging a negative story about yourself
8. Forgiving yourself
9. Committing to self-love
10. Commit to learning more

 

Practicing Gratitude 

Training your brain to scan the world for the positive and actively practicing gratitude is a very healthy way to balance yourself. Practicing gratitude might be an inner experience such as a gratitude-based meditation or it may be an external experience where you are sharing space and energy with another being. However you experience gratitude, be mindful of what activities bring you joy and engagement and value those in your holistic well-being routine. 

 

Integrating a Well-Being Routine into Your Personal and Professional Identities

 

So often in modern workplace culture, we are conditioned to hold dysfunctions belief around our personal and professional identities needing to be two separate personas. Holistic health argues we are who we are always, and we bring our whole self to work every single day. There are no separate identities, we simply exist as we are regardless of where we are. 

The conversation around mental health at work is becoming more mainstream. The intersectionality of employee’s personal and professional lives is evident by the pets and children drop ins on Zoom calls with virtual work. Organizations are moving towards a more inclusive and honest appreciation of who workers are, how they show up to work and what needs to shift to support folks authentically and holistically. 

Now is the time to think and feel critically and compressively about your holistic well-being at home and work. Ask yourself, in what ways am I happy and supported and in what ways do I need to create systems and routines of wellness and support. 

Developing a holistic well-being routine might just be what you need!