Holistic Health
Why & What
My interest in the intersection of learning and health has followed me over the years as a networked learner and perhaps an explorer of holistic health. In the context of my engagement in the 21st Century Explorers Online Group, this interest has resurfaced.
Holistic health involves paying attention to our cognitive state and process, physical activities and habits, emotional waves within ourselves, and our social living support system. In other words, it is about the connectedness and sanity of our body, mind, heart and social interactions. All starts with critical questions to mull over and answer:
What am I?
How do I start?
How do I figure out?
Navigating My System
So how do I pay attention to each element? Physical? Cognitive? Emotional? Social?
Table of Contents
Step 1: Being self-aware of the four elements
We are working on ourselves. So I want to listen to my inner and authentic self, which I am—connecting with what’s inside me and what’s around me now and trusting my guts and intuition and using the following questions per dimension.
Physical: which activities do I do to get moving?
I list them and experiment with sports I love doing. What are the ones that need a lot of stamina, for instance, others that don’t? How about walking? Stretching?
Tracking my progress in a sheet. So how do I nudge myself to get moving? With a wearable on my wrist to nudge me to move when I don’t—a timer on my browser when working.
I plan on my agenda to do fitness every other day. Sometimes it is a meeting or walkabout with a peer. It can also be professional/personal obligations for meetings and business events such as conferences, meetups, workshops, and exhibitions.
Emotional: how do I feel?
Am I aware of my feelings? How does it impact me internally, in my relationships with learning, other people? My environment? Workplace? Entourage? It is about self-awareness and self-regulation.
Cognitive: how do I think, do, and share?
What are my routines for seeking, sensemaking and sharing? On my own? Collectively? Formats? Approaches?
Social: How do I interact and connect?
Weekly / monthly with people from my team, network and communities? How deep and meaningful is my engagement? Which type of engagement? Is it sane? What would each engagement look like?
- Catching up? Getting to know each other?
- Sharing stories, experience, knowledge, ignorance?
- Observing?
- Putting someone in the spotlight?
- Learning life, learning and work practices?
- Co-creating?
Do I take care of the health and diversity of my network? Do I visualize and see my network?
Step 2: Mapping how my operating systems work together.
I assess myself monthly, quarterly, and yearly. First, I through an online form I created privately. Then, I wrote an answer to the questions I wrote down.
Visualizing my navigation system through mind mapping, sketching, or other visual thinking means seeing my emerging story and experience. It can be a canvas, card, visual diagram, or write-up.
Step 3: Finding out how each type of health impacts me
What are my energy, well-being, self-efficacy, and personal growth levels? I decide what to let go of or keep digging in meaningful, impactful, rewarding areas of my holistic health. For instance, on a scale of 1 to 10, I could evaluate:
Physical health gives/pumps me:
- Energy 7
- Well-being 7
- Self-efficacy 7
- Personal Growth 6
Emotional health gives / pumps:
- Energy __
- Well-being __
- Self-efficacy __
- Personal Growth __
Cognitive health gives / pumps:
- Energy __
- Well-being __
- Self-efficacy __
- Personal Growth __
Social health gives / pumps:
- Energy __
- Well-being __
- Self-efficacy __
- Personal Growth __
Step 4: Letting go or embracing curiosity habits
That doesn’t work for me. Embracing existing and new ones.
Moving & stretching to wire
What are the benefits of moving on myself and my internal navigation system? Connecting to nature. Walking daily to improve my mental health, my self-awareness and my self-respect. It is suitable for my brain and self-efficacy, too. Walking to wire and rewire my brain.
Source: https://darebee.com/programs/vitality-program.html
Swimming for stamina & unplugging
Biking for creativity & cities exploration
Source: photo shot by moi on a bike ride in Chianti, Italy.
Recharging the batteries
Sleeping for mental fitness. Power naps. for memory, digesting what I have done in projects, working on my own, learning, writing down or visualizing. Unplugging. It is about #SlowSocial.
Bottom line
Being in the flow, unplugging, connecting the dots, letting the ideas emerge. This is what I do to self-improve. This is part of my sensemaking routine.
Step 5: Doing on my own.
I also get help from my support life/work system/network and sometimes coaches and mentors. I can reach out to have an exploration call or in-person meeting in my trusted network to ask for feedback, tips, advice, and suggestions.
Step 6: Doing it & reviewing
It is a constant work in progress. Planning the frequent review. Sleeping on ideas and experimentations. Getting back to them over time. Refining.
Impact On Self-Efficacy
Once my navigation/operating system is mapped, I keep upgrading and fulfilling better human connections, conversations, deliberative decision-making, and creativity.
How do cognitive, emotional, and physical waves trigger or block our connectedness, conversation, decision-making, self-efficacy, creativity, and curiosity?
What are the enablers and blocks inside myself, body, mind, heart, and outside from my environment and interactions?
Embodied Exploration’s Conversation
Thank you @changingview @tolja @Connectle_ & the participants of the #21stCenturyExplorers Community for an insightful live conversation. Enjoyed sharing how I explore holistic health while working & learning in the 21st century https://rotanaty.com/2020/03/30/holistic-health — @rotanarotana
Grateful.
“Thank you @changingview for bringing together this conversation with @rotanarotana and @SandraYOtto, and exploring the connection between our physical, emotional and cognitive selves. #21stCenturyExplorers http://connectle.com/explorers” — @connectle_
Looking forward to the following conversation.
“Such a pleasure to host this conversation on Embodied Exploration – how we use our integrated physical, emotional and cognitive wisdom to navigate towards our frontiers. So much more to explore here!” — @changingview
Another gratitude from a fellow explorer:
“So good to see you @rotanarotana and @SandraYOtto in conversation. Two wonderful and inspiring people I’m proud to know. #21stCenturyExplorers” — @sahana2802
I am also mentioned in this blog post by Klara Loots from Antacara Frontiers :
“On Tuesday 7th April we hosted another 21st Century Explorers Community conversation (via Connectle) around the topic of Embodied Exploration – How our physical, emotional and cognitive states are all connected and when working holistically together can drive us farther towards our frontiers. (…)
In this current uncertain time, I have found my mind, my thinking mind, to be overworked. I have a mental check-list that I’m ticking off and although having this to-do list to refer to is in some ways reassuring, I realised after the exercise with Sandra that it very seldom involves considering how I feel or what I really want. (…)
Rotana Ty led us into a conversation about physical movement and holistic health – the connectedness of our bodies and minds. Right now we have been given an opportunity to act, live, and move with more purpose – we have an opportunity to reflect on how our actions (our daily movements and routines) make us feel. We have an opportunity right now to create our own certainty, in these uncertain times, in every decision we make.
We’ve also been given the gift of time. Time that used to be taken up by traffic, long meetings, or school-runs.
Time.
Time to realise that life doesn’t happen to you, you happen to life. When your whole life has been placed into one bubble, one space, you quickly begin to notice how every choice you make (and don’t make) affects your physical, mental, and emotional state.
Time.
Time to think. Time to feel. Time to make more deliberate choices.”
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