The Wellness Moonshot: A World Free of Preventable Disease is the first global commitment to eradicate preventable, chronic diseases. Launched in 2017, by the non-profit Global Wellness Institute (GWI), The Wellness Moonshot provides information and resources for individuals and companies to create cultures of wellness worldwide.
With strategic partners in China, Israel and India, and collaboration with Prevention magazine, The Wellness Moonshot has gone truly global – bringing the GWI’s mission to fight preventable disease to millions worldwide.
In support of The Wellness Moonshot: A World Free of Preventable Disease, GWI provides ideas and information on a different wellness theme each month as part of The Wellness Moonshot Calendar: A Year of Inspiration. These monthly insights are curated by the GWI and Renee Moorefield, chair of the Wellness at Work Initiative and CEO of Wisdom Works, to help you create a culture of wellness within your home, organisation or community. Think of each month’s The Wellness Moonshot as a guide or “lesson plan” to empower wellness. Plus, invite others to join in The Wellness Moonshot! Here’s this month’s Wellness insight.
AUGUST 2020
At some point, your path of being a wellness leader will get murky. Inviting your family members to eat healthier, encouraging your team to embrace gratitude, or motivating your workforce to integrate physical activity throughout the workday isn’t as straightforward as it may have seemed when you first began your journey.
One reason why? Too much advice is likely coming at you from all directions. From health practitioners to wellness companies to lifestyle gurus to friends, these days, everyone has jumped on the wellness bandwagon – often flooding you with conflicting points of view. If you take every perspective as gospel, it’s bound to be confusing.
How do you filter out the Wellness Noise?
Mother Nature is a brilliant teacher. Across our planet, mosses and mushrooms remove toxins and contaminants from water to restore its balance. Oysters are like the ocean’s kidneys, eliminating pollution from the seas. Microorganisms, in rich soil, access, conserve and channel nutrients and water to benefit plants. Just like Mother Nature, you too possess this inherent ability to filter – to comb through, sift out, clarify and direct. And at the heart of this ability is your power to choose.
During one of the most difficult times we’ve shared around our globe, this year’s Coronavirus pandemic, spiritual leader Pope Francis affirmed, “It is a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not.” This is such invaluable wisdom. Being faced with uncertainty doesn’t mean you’re helpless. Just the opposite. It means that you have choices. The question is: How do you make the best choices on your wellness leadership journey?
There isn’t one right answer – Yet, you must choose anyway
Your job as a wellness leader is to blaze a path. Leading wellness for yourself and others isn’t a technical problem you can fix with advice, even if that advice is useful. Wellness sciences and best practices are worthwhile, for sure, yet they cannot capture the entirety of wellbeing. We humans are too marvellous and bewildering!
Leading wellness is a more profound commitment. It means continually questioning what creates wellbeing for you and the people you serve, listening to and acting on the insights that emerge, learning from your actions, and helping yourself and others navigate the journey. You are unique, and so is your wellness leadership. Therein lies the root of the challenge: There is no one right answer to leading wellness. However, you must make choices daily to promote health and wellbeing for loved ones and colleagues within circumstances that are constantly evolving.
Actions to help you filter
Leading wellness is a challenge, yes. But it isn’t insurmountable. Many wellness leaders find this very challenge—winnowing the wheat from the chaff—the greatest source of innovation and learning. When it comes to filtering out the wellness noise on your particular path, see if these strategies will help:
Be discerning about your wellness inputs
Are the sources you pay attention to credible? Are they open to other points of view? Or do some sources attempt to sway you with fear, manipulation or bias? Think about who is influencing you as a wellness leader and decide which inputs are actually worth your attention. A wellness brand or media channel you follow may be well-meaning but lack the qualifications to back up its own advice.
Learn to listen to yourself
When you give away your authority to external sources, you can easily lose sight of what you know. Ironically, one of the best filtering tools in your arsenal is to listen more deeply to yourself. But that’s hard to do if you don’t carve out time. How might you plug into your own wisdom? First, take a nourishing breath. Then spend a few minutes (each day, if possible) reflecting on your wellness journey.
When you dig deep, what do you sense is beginning to unfold? And what do you intuitively know about the twists and turns that lie ahead? Write your answers down and add to them as new insights come to you. Use this listening practice with families, friends and colleagues to help them tap into their inner knowing, too.
Use crisis as a wellness advantage
Great wisdom lives in difficulties. Crises often reveal to us what we genuinely value – our physical health and vitality, our close relationships, our freedoms – and they help us clarify that which no longer serves our wellbeing. Together, we are learning from the Coronavirus pandemic and the global movement for social justice. Moreover, we can help our family and organization mine these challenges for good by asking, “How will we use this time to reset our lives and work with wellbeing?”
Join The Wellness Moonshot Celebration
Each month the GWI hosts a celebration on the day of the full moon to honour the incredible work wellness leaders are doing around the world to create a world free of preventable disease. Follow on Instagram #WellnessMoonshot
Source: Global Wellness Institute
