Motivational/educational talk encouraging individuals to take systematic, comprehensive control of their health and life choices by becoming the 'expert on you.' The speaker emphasizes that struggle and discomfort are inherent to meaningful pursuits and recommends tools like the Duke Wheel of Health to assess life components and guide deliberate change.
You know, I heard it said the other day, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And it's very true. Struggle is a part of life, and things that are truly worthwhile to us involve struggle, whether it's our family, it's our own health to some degree and well being, or whether it's our work and our career. But how do we address that struggle? How do we lean into it in a way that we create the life that we want for ourselves? We tend to think in a much too myopic way, and we tend to think about, I need to get in better shape or I need to eat better, or I need to manage stress better. But we don't take a comprehensive enough approach. And at the end of the day, we often rely too much on others. We think others are going to give us what we need. So we're going to go to that gym. If we just take that class or if we meet with that nutritionist, we'll be able to address our needs. And the reality is, or even see that physician. The reality is, at the end of the day, you need to take control and you need to become the expert on you. You can see guidance from these professionals, from the podcasts, from the books that you read, but that needs to be filtered through the one expert who knows you better than anyone else. You. And so how do we do that? And how do we sort of take a more systematic approach? Well, that can be challenging. One way to do that is to use some of the tools out there that have been developed to help us think more comprehensively about our lives and the different components of our lives where we need to find our own expertise. And so the tool that I like to use is a Wheel of Health. And having been at Duke, I'm most familiar with the Duke Wheel of Health. There are others out there, but it's a way of looking at the different components of our life and trying to say to ourselves, where do I need to act differently here? Where do I need to make different choices so that I can get a different outcome, so that I can enhance the quality of my life in these particular areas. And it's a wheel. Why? Because it needs to be complete. If certain pieces of the wheel are missing, then the wheel is not going to roll properly. And so taking the time to do that in a systematic way, getting the knowledge that you need, okay, the awareness that you need to be able to act in a way consistent with the outcomes that you're trying to get, this is one of the keys to really not only taking control, but finding the path to your best life.
