When I was a child, I went through a phase of being very negative. Chalk it up to a difficult season, temperament, tween year angst—I am not sure. But I definitely had a time when what went through my mind and came out of my mouth was not the most positive. People around me noticed and of course did not respond favorably. After this went on for a while, I decided I wanted people to be happy to see me and I was also tired of feeling miserable myself.
Yolanda Brailey
How do you define the word “hope?” Do you define it as wishful thinking or some ethereal ideal that sounds nice, but feels unachievable? The American Psychological Association (APA) defines hope as “the expectation that one will have positive experiences or that a potentially threatening or negative situation will not materialize or will ultimately result in a favorable state of affairs” (www.psychologytoday.com). Notice that the APA acknowledges that threatening and negative situations exist as do the possibility (or hope) that these situations can become better. I would like to suggest that this could be called “informed hope” versus “blind hope.” We can have informed hope which recognizes the troubles that threaten our world while still holding onto the belief that change is possible.
In the practical section of this month’s blog, I encouraged you to take some time to consider the following areas of health: emotional health, social health, physical health, spiritual health, intellectual health, environmental health, occupational health and financial health. I hope you were able to identify not only areas that need improvement, but areas in your life where you feel like you are doing well.
What do you think of when you think of the word “health?” Do you think about your physical or mental health? These are the first two that come to my mind. However, there are many types of health. Years ago, I spoke with someone who was studying what they called “different types of intelligence.” She talked to me about how someone can be musically intelligent or mathematically intelligent. In a similar way, there are different types of health. A person may have fantastic physical health, but poor financial health. Or vice versa, someone may have solid financial health, but poor physical health. Just as there are different types of intelligence, there are different types of health. For this piece, we will focus on 8 different types of health. They are: emotional health, social health, physical health, spiritual health, intellectual health, environmental health, occupational health and financial health.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” This quote comes from Viktor Frankl who survived the Holocaust and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. It is a good place to start when talking about gratitude.
Control is mostly an illusion. We can control some things—such as the clothes we pick out to put on each day, the food we take into our bodies and how we spend our time. And yet, there are so many things we cannot control. And most of these are big things.
