“It is far more important to deal with the internal problem than the external symptoms.”

Dr. Caroline Leaf

Occupational Wellness is no easy topic…for anyone. It can feel complicated and out of one’s control. I know my wellness within work has been one of my biggest struggles since I began to build my identity around my career in my 20's.

If I am honest, I’ve been kicking around what to write specifically about occupational wellness, and it hasn’t been easy. Most of what you find online relates to this definition:

Occupational wellness inspires us to prepare for work in which…

My last article was an introduction to the Dimensions of Wellness. Before I dive in to focus on each dimension of wellness individually, I would like to connect the individual dimensions back to an overarching inside-out well-being journey. I believe the answer to pursuing wellness across all dimensions is an inside job. Even though occupational, social, and physical wellness are technically outer life dimensions, as in everything in life, there is a sort of fractal (repeating pattern) happening where everything operates from the inside-out.

DIMENSIONS AND RESOURCES

I have written a lot about what I call an “inside-out wellbeing journey”. It’s a mouth full, and I wonder if readers are grasping my meaning. I think it’s time to add some context and provide some practical information as a takeaway. I choose to use the word “wellbeing” because I like that it incorporates the word “being” as opposed to using the term “wellness”. Although, I would suggest the modern uses of the two terms can be interchangeable.

We no longer think of wellness in terms of just physical health. We have gone through the transition of adding the…

As I dug into research about the inner life, I found a lot of content that brought up the lack of consideration for the inner life in the business world. A lot of old content and an overwhelming amount of new. One clear effect of Covid-19 is the realization that businesses have long been out of touch with the human experience of their people. This disconnect exists between businesses and their most important shareholders — their customers, communities, and employees. (I will refer to shareholders a good bit throughout my writing, and it always means these groups unless noted otherwise.)

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“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.”

Marcus Aurelius

I just finished a series of articles focused on attention. Each article was framed to help us view our attention as a valuable resource that should be ours to control and manage. Whether it be in relation to our intentions, systemic issues, first principles, or our inner life, the direction we put our attention is the direction our lives will follow.

Many of today’s discussions, concerns, and events are rightfully taking our attention and influencing our lives in…

I’ve covered “attention” in a few forms in this series thus far — its value, its relation to intentions, how it is influenced by external systems through ontological design, and how we can accurately think in first principles to pull out of bad designs. To wrap up this series, I feel the most integral part that attention plays in an inside-out wellbeing journey is in our inner lives which communicate outward as a value system.

“Throughout the ages men have been intuitively aware of the existence of an inner center. Greeks: Daimon, Egypt: Ba-soul, Romans: Genius.” — Carl Jung

While…

When I look out into the world today I see so much that I can’t believe. Every day there are more stories that make my heartache for humanity. I ask myself “how did we get here?”

Through this attention series, I zoomed in on the subject of attention to discuss its value and the deeper level of intentional attention. Now, I’d like to zoom out in an effort to shift our attention to the larger picture. …

Part 2 in a Series on Attention

IN NEW LIGHT

I wrote this “Attention” series prior to George Floyd’s death and the resulting past two weeks of growing awareness on the part of our country (or the white majority) in relation to systemic racial injustice. I have contemplated the purpose of publishing the topics I had begun, and I have come to the conclusion that my overarching subject matter of inside-out wellbeing is more important now than ever. Specific to this series, it is extremely important how we use our attention during this American awakening.

In two weeks of conscious listening, learning, and loving, I am growing my empathy for…