Intention - How We move to Action
By: Colleen Rivers, MD
People often ask me how I ended up a speaker on lifestyle and health from a career in Emergency Medicine. It’s a fair question. Emergency physicians are the most clinical of clinicians, trained to stabilize sick patients, treat acute issues, and get people where they need to be (e.g., home or admitted to the hospital.) In many cases, we lack the time and bandwidth to talk to patients about how their lifestyles can improve their medical problems or where they are headed if they don’t make changes. However, what I have seen in the ER compels me to talk about it. I have taken care of the elderly with dementia who don’t recognize their own children, for patients with advanced diabetes who face amputations, and for persons with severe depression who are considering harming themselves. My heart has been broken by the countless people suffering from diseases that may have been avoided or could be improved by small changes in lifestyle. These are things like eating better, moving more, sleeping enough, and improving our thought content and the quality of our relationships. I find that most people want to do better but struggle to make change. In my mission to empower them, my greatest tool is to help them live intentionally. Since this concept is more popular in yoga studios than health articles, I will explain what I mean and how to make it actionable.
When I say to live with intention, I mean to get clear on your purpose in life and who you want to be, then ensure your choices align with that. The easiest way to start is to see if you can write the purpose of your life in one sentence. Consider it a mission statement of your own little company. How can a business be successful if it doesn’t know its goal? The same is true for us. We need to define what is important to us so we can say “yes” to more things that support our mission and “no” to the things that don’t. Once you’ve got your sentence down, I challenge you to start putting words to who you want to be in every aspect of your life. Whether it’s a parent, spouse, friend, or professional — describe the best version of yourself and start letting this vision inform your decisions. The research tells us that people who know the purpose of their lives tend to live longer and to be healthier. Wouldn’t it make sense that we should develop our sense of purpose just as we work to improve the other facets of our health?
No matter where you are in the process of hashing out these big questions, I have an exercise that will help set your course. I start my workshops with it and return to it myself when my habits have gone completely sideways. Get a pen and paper and describe your ideal life at eighty-years-old. In other words, depict the life you want — not the one you think you must have. Visualize, in detail, how you want to feel physically and emotionally and how you hope to function mentally. Who are the people you will spend time with, and what will you do?
My vision is to be a strong wife, mother, and grandmother, and my days are to be spent moving, laughing and loving those around me. I must keep this image up front every single day; often it’s the last part of my morning reflection. Without this North Star, I struggle to prioritize things like leafy greens, going to bed on time, and sticking with a daily meditation. Yet I’ve already seen the result of my default habits when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty. If I want better for my one chance at this beautiful life, then I need to do better.
None of us are exempt from a bad diagnosis. I know that with even the healthiest of lifestyles, there are factors outside our control. However, my point is that we can still optimize the things we can control, making our chance of a bad diagnosis less and making us more resilient if we do face one. By getting clear on our purpose and and the vision of our later years, we gain the motivation to make those simple but often difficult changes. By doing so, we just might find ourselves becoming who we were meant to be all along!
Dr. Colleen Rivers is the founder and CEO of Seek, a health and wellness platform that empowers people to take back ownership of their own health. Its overarching philology is that the act of seeking — or taking one small step toward your healthiest self — is in itself transformative. Visit her website: www.seektransformation.com