You Are Either Growing Or Dying…

Imagine getting up every day full of energy is if you were in your 20s. Again, what would that be? Like?

What would that be worth to you? What is your health worth to

you? Think about it. Your health isn't everything. But without it, everything else is nothing. And yet too many of us are taking it for granted until something goes wrong. No one wakes up hoping to be diagnosed with a disease or chronic illness. And yet, we've never been taught how to be proactive in our health through our school system, or public health. As a registered health coach and integrative health practitioner, I believe it is time this information is made available to everyone. Combining new knowledge around your health and the ability to do my functional medicine lab tests in the comfort of your own home will allow you to optimize your health for today and all your tomorrow's don't wait for your wake up call.

Welcome back to another episode of Don't wait for your wake up call podcast. I am Melissa Deally, your host, and it's the start of a new month. So I have a new theme. But before I dive into that, I want to say thank you very much to Candy Motzek She sent me a wonderful testimonial that I'm just going to share with you. And then we'll dive right into the episode. Candy writes. If you're concerned about maintaining or reclaiming full and vibrant health, then I would highly recommend Melissa she is a heart centered guide with a wealth of knowledge and her passion for her work shines through. Thanks so much candy. I've loved working with you too. So yes, it's a new month new theme. And this month my theme is personal growth. Now you might wonder what does that have to do with my health. And my answer to that is it has absolutely everything to do with your health, as we are simply not taught enough about our health through public health and our education system. And as such, we aren't empowered in our health. But when we choose a path of personal growth, one area we can choose to focus on is our health. As we learn more about nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress, or hormones, the importance of gut health, it allows us to be making better choices in our day to day life and to become empowered in our health and choose to take proactive action in preventing chronic illness. It's definitely not the only area of personal growth. But given that your health is your greatest asset. It might be where you want to start and definitely an area that I encourage you to dig into more, which is why you're here. It's why I offer this podcast. And it's why when I work with my clients, a huge piece of that is focusing on the educational piece, and teaching health empowerment. Once you've regained your health and have fabulous energy, then you can put that in energy into continuing your personal growth, journey and all the other areas of interest to you. Here's a quote from Peter saying that is just perfect for this topic. Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning, we recreate ourselves through learning, we become able to do something we never were able to do before. Through learning we re perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create to be part of the generative process of life. This is within each of us as a deep hunger for this type of learning. So, personal growth is the process of an individual becoming aware of the self followed by taking steps to address the behavior, the attitudes, values, actions, and habits that they wish to change. This process starts first with self awareness, which is something I teach all the time as I asked my clients stop and think about their symptoms. Why do they feel the way they do to first have awareness that they have symptoms that they are symptoms of their body, asking them to do something differently? And to stop just accepting them as signs of aging, allergies, genetics, ignoring them and pushing through their busy life, but to stop and ask, what is this symptom trying to tell me? In doing so that creates deeper self awareness? Self awareness allows you to see yourself honestly and can lead you to making changes that deliver positive outcomes in your life. When I guide my clients through my health kickstart and detox for program, the results that make me the happiest are not the fact that they have less inflammation, less aches and pains better sleep, they've lost some weight, they feel better. But rather when my clients tell me that they have much more awareness around the connection between the food they put in their mouth, and then how they feel. And just about every client reports this at the end of that program, and I absolutely love hearing this, because it tells me they've developed the skills to continue listening to their body, using their self awareness to guide them for the rest of their lives. When we listen to our body, we won't be led astray.

Personal Growth is a process that can be simple or complex, depending on the needs and the wants of the individual. Their pursuit of personal growth is for many a lifelong project of self betterment. But for some could be targeted only at a specific thing they wish to improve. For me, it's become a lifelong journey. Although I didn't always have that mindset. In fact, it was as recently as December 2017, I was at a conference. And a speaker said, I believe we were all put on this earth, to find our purpose, be of service to humanity, and never stop learning. And that really resonated with me. I had already started a personal growth journey a couple years before that, when I was let go from my job. And I was started to reinvent myself and my career at that point. And that triggered my personal growth journey. But until that conference, I believe that at some point, I'd get to the end of that journey, I'd reinvent myself and then that would be that, that I get to the end of my learning, right. But in that moment, my life changed. And for the better, because I realized that there is no end, there is unlimited knowledge in the world, I can't ever begin to know all of it. But I can always be in pursuit of learning more about myself, my passions. So I can show up and serve as my best self every day. Better than I was just the day before, because I learned something new each and every day, from books, from webinars, from courses, from my clients, from my loved ones. As long as I stay open to learning, I can continue to learn. And it's the same for you. So I choose to stay in a state of curiosity and ask why. I read recently in atomic habits by James clear that curiosity is better than being smart. As when we are curious, it motivates us to take action and keep learning. But when we are smart, we can get stuck in that tunnel vision thinking of, Oh, I already know that and miss out on new knowledge, you might already know some of it. But you get to learn that little bit more. It's like I could go back and read atomic habits a year from now. And I would get different learnings from it. Because I learned when I read it this time, what I was ready to learn. But as I continue to grow over the course of the next year, I will be ready to learn new things that I will pick up out of that book next time that I didn't capture this time. And is the same from any source of learning. Sometimes you have to hear things three or four times before they sink in and resonate enough for you to be able to take action, right. So whereas they have to stay open all the time, to what's coming in. And we will learn what we need to learn in that moment. And we may not learn every single thing. But if we were to go back and revisit it a month from now a year from now, we will learn something different. Personal Growth is also often guided or complemented by a mentor that they could be your coach your counselor, your physical therapist, dietician, doctor, boss, business connection, lecturer, personal trainer, parent, friend, you get my point, anyone whose opinion you value enough to act on, but it also doesn't have to be it can be guided by books as well. And I've read many personal growth books. As long as you take action on what you're reading and you don't just read through it and then put the book down and never touch it again. These books very often have action steps for you to be taking and implementing and putting into practice. And as long as you put those lessons into practice, then you are using the book as it should be for your personal growth. And as I said, there are many books available today in the personal growth arena, and I've read some great ones. But I've only just touched the surface. However, if you'd like a recommendation from me, because you're just looking where to get started, feel free to email me at Melissa at your guided health journey.com. And I would be happy to share. If you're enjoying my content, and someone that wants to step into being proactive in your health and learning more,

I would love to invite you to join my membership community. There's a link in the show notes for only 1999 a month, you get access to all of my content. And there's a lot as well as weekly calls that you can come and get your health questions answered. It's truly priceless. I'd love to see you join the community, check out the link in the show notes.

A personal growth journey is a unique process for each individual, and could be made up of an endless variety of topics. Everyone should care about personal growth. And everyone can of course benefit from becoming a better person. And think of all the people in your life that can also benefit from you becoming a better person. In many cases, it is a life event that puts someone on the path of personal growth. And as I said, for me, that was the case, when I was let go after 24 years in one career. I didn't know what I was going to do next. But I knew that I wanted to do something completely different. And because I didn't know what that was, I didn't know who I wanted to become. I started reading and exploring and opening up to the new possibilities that were presenting themselves to me. And I absolutely loved that process. And honestly, if I hadn't been open to that process, I would have never ended up in health and wellness because it just quite frankly, wasn't on my radar. And I had to go through the learning to realize what I didn't know, in order to then find my place of interest where I wanted to learn more. And so I've loved this process. Sometimes though, people may feel inspired and motivated to pursue personal growth by something they encounter in another person from a movie, or a book they read that triggers the start of their journey. It doesn't matter what the trigger is. It just really matters that you start and the process of looking inward and making honest assessments about yourself and where you're at. It can be uncomfortable, painful, cause a little bit of fear to well up inside of you. And that is where the support of a coach or a mentor is important because they will hold you accountable to taking those steps, while also seeing you for the person you're becoming even if you can't see that for yourself yet. Theodore Roosevelt said it well. Nothing in the world is worth having, or doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who lead difficult lives and lead them well. There are a number of questions that are useful to ask yourself to help determine your personal development goals. These include, but are definitely not limited to what values are important to me in terms of honest temperaments integrity, courage, etc. You can Google a list of values, if you're not sure where to start with values, and nothing's coming to you Google the list and see what resonates and then determine what's important to you. What do I want to start doing? What do I want to stop doing? And it might be easier to answer what do I want to stop doing? Before you can even answer the what do I want to start doing? Alongside that? Given that we're all time challenged in many cases, you may feel like well, I don't have time to start doing anything I'm already maxed out, which is why it's really important to also be asking, What do I want to stop doing so that you can create the space to start doing something that you want to do? Start want to learn etcetera? How do I want this process to benefit others in my life, because remember, your personal growth journey does have a spillover effect, a positive spillover effect on all the other people in your life. Another question is, what do I want to get out of this process personally? Why do you want to go through it? What is it you want to learn? How do you as a person want to develop? And what kind of person or character traits would I like to have?

So think about those questions, and start tapping into your personal growth journey. And when it comes to your health, I would love to work with you, if that's an area in which you would like to learn develop, I can recommend courses that I've done, where, you know, people that have inspired me sources of learning that I tap into each and every day. And honestly, from the moment that I stepped into my first health coaching course, I knew I had landed exactly where I wanted to be, I absolutely loved the learning, I realized how much I didn't know. In fact, I was shocked at how much I didn't know about my own body and how it functions etc. And that so much of what I did know had been, you know, taught to me by big pharma and, you know, soaking that up through ads on TV and everything else. And when I learned there was a whole other way, I was just so excited to keep learning, I had literally found my passion, I couldn't get enough of it. I just, I wanted to keep learning. I didn't only do my health coaching courses, I then was doing other online courses alongside that to support that learning. Because I literally realized how much I didn't know. And I wanted to know more about how my body functioned, so that I could set myself up for a life of vibrant longevity, and not end up another statistic with another diagnosis of chronic illness. So what's your passion? Where do you want to learn and if it's in the realm of health, just for learning for yourself, again, feel free to reach out because the courses that I did help you in your day to day life, I believe that if every single person on the planet just did the very first health coaching course that I did, we wouldn't have the sickness that we have in the world today, all the chronic illness. You don't have to make a career out of it. You can just do these courses in order to benefit yourself and your family. So next week on the podcast, I am going to be talking with Jason Cronin and we are talking about the eight dimensions of wellness. All areas in which there is an opportunity to grow personally and develop so that your life feels full in all areas. And then in the episode after that episode 84. I will be back and sharing the top 10 reasons personal growth is important, no matter what your age. So thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing this podcast with anybody that you think that it can benefit. And come back and join us again in the next episode.