Emotional Fitness® - The Missing Link by Warren Redman

Joggers out along the river paths at lunchtime, health food stores booming, the internet zooming, yoga studios bursting with students. You don't have to look far to see how we are becoming more and more health conscious. Now it's time to take a look at the missing link.

Back in ancient Greece it was known that to be fully healthy we need to attend to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual selves. Now, 3,000 or so years later we tend to have forgotten, or rather ignored the emotional aspect of our fitness. Until, that is, Daniel Goleman came along a couple of years ago with his best-seller, Emotional Intelligence.

In his more recent book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, Goleman emphasizes that the stronger we are in our self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills, the more successful we are likely to be. An earlier psychotherapist, Dr. Eugene Heimler, taught that we need a healthy balance between our satisfactions and frustrations. Heimler was a survivor of concentration camps during WWll and knew something about total frustration. He later began to understand how he had survived. Later still he taught at the University of Calgary how we can now survive more successfully in society. The most important ingredient is our emotional health.

Your Whole Health Check

So you're great at keeping your body in trim; you are increasingly conscious about what you eat and you attend to your spiritual self in your own way. The chances are, if all that is true, you are also emotionally fit. But how do you know?

Here's a simple test to see how well you are doing in each of the four areas of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual fitness.

Give yourself five points for every definite yes, and zero for a definite no, with something in between for those uncertain areas. (You can be the judge)

Physical Fitness

1 Your weight is within the suggested healthy limits for your height, sex and age

2 Your body feels good

3 You take regular exercise

4 You have at least an annual physical test that shows everything is fine

5 You eat lots of vegetables and fruit, drink plenty of water and are careful about fatty foods

Mental Fitness

1 You feel alert most of the time

2 You read or study regularly

3 You engage regularly in mental exercises (word games etc)

4 You are stimulated by new problems

5 You can figure out logical brain-teasers

Emotional Fitness

1 You feel good about your life

2 You feel confident about your abilities and are aware of your weaknesses

3 You feel comfortable whether alone or in the presence of other people

4 You can handle change and challenges with a positive attitude

5 When you feel frustrated, you believe you can change things for the better

Spiritual Fitness

1 You have a sense of meaning and purpose in your life

2 You take time to be in nature and take notice of it

3 You make sure that you spend some time developing your creative side

4 You feel connected with the world

5 You love the mystery of life

If you have 100 points, you are the healthiest person who ever lived, or a biased judge.

Emotional Health Helps Success

Daniel Goleman's book is based on several years' research that showed how little emotional intelligence there is around, simply because we tend to value mental intelligence so much more. Eugene Heimler showed that where we are not emotionally healthy we do not function well in any areas of our lives. My own discoveries show that most of us don't function as well as we could because of our relative lack of emotional fitness.

Take for example, the levels of stress, displayed in sickness and absenteeism in Canada's corporate world. Take the recent outbreaks of violence in our schools. Most of this is due to the high incidence of frustration, a symptom of emotional unfitness.

In our work or personal lives, our relationships with ourselves and other people, our feelings of adequacy or inadequacy, our self-esteem and confidence, it's our emotional fitness that determines our success.

How Emotionally Fit Are You?

Here's a checklist of questions so that you can see where you can improve your emotional health.

1 Do you express anger properly and safely?

2 Do you ask for what you want, yet are not attached to the outcome?

3 Are you comfortable about showing your emotions?

4 Do you share your feelings with others?

5 Do you sometimes feel guilty?

6 Are you happy with your life?

7 Do you feel that you use your strengths well?

8 Are you aware of other people's feelings as well as your own?

9 Are you adaptable to change?

10 Can you laugh at yourself?

11 Do you feel secure?

12 Do you have close friends?

13 Are you patient with other people?

14 Do you always find interest in what is going on?

15 Are you satisfied with the present, rather than concerned about the past or future?

16 Do you feel good when you are alone?

17 Do you feel good with other people?

18 Are you motivated to develop yourself?

19 Do you deal with conflict well?

20 Do you hate checklists like this?

- Warren Redman