09 April 2024

One’s life is not just one single picture but rather one large picture made up of many smaller images that create the ‘whole’ of which we each call ‘life’. In life there are five areas that you need to be aware of in order to have ongoing growth, happiness (and a sense of ‘life fitness’) over your lifespan. ‘Life Fitness’ is a rating that each of us has against the five following areas of life (below). Many do not realise of their default rating that they have given themselves against each one even exists which makes understanding what it is even more important.

Your life fitness consists of the five following areas:

• Mental (Your thoughts and direction of thinking)

• Emotional (How you feel or are affected emotionally)

• Physical (Your physical fitness or overall wellbeing of your body)

• Spiritual (Your connection to Spirit, God, inner-self or anything you believe in)

• Social (Your interaction with others in general as a ‘social being’)

If you could rate yourself out of 10 right now (1 = lowest, 10 = highest) against each of the five areas above in your life, what would your personal ‘Life Fitness’ report look like? Poor, average, or great? If you were to ask yourself ‘Am I living my life in these areas to my best intentions right now?’ – what would be your answer?

In order to set overall life fitness goals that are achievable, take some time to research the dreams you have and find out if they really what you want. You do want to challenge yourself, but you don’t want to make achieving your overall life fitness so hard that you experience only failure. To ensure maximum success in overall life fitness, make sure that your life fitness score meets the following criteria. Your daily, weekly and monthly scores are never going to be perfect, so don’t expect a 100% score rate on your mental, emotional, physical, spiritual or social fitness. You are always developing and changing – that is the constant you need to be aware of throughout in life.

Match Your Core Values 

The more each of the five life fitness levels (mental, emotional, physical, spiritual or social) match your core value set - the more likely you are to be able to live a life of balance. If a goal in your life for some reason doesn’t fit into one of your core values, it’s not likely you’ll experience much success. In effect, nor will your life fitness score rates look healthy as these too will ultimately be affected.

Be 100 Percent in Control of Yourself 

Any goal in life including your overall life fitness where you control 100 percent of what happens by choice is a goal that you can reach. Do ensure that you’re not letting fear get in your way or blaming fate for your failures, though. Self-limiting beliefs can get in your way on this one especially. Be realistic about whether you do have control (or not) and give yourself more credit. For example, if you think you do not have control over your social fitness  because “that’s just how it is,” you are mistaken and need to eliminate this type of thinking and do some work on yourself in this area of life.

Be Able to Envisage Your Life Fitness Score Rate as an Outcome

If you can’t see the end result, it will be very difficult to move forward toward achieving your goal of an overall healthy life fitness. If you need to draw a picture, make a vision board, or take a day out to plan for yourself the steps needed for a better life fitness for yourself and see how this all fits together in the big picture of your life. You need to envisage the result beforehand to be able to truly achieve it.

Spell Out Your Intentions

Every goal you make in this life needs to be very specific in nature to attain it. State exactly to yourself what your intentions are (even for your life fitness goals). Create a timeline with an end date in mind on the five areas of your life fitness scores and keep this close by so that you can review it regularly. When things don’t go to plan, stop, review what has happened, and then create a revised plan that suits your life plan and continue.

Be Actionable 

To achieve any life goal there has to be steps that you can take to get there. Like using a map to reach a destination that you want to go to on vacation, you need to draw a map to your vision of your life growth with the steps and paths you’ll take along the way. Put not only what but when, and how you will grow and accomplish the steps needed to be taken in any area of your life be it emotional, physical, social and so on.

Be Measurable

Start with the end in mind and work your way back to today, creating the list of things to do each day to finally reach a point of change in your life’s overall fitness. You can adjust as you get into new routines and habits when it comes to life fitness. Life fitness levels are changeable and forever evolving as you go through life. Your perception changes as you age and grow as a person.

So, let this be a starting point for you if you have never seriously looked at your overall life fitness score rates before. Create some notes and journal on each of the five areas of your life fitness scores. Where are you right now on each of these areas? What do you want to see change in each area? What outcome are you seeking in each area of life in your Life Fitness? Once you do, you will be surprised to see which areas of your life stick out more and require a bit more attention than others in order for you to grow and live a more fulfilled life.