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Joggers out along the river paths at lunchtime,
health food stores booming, the internet zooming,
yoga studios bursting with students. You don't have
to look far to see how we are becoming more and
more health conscious. Now it's time to take a look
at the missing link.
Back in ancient Greece it was known that to be
fully healthy we need to attend to our physical,
mental, emotional and spiritual selves. Now, 3,000
or so years later we tend to have forgotten, or
rather ignored the emotional aspect of our fitness.
Until, that is, Daniel Goleman came along a couple
of years ago with his best-seller, Emotional
Intelligence.
In his more recent book, Working with Emotional
Intelligence, Goleman emphasizes that the stronger
we are in our self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation,
empathy and social skills, the more successful we
are likely to be. An earlier psychotherapist, Dr.
Eugene Heimler, taught that we need a healthy balance
between our satisfactions and frustrations. Heimler
was a survivor of concentration camps during WWll
and knew something about total frustration. He later
began to understand how he had survived. Later still
he taught at the University of Calgary how we can
now survive more successfully in society. The most
important ingredient is our emotional health.
Your Whole Health Check
So you're great at keeping your body in trim; you
are increasingly conscious about what you eat and
you attend to your spiritual self in your own way.
The chances are, if all that is true, you are also
emotionally fit. But how do you know?
Here's a simple test to see how well you are doing
in each of the four areas of physical, mental, emotional
and spiritual fitness.
Give yourself five points for every definite yes,
and zero for a definite no, with something in between
for those uncertain areas. (You can be the judge).
Physical Fitness
1 Your weight is within the suggested healthy
limits for your height, sex and age
2 Your body feels good
3 You take regular exercise
4 You have at least an annual physical test that
shows everything is fine
5 You eat lots of vegetables and fruit, drink plenty
of water and are careful about fatty foods
Mental Fitness
1 You feel alert most of the time
2 You read or study regularly
3 You engage regularly in mental exercises (word
games etc)
4 You are stimulated by new problems
5 You can figure out logical brain-teasers
Emotional Fitness
1 You feel good about your life
2 You feel confident about your abilities and are
aware of your weaknesses
3 You feel comfortable whether alone or in the presence
of other people
4 You can handle change and challenges with a positive
attitude
5 When you feel frustrated, you believe you can
change things for the better
Spiritual Fitness
1 You have a sense of meaning and purpose in your
life
2 You take time to be in nature and take notice
of it
3 You make sure that you spend some time developing
your creative side
4 You feel connected with the world
5 You love the mystery of life
If you have 100 points, you are the healthiest
person who ever lived, or a biased judge.
Emotional Health Helps Success
Daniel Goleman's book is based on several years'
research that showed how little emotional intelligence
there is around, simply because we tend to value
mental intelligence so much more. Eugene Heimler
showed that where we are not emotionally healthy
we do not function well in any areas of our lives.
My own discoveries show that most of us don't function
as well as we could because of our relative lack
of emotional fitness.
Take for example, the levels of stress, displayed
in sickness and absenteeism in Canada's corporate
world. Take the recent outbreaks of violence in
our schools. Most of this is due to the high incidence
of frustration, a symptom of emotional unfitness.
In our work or personal lives, our relationships
with ourselves and other people, our feelings of
adequacy or inadequacy, our self-esteem and confidence,
it's our emotional fitness that determines our success.
How Emotionally Fit Are You?
Here's a checklist of questions so that you can
see where you can improve your emotional health.
1 Do you express anger properly and safely?
2 Do you ask for what you want, yet are not attached
to the outcome?
3 Are you comfortable about showing your emotions?
4 Do you share your feelings with others?
5 Do you sometimes feel guilty?
6 Are you happy with your life?
7 Do you feel that you use your strengths well?
8 Are you aware of other people's feelings as well
as your own?
9 Are you adaptable to change?
10 Can you laugh at yourself?
11 Do you feel secure?
12 Do you have close friends?
13 Are you patient with other people?
14 Do you always find interest in what is going
on?
15 Are you satisfied with the present, rather than
concerned about the past or future?
16 Do you feel good when you are alone?
17 Do you feel good with other people?
18 Are you motivated to develop yourself?
19 Do you deal with conflict well?
20 Do you hate checklists like this?
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