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Emotional Wellness is the ability to
acknowledge and accept a wide range of feelings in oneself as well
as in others. It is being able to freely express and manage one's
own feelings to develop a positive self-image and to arrive at
personal decisions based on the integration of attitudes and
behaviors. Emotional wellness is achieved by continually working on
positive self-esteem, relationships that are rich in satisfaction,
and learning to meet life’s challenges with resilience.
Characteristics of
Emotional Wellness:
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Self confidence in our abilities and talents |
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Self acceptance |
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Recognizing our problems |
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Ability to find solutions for problems and issues |
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Coping through challenges in healthy ways |
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Managing our feelings and emotions |
Our emotional well
being can be compared to circus juggling. When all is going
smoothly, the areas of our life are juggled with ease, creating
synergy and stability. When life events tip our emotions, these same
areas can get out of sync and life appears unbalanced. Emotions such
as anger, worry, and grief are a part of life. When one or more of
these begin to consume our thoughts and our days, they can damage
our personal relationships with friends and family as well as
seriously hurt our professional associations.
The Need for
Emotional Wellness
Edward Hallowell writes
that modern office life is
turning steady executives into frenzied underachievers:
“[This] experience is
becoming the norm for overworked managers who suffer—like many of
your colleagues, and possibly like you—from a very real but
unrecognized neurological phenomenon that I call attention deficit
trait, or ADT. Caused by brain overload,
ADT is now
epidemic in organizations. The core symptoms are distractibility,
inner frenzy, and impatience.
“I have
observed firsthand how a rapidly growing segment of the adult
population is developing this ... condition. The number of people
with ADT coming into my clinical practice has mushroomed by a
factor of ten in the past decade.
“Blessed with
the largest cortex in all of nature, owners of this
trillion-celled organ today put singular pressure on the frontal
and prefrontal lobes [which] guide decision making and planning.
... As long as our frontal lobes remain in charge, everything is
fine.
“Beneath the
frontal lobes lie the parts of the brain devoted to survival.
These deep centers govern basic functions ... as well as crudely
positive and negative emotions. When you are doing well and
operating at peak level, the deep centers send up messages of
excitement, satisfaction, and joy. They pump up your motivation,
help you maintain attention, and don’t interfere with working
memory, the number of data points you can keep track of at once.
But when you are confronted with the sixth decision after the
fifth interruption in the midst of a search for the ninth missing
piece of information on the day that the third deal has collapsed
and the 12th impossible request has blipped unbidden
across your computer screen, your brain begins to panic, reacting
just as if that sixth decision were a bloodthirsty, man-eating
tiger.
“Intelligence dims. In a futile attempt to do more than is
possible, the brain paradoxically reduces its ability to think
clearly.”
Overloaded
Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform,
Edward M. Hallowell, Harvard Business Review January 2005
Do you know …
The Characteristics of Resilient People?
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Ability to "bounce back" and "recover from almost anything"
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Have a "where there's a will, there's a way" attitude
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Tendency to see problems as opportunities |
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Ability to "hang tough" when things are difficult
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Capacity for seeing small windows of opportunity and making
the most of them |
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Have deep-rooted faith in a system of meaning |
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Have a healthy social support network |
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Have the wherewithal to competently handle many different
kinds of situations |
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Have a wide comfort zone |
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Able to recover from experiences in the panic zone or of a
traumatic nature |
Examples of
Resilient People:
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Helen Keller
Blind and deaf from birth; demonstrated remarkable resilience in
learning how to communicate and live with passion. |
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Nelson Mandela
Jailed for decades in South Africa during apartheid; later became
leader of the country. |
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Anne Frank
Jewish girl who kept a famous diary and notes while hiding from
Nazis; later died in a concentration camp. |
What is Psychological
Resilience,
http://www.wilderdom.com/psychology/resilience/PsychologicalResilience.html
Achieving excellence in Emotional Wellness
You’re well on
your way to mastery of Emotional Wellness when you can easily:
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Talk with someone about emotional concerns |
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Say “no” without feeling guilty |
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Feel good about who you are |
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Consider yourself a generally happy person |
Emotional wellness
is demonstrated by the acceptance of a full range of feelings.
Positive emotions such as happiness, excitement, contentment, and
love contribute to our overall sense of well-being. When these
feelings are available to us, we can meet emotional needs
constructively. They lead us to maintain a positive attitude, high
self-esteem, and a strong self-image. When we are in touch with our
range of emotions, we stand a greater chance of leading a healthy
life.
Tips for optimal
Emotional Wellness development:
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Work to develop a positive self image |
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Maintain a healthy support system of friends, family and
colleagues |
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Face challenges with optimism |
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Remove internal roadblocks by believing in yourself |
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Accept your limitations and engage others to assist you
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Sandra Larkin Wellness Strategies enables your organization to build corporate resiliency
with Custom Wellness Workshops. The design and development of
our Wellness Workshops are intended to meet the specific needs of
your associates and to assist them in viewing the bigger picture.
They deepen the strengths and expand the flexibility needed for
ongoing change.
Personal Wellness
Coaching as well as Executive
Coaching is available to build a lasting and firm foundation for
team development, leadership skills and strategic direction. Over
time, consistent coaching, workshops, and team building increase
associates’ time management, productivity and efficiency enabling
the organization to operate at peak performance. |
