Simple Secrets to Better Health - Chapter Thirteen

Your Future of Choice

The defining principle of wellness is that each person must accept responsibility for themselves. When it comes to sickness and disease repair, people count on others to take charge and help them. They are patients and they are dependant. With wellness, each person is in charge of themselves and they need education and support.

In today's world, the bar has been raised. According to author Stephen Covey, being highly effective in today's world is entry level now to survive. To thrive, one must find your passion and then help others find theirs. This applies to your health as well. Since so much of our quality of life is dependant on good health, we must find a way to become passionate about it. Otherwise, we will simply become victims waiting for what life and the government provide next for us.

Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management thinkers of our time, writes, "In a few hundred years, when the history of our time is written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event those historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it."

We are moving from a world where governments and business were providing education, medical care benefits, pension plans and more to a world of increasing choice and self management. While The Simple Secrets to Better Health identifies a balanced diet, moderate exercise and supplementing our nutrition as the three pillars of health, nothing will happen until you choose to take control. The sooner we choose to make this shift, the more we will have the opportunity to not only survive, but to thrive. Central to this realization is the fact that no one can do this for you.

The foundation of this whole concept is the fact that we have the freedom to choose. The size of that space between stimulus and response is to a large degree ours to determine. Sometimes genetic, environmental and present circumstances make that space very small, but it still exists.

STIMULUS >>> FREEDOM TO CHOOSE >>> RESPONSE

Imagine you wake up in the morning to realize that you slept through the alarm. That is the stimulus. Now you are free to choose how to respond. If it is your day off, you would probably choose to respond with a relaxed smile and no physiological body response. If it is a working day, you might jump out of bed, heart racing, blood pressure rising, skip breakfast, the free radicals would be going off like fireworks and you would have oxidative stress. Your body responds with inflammation. The stimulus of sleeping through the alarm was the same in both cases. Our choice of response was totally different.

To change, we must first realize that this space exists. One of the most obvious signs of not realizing it is there is blaming. When we blame, we give away our power. Your boss's fault, your parent's fault, the doctor's fault, the government's fault or the weather's fault all serve to shrink your "freedom to choose" space.

Smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, nutritional deficiencies and excessive drinking are choices we make that will shrink our "freedom to choose" space. A balanced diet, moderate exercise and quality supplementation to insure adequate nutrition are choices that will expand your "freedom to choose" space. The choice is yours.

Will you make changes in your life based on what you have learned from The Simple Secrets to Better Health? Will you use it to help yourself and others expand their "freedom to choose" space and their health? The choice to recognize, to learn, to act and to teach are yours:)

Click here to return to the chapter index
Click here to proceed to the June 2006 monthly letter