Creating habits is key to creating a holistic lifestyle. Below is a basic outline of how to create holistic habits that align with your life.
1. Meet Yourself Where You’re At The first step in habit creation is meeting yourself where you’re at. You have to get ~uncomfortably~ honest with yourself and asses where you’re at. It’s tempting to think about where you want to be or where you think you should be.
But in order to grow and to create the lifestyle you want, it’s crucial to understand where you’re at right at this moment.
Take into consideration each element of holistic living – mind, body, and soul. Dig in to see if you can pinpoint areas that are affecting each other.
2. Focus on One Thing at a Time
You can’t do everything all at once or you’ll go crazy, and you also won’t be able to make lasting change. Instead, pick one (or just a few) areas of your life that need the most nourishment, and focus on that thing. Remember that even if you select an area of your life that seems like it’s in just one category, it will be affected by and affect the other categories.
For example, if you want to have more energy you might need to create better sleep patterns (body), reduce stress (mind), and control the energy you give to others (soul). Having more energy is still a pretty big topic, so I would encourage you to break bigger topics like these into smaller, bite-sized chunks.
3. Research + Learn
Once you’ve determined the area in your life that needs the most growth, it’s time to dive into research and learning about that topic.
Since all of our holistic journeys are different, it will require research and learning on your part to discover the best strategies to implement into your life. You can find information in bookstores, on blog posts, and even on Pinterest. There are so many great thinkers and leaders in the holistic lifestyle realm, so take time to find the ones who resonate most with you.
Remember that a lot of learning comes from trial and error in your own life. It can be discouraging, but trial and error is part of the process of discovering what works best for your life.
4. Set Purposeful Intentions
Since holistic living is a lifestyle and not a destination, it’s often best to start by setting intentions instead of goals. Of course, you’ll need to break those intentions down into small goals to take action toward your intentions.
Intentions help us create a lifestyle rather than achieve a specific goal because they keep us in the present moment and focus on how we want to live each day.
Here’s an example:
Goal: Stop feeling guilty after spending money
Intention: cultivate a healthy money mindset
The word ‘stop’ in the goal implies an end result. It implies that you will not feel better (or be better) until you reach that end goal. The intention, however, can be integrated into each day in different ways as you continue to grow.
We can only live in the present. So, setting intentions that help us enjoy life each day on the journey is what we’re aiming for.
5. Integrate Sustainable Action
Once you’ve set intentions, you can then set smaller goals or tasks to take sustainable action and create habits that help you build a holistic lifestyle. The key is that whatever action you take, you need to be able to sustain it over time since you’re creating a lifestyle.
As you continue to grow on your holistic lifestyle journey, these habits will change and evolve based on your needs at any given time.
Once you start to integrate changes in one aspect of your life and it becomes a part of your lifestyle, you integrate changes into other aspects of your life as well by repeating these steps. Go back to step one and re-assess where you’re at now and begin again.
Excerpts from Introduction to Holistic Living for Beginners: Wild Grove Essentials