Well-being is multi-faceted across the various dimensions of your life. Health and happiness experts agree on specific areas pivotal to optimal well-being.
- Physical well-being: leading a healthy life supportive of favorable physiological health (i.e. the human body)
- Social well-being: having strong, positive, and supportive relationships in one’s life
- Career well-being: finding meaning in one’s professional work (i.e. way of making a living)
- Financial well-being: maintaining sufficient and balanced finances supportive of health, safety, and security
- Community well-being: feeling engaged in one’s community
I also like to include Personal Well-being in my toolbox of key terms to communicate with people about health and well-being. This may include overall productivity in one’s life, a sense of optimism, emotional resilience, and so forth.
There is a range of intersecting variables across primary dimensions of well-being. With respect to physical well-being, you have the mind-body connection. Regarding social well-being, there is a bi-directional influence between the people you form social connections with and positive emotions. Happiness in one’s career, a facet of career well-being, may suggest double the likelihood of overall positive well-being. And, having a sense of safety within the place you live can be pivotal to your community well-being. There are many more examples to illustrate the interconnectedness between dimensions of well-being.
Furthermore, you can think of aspects of well-being from the lens of key buckets (or elements).
- Happiness, positive feelings, & optimism
- Resilience, inner peace, & sense of purpose or meaning
- Relationships, family, & community connections
- Physical health factors, such as relationship with food, sleep patterns, body image, & so forth
- Living (home) and work environments
- Career, productivity, & how you spend your time
So, how do you cultivate positive well-being across the dimensions of your life?
Regarding well-being, there are some influential factors that you have a greater level of control over. You may have experienced a traumatic event, for example, which can lead to a sense of more gratefulness but could also instigate fear. (*Gratefulness and fear are two core constructs within happiness).
Regardless, it is currently supported that most areas of personal well-being can be consistently built up. Also, there are some pivotal tools within personal development that can muster up a stronger sense of positive well-being. Reflective exercises, mindfulness practices, gratitude routines, and methodologies used in personal coaching modalities are considered some of the primary mechanisms to boost overall well-being.
Do you want to get your hands on some of the key methods for boosting well-being?
We have been selectively crafting a workshop series on positive well-being. This workshop series covers some of the most critical areas relevant to an overall sense of well-being.
- Stress Mastery: How to Use Loving-Kindness to Enhance Your Well-being is your go-to workshop for reigning your stress response, emotional social awareness, and overall well-being game plan.
- Strengths and Well-being: How to Set Up a Personalized Well-being Vision Plan is a critical workshop for crafting your well-being game plan.
- Work-Life Integration: How to Design Your Days, Weeks & Months for Optimal Well-being is your go-to workshop for optimizing well-being within your whole lifestyle.
- Social & Emotional Well-being: How to Boost Positive Emotional Awareness and Relationships is your go-to workshop for harnessing greater control in overall well-being.
- How to Optimize Well-being for a Clearer Mind, Healthier Body, & Peak Performance is the workshop to help you structure your well-being plan for better performance and productivity.
At this point, we are rolling out the workshops in a few ways. In our local community, we are offering the workshop series to a select # of attendees. However, in many cases, we can offer a hybrid approach between in-person and digital meetings. That means if we are in Vermont and you are in California, you are still in luck (pending, you can do the math on the time zone difference).
*Although we do not have a structure for recorded webinar access just yet, we are considering it for future iterations of the workshop series.
We are also offering this series to relevant partners, such as small workplaces interested in supporting staff well-being or a busy medical practice full of people ready to embrace lifestyle approaches for positive well-being. Other examples may apply, but the skinny is we may be able to deliver these workshops to your communities.
Photo by Fabio Comparelli on Unsplash.
Dimensions & Elements of Well-being structure adapted from Jeffrey Auerbach and the College of Executive Coaching, 2022.