Filtering the noise to make the best choices

“It is a time to choose what matters and what passes away,
a time to separate what is necessary from what is not.”
—Pope Francis

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 marvelous 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?”

Let your Wellness Moonshot help you.

You’ve already created a personal wellness moonshot on your own or a shared wellness moonshot with your family at home or team at work. Revisit the questions in The Wellness Moonshot quiz and think about who you want to be and what results you want to achieve in your life. Return to these questions every time you come to a major fork in the road.

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Wellness Leadership Is About Making Choices

Think about it this way: We are all living in two worlds, an ever-changing external world full of the advice, fears, expectations and aspirations swimming around us and the world inside ourselves. As a wellness leader, you have the chance and the responsibility to make your inner world vibrant so that your choices impacting the outer world come from a place of equanimity and wellbeing.

Celebrate how your ability to filter helps you lead wellness at home or work! During the week of the full moon, August 2–8, share your experiences on social media. Make sure to include #wellnessmoonshot, and we’ll spread your inspiration to the growing network of wellness leaders worldwide.

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! Our next step in this wellness leadership journey highlights the importance of renewal in helping you lead wellness at work, at home, and in your community.

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Resources

• Revisit the “Are You a Wellness Leader?” quiz to see where you can grow.
• Explore the Wellness Evidence database.
• GWI’s Wellness at Work Initiative Articles and Trends
• Wellbeing Leadership Assessment System, Be Well Lead Well Pulse^®
• Celebrate one of the following observances: International Day of World Indigenous People, International Youth Day or World Humanitarian Day.