Back in 2018 (or maybe 2019), I was doing my weekly Personal Retrospective and realized something unusual: I’ve felt incredibly good for the past several months. My overall state of being just felt… healthy.
Because I’m a manager, my brain immediately went into reverse-engineering this “accidental” success. Whatever I was doing was working, so how could I be more pragmatic about it? I started that particular journey by literally googling “what does being healthy mean.” That led to a bunch of university pages aimed at keeping freshmen alive, and most of those pages broke health down into 6 to 8 categories. I took their baseline, added a bit of my own flavor, and landed on my own 10 dimensions.
The 10 Dimensions
Here is how I define it for myself:
- Physical: The body - exercise, sleep, and diet.
- Intellectual: Am I challenged? Am I pushing my mind? (Ties heavily into my core value of learning & growth).
- Emotional: My capacity to experience a full range of emotions and process them in a healthy way.
- Social: The quality of my contact with friends, extended family, and colleagues.
- Spiritual: Simply put: recognizing that my life has meaning and purpose.
- Financial: The state of my income, investments, and savings.
- Occupational: Do I actually like what I do? Am I excited to wake up on a Monday?
- Avocational: Hobbies outside of work and family that give me a necessary change of scenery.
- Spousal (*): The health of my marriage and relationship with my wife.
- Parental (*): My relationship with my son.
* - Note: Spousal and Parental could technically be “Social,” but I intentionally separate them to ensure they get dedicated focus.
How I use this
This list doesn’t just sit in a drawer somewhere. During my journaling sessions, I regularly list these 10 categories out and score them from 1 to 10.
The goal isn’t optimization for its own sake, or trying to achieve a perfect 10 across the board. Instead, I look for small, incremental maintenance. For any lagging category, I use a simple writing prompt: “What is one thing that would bump me up a single notch?”