Mental health encompasses the emotional, psychological, and social well-being of an individual. It involves the ability to handle pain and stress, maintain fulfilling relationships, work productively, and make informed decisions. Holism is the concept of viewing the body, mind, and spirit as interconnected and interdependent, recognizing individuals as integrated beings with physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions.
Remember that to have you must first do. In order to do you must become. Becoming implies learning something new and then applying your new found knowledge. If you have enough knowledge right now which you are not acting upon, then you must focus. All that needs to be done is to schedule those known activities onto your to do list to make sure they get done. As you learn new subjects and gain a working knowledge of your new ideas, you become more interesting. You gain credibility as the one who knows and understands.
Become a valuable person
You become more valuable to those around you as you put your new found knowledge and skills into practice and start to perfect them. As your self-love and self respect increases also does your capacity to give to others and everybody wins. You must strive to become a person of value. When you are successful you are not always valuable but when you are valuable you are always successful. A valuable person is of great worth to fellow mankind. You need to serve a person to be of worth to them. You have to sincerely and genuinely love yourself to be able to give sincere love to others. You need a wholesome self respect and self love not self centred or egotistical love. Being true to your values creates self acceptance, self love and self respect. You will find integrity where your righteous values and your actions meet. You need to list your values and do a self evaluation to create a list of the most important becoming goals.
Prosper
You must aim at prosperity and peace as your highest ideal. You must keep in mind that wealthy people are not necessarily successful in all areas of their lives. Whenever you have a losing experience in any one of the major areas of your life it affects the whole person and affects your self-image negatively. You can self actualise in one area of your life and be recognised in that area only. This is better than not self actualising at all. You need to achieve your ideals in all areas of your life to be a completely self actualised person.
Self-actualize
Your aim is to become a self-actualised person. Self actualised individuals realize their dreams in action. They are admired, respected and esteemed for their great achievements. They have a capacity to develop a balance between their physical, social, mental, spiritual, financial and family life achievements. They are no longer dependent on the praise of others because they are so highly respected and esteemed by others. Their purpose for living takes on a nobler aspect than trying to satisfy their selfish needs. Self-actualisers are financially independent therefore they have more time to be creative because they are not bogged down with basic needs that have to be met. They are more philanthropic because they have the financial resources and time to benefit those less fortunate than themselves. They have more time and money to afford personal development and they constantly strive to be better quality people.
Self-actualizers have already developed their personal faith level to such a high degree; they truly know that nothing is impossible. They have already exercised their creative powers to such a high degree that they believe in creation and believe and trust in a creator. How do you reach this level of development? You need to work on your physical needs, security needs, social needs; esteem needs and finally on self-actualization needs.
You need to satisfy your needs for fresh air, water, food, shelter and sex. These are physiological needs. Two types of security govern your life i.e. physical and emotional. Physical or extrinsic security includes money in the bank, investments, insurance policies, medical aid, employment and a salary, etc. Emotional or intrinsic security includes belief, faith, self confidence and self image.
Become confident
Self confidence is a result of knowing where you stand, knowing where you want to go and knowing how to get there. Self confidence is developed through the becoming process. Practice makes perfection and faith is required to practice. Self image is a combination of self love, self acceptance, self respect and self worth. To be loved, accepted, respected you need to first love, accept and respect yourself. You need to be an outstanding achiever and that means doing what the average person usually shies away from. Self image determines what you will achieve. You establish expectations for yourself and then proceed to fulfil those expectations. If your expectations are high you will achieve exceptionally. The opposite is also true. To have high expectations you have to be worthy of them. As you establish growth in your life and start to develop new skills and abilities you develop new strengths which were once weaknesses. You can live successfully with internal security even in the scarcity of extrinsic security. When you have faith alone, you can perform miracles. You have to take risks from time to time and that will threaten your security.
To discover your potential you need to develop inner security. Belief is the foundation of inner security. Belief is the foundation of all achievement. Belief comes from past experience or seeing others doing similar things. A goal with a specific detailed plan also creates belief. Most losers believe they will make it someday, yet they do nothing about it. That is because belief is passive. To put your belief into action, you need faith. Faith requires no guarantees. Faith is courageous and hopeful. Faith is willing to put beliefs into the test. You discover hidden talents and abilities when you put your ideas to the test. You start to discover a potential power you were unaware of before. You are endowed with an ability to see and do more with each action you take. You gain a depth of understanding about people and life that you never had before. Your inner fears diminish as your internal faith increases as faith and fear cannot occupy the same body at the same time. Faith causes you to persist even in the absence of immediate results.
Develop self esteem
You have to prove to yourself that you are worthy of self esteem before you can achieve it. The most tangible way of proving your worth is to attain a high status level in all areas of your life. Recognition by others of your worth comes through that status. You need to acknowledge that it is not the recognition or status that most individuals require. Most people are looking for the respect they receive for being such great achievers. Some have not reached that level and would want to be accepted first. Others who do not have meaningful relationships would want love above all. There is a marked difference between acceptance and respect. When you are accepted others listen to what you say. When you are respected others do what you say. Respect means reverence, awe, high regard, honour, homage, idolisation, hero worship, admire, adore, look up to and pay tribute to. If you still fear rejection in any form, then you can safely assume that you still want acceptance from others.
To esteem means to think highly of, to honour, respect and find worth in. Those who have reached a high level of self esteem no longer have a need to prove their worth to others. They do have a need to prove their own potential to themselves. Unlike the self-actualiser, those who have esteem are proud of their personal achievements. They believe that they are largely responsible for what they have whereas self-actualisers give gratitude to their Creator for their talents and abilities and for all they have.
Set Goals
The solution to all your problems is goal setting. The goal allows you to measure progress even before the results are achieved. The plan helps you to break down seemingly impossible tasks into achievable steps. Each time you take an action step towards your goal you increase your faith, self confidence and self image. Goal setting helps you focus on what is important to you. When you set goals you immediately start to control your own circumstances rather than allowing circumstances to control you. As you apply the principle of goal setting to your life, you realise that the same principles apply to every obstacle you face in life. You start to see that there is no obstacle that is insurmountable providing you break it down into small enough steps. You must make sure that your goals and dreams are based on your values, not society’s values. Choose a lifestyle that really excites you. Winners know that it is the striving and not having that brings sense of achievement. Remember that life is a journey and you hold the road maps. You need to be emotional about the things you want to have, the person you want to become and the things you would like to do. You must develop mental images of the future you. When you are passionate about the things you want in life, you are prepared to go the extra mile to fulfil your dreams. To be passionate about your goals, you need to look at the end result benefits of your goals and see whether those benefits touch your soul. Start to visualise the new you. Take time to meditate each day and think about the future you. Pictures of the future will help to motivate you. You need re-ignite the passion about life and living. You can give your self-image a tremendous boost by simply planning your day and committing to seeing that plan through. Losers seek out those activities that bring instant gratification. They tend to ignore the mundane daily tasks. Know that the greatest feelings of self respect and self worth come from doing the mundane boring daily tasks. Remember that success is a journey. Realise that goals are merely there to stretch your mind and capabilities. Understand that success comes from the striving towards goals. Remember that exciting goals require routine tasks and you must tackle daily tasks with enthusiasm knowing that each task brings your goals closer.
You must focus on your wants not your needs then there will be greater sense of anticipation and therefore a greater urgency to get things done. When you have a specific purpose for living and clearly defined goals along the way with specific plans for their attainment, you start to put the principle of expectancy into motion. Remember that mental attitude counts a lot in success. You must use auto suggestion and repetition to count your current blessings one by one and add the desired blessing on your daily routine of four-hourly reaffirmations. You must fine tune your ability to see things in your mind’s eye as if they were already happening. You need to spend at least fifteen minutes daily to visualise your life as you want it to be. Be specific and add sound and taste and smell to your picture. Make sure you pursue dreams which are exciting to you.
Published by Dr BA Mabaso, MB ChB, DHSM, MBA, MPhil
