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Making Healthy Choices: The Path to Personal Fulfillment, with Deepak Chopra, Co-author, Super Genes
Radical Well-being
Radical well-being is more than the absence of disease infirmity. I think radical well-being is peak performance at all times. So when I think of radical well-being, and I have my own kind of reminders, one is a joyful energetic body. The second is a loving compassionate heart. The third is a reflective alert mind. And the fourth is lightness of being, carefreeness of what these days psychologists call the experience of flow. For me that’s radical well-being, and it comes about by paying attention to your own self. But the self is not just your mind or what some people call consciousness, the self and all its activity: your body, your mind, and your core being.
Easy and Hard Choices for Body and Mind
An easy choice, in terms of your body, could be doing a stretch every so many hours. I actually have gizmos in my body right now that are sending me a message you’ve being sitting too long, take a stretch. A more experimental hard choice would be take a yoga class every day, which I do by the way. So an easy choice could be sit for five minutes and do a reflection or feel your body or your breath. A more difficult choice might be, do 20 minutes of meditation every day. So there’s a spectrum of choices. And for people I say start with what I call minor changes in habit and then see. You feel better. You get feedback from your body. And then it becomes easier to take the more moderately difficult and then what people would consider very difficult.
But they’re not. I mean if I don’t do a yoga class every morning I feel different. It gives me a high. I feel energized. So these things become easier as you do them. Your brain networks respond and your genes get into the habit of doing it automatically once you do it consistently.
Reflection Questions for Getting in Touch with Your Core Being
I teach courses on leadership and management at Kellogg Business School and Columbia Business School. And when I talk to professionals before I even go into the mechanics of how to be a good manager, a good leader, how to fulfill your professional goals, I ask them to write down short answers to certain reflections. So one of them could be, who am I? What do I want? What’s my purpose? What am I grateful for? What are my unique skills or talents and am I using them? What do I want my legacy to be at the end of my life? Do I have any heroes, mentors in history, mythology, religion that I would call role models? What can I learn from them? What kind of world do I want to live in? What kind of a leader do I want to be? What can I give to my team? What do I need from my team? What kind of a business do I want to work with? How is it going to effect meaning and purpose in my life?
These are the most important core questions that reflect who we are, much more important than your bio, which is just other people’s opinion. It’s the what I call your bio reflects the hypnosis of social conditioning. It has nothing to do with who you are. But the questions I said have a lot to do with who you are. And then when you start to writing down your goals, and I think that’s a good thing to have goals, do recognize that success is more than just achieving your goals. Success is the progressive realization of worthy goals. It’s the ability to love and have compassion. Success is also the ability to get in touch with your creative being. If you think of your goals in that setting, then you should be questioning why do you have the goals you have? How is it going to change the quality of your life? And how is it going to change the quality of all those who come in contact with you? And if the answer is going to improve life and the experience of life then those are worthy goals and nothing can stop you, provided you don’t violate the values of your inner being, which are those questions that I just raised.