Dr. MJ Bazos MD,
Patient Handout
Seven Steps
to Optimal Wellness
When negative events affect how you think and
feel at any moment, it's easy
to lose sight
of your personal power. After all, when difficult people are acting up, it's
easy to become a helpless victim--blaming others for the sorry state of affairs.
It's harder to take responsibility for overcoming your daily obstacles to
maintaining optimal well-being on the job. The fact is, quality of life is
contingent upon your willingness to take responsibility for each process and
every outcome at any given moment.
What might life be like if you were to
realize and express your optimal potential? How much easier
would it be to master each and every challenge you face? What
might you need in order to overcome on-the-job obstacles to self-esteem and
professional success? Can you transcend the uncomfortable circumstances of your
life and career to rejoice in your health, happiness, and greater stress-free
productivity? This article provides the nuts and bolts--knowledge and skills--to
do just that; rejoice in your personal power.
A NEW BEGINNING
Believe it or not, you already
have everything you need for career enrichment and life fulfillment. You have an
incredible mind, body, emotions, imagination, intuition, and will to make
positive choices for better health and living. You even maintain a spiritual
nature which automatically empowers your state of well-being. Now it's up to you
to use your innate endowment for the benefit of all. You have the ability to
constantly experience love, create happiness, be productive and fulfill your
greatest goals. It's all a matter of choice, and the choice is yours right NOW!
It's actually very easy once you learn the basics to help yourself and others
move through fear, frustration, and limitation to love, faith, and creative
self-expression. It takes time to master the dynamics, but miracles are possible
and readily available.
Self-discipline
is what's needed to achieve more than you ever
dreamed
possible. The following seven steps
will assure your success in life, a
more
enjoyable career in dentistry, and
support you on your way to achieving self-mastery,
career-enrichment, life-fulfillment, more love, health, happiness, optimally
satisfying relationships, and the power to be all you can.
SEVEN STEPS
1. First Clarify your
values, goals and purpose
-- What's really important to you?
List your first, second and third most valued desires and why you feel so
strongly about them. Pray and meditate on these as your most precious goals to
be achieved. Visualize them daily, ideally while relaxed and focused.
Endeavor to determine your unique
purpose in life. What heart-felt yearnings inspire you? Everyone longs to be
productive in some meaningful way. Certainly, promoting health, serving the
needs of others is very important. Are there any other social service crusades
to which you long to subscribe? Clarify these and set personal goals for
life-long learning, career-enrichment, and life-fulfillment based on this
knowledge and motivation.
2. Develop an action plan
-- After considering your values
and goals, establish priorities. Develop a step by step action plan to achieve
your goals. Record on paper, or better yet, in your ongoing journal, what you
will need to have, do, or be to manifest your dreams. For every need or action
step, seek mentors or experts in the field to emulate. There's no need to
reinvent any wheels. Do what successful people are doing and you will succeed.
Your individuality will automatically be expressed along the way.
3. Develop your personal
awareness and self-observation
skills
-- Take stock in your
physical, mental, emotional, imaginative and intuitive abilities. Assess your
intra-personal assets and liabilities. Which of these parts of you are optimally
healthy and which are imbalanced, over or underutilized? A part of you is
capable of observing your body sensations, mental thoughts, emotional feelings,
imaginative visions, and intuitive insights. Realize you are greater than the
limitations posed by any of these subordinate parts of yourself. Endeavor to
develop optimal self-awareness and self-regulation skills.
4. Develop your strength
of will and power of choice
--
Begin to choose your fate by affirming your power to control your intra-personal
dynamics-- especially negative thoughts. Shape your social outcomes by asserting
your will with the intent to heal and be helpful. Use your personal power to
master the challenges you face every day. Progress is made each day; one step at
a time. Progress may appear slow but is forthcoming. Nurture the virtue and
value of patience within you.
5. Always take action
based on your highest good and
goals
-- You already clarified your
highest values and greatest goals in step number one. Act consistently in
support of these, in your best interest, and for the purpose of nurturing your
own and other people's personal development and spiritual growth. Turn conflicts
into opportunities by realizing the perfection in every situation and all of
life. When problems arise, ask yourself, "What's good about this problem?...
What's not ideal yet?... How can I make it more ideal, and how can I have fun
doing it?" Always seek to determine your role in creating and resolving each
"crisis" as an undeniable "opportunity". Remember, you choose to see every
glass as half empty or half full.
6. Pay special attention
to feedback
-- Look up the word cybernetics in
your dictionary if you don't know what it means. Life continues as a result of
communication and feedback. You feel pain and negative emotions whenever you
violate your natural state of homeostasis and health. Negative social
experiences likewise are created for a purpose, and always by choice. To remain
happy and productive, your personal choices must comply with a higher purpose,
spiritual order, and/or God's will in order to maintain personal power; social
and/or environmental health. Realize every negative is positive feedback for
better health, living, and decision making. Take responsibility for every
negative you experience. Learn to resolve each problem by assessing your role in
creating it, then take affirmative action for correcting it.
7. Always be grateful,
thankful, and forgiving
-- God's universe is forever giving.
All living and non-living systems are constantly empowered, revitalized, and
rebalanced just for the sake of being. Unconditional love reflects this same
power in each of us. You are capable of giving and worthy of receiving
unconditional love. With this, the entire force of the universe supports you and
your cause.
Be eternally grateful for
everything you have, for all your gifts, abilities, and possessions. Start each
day by giving thanks for all of life's (big and little) blessings.
Finally, forgive yourself and others
for any past wrongs and/or harm done. You lose yourself in the
present by being angry and/or resentful about the past. Every
moment is an opportunity to experience life anew, and create it to be the way
your heart desires. As Winston Churchill said, "Free will and
predestination are identical". You have the power to let go of the past and
choose your future. Give thanks for this awesome power and all your
possessions.