Issue link: http://www.wacmagazine.com/i/438230
18 | Washington Athletic Club Magazine | JANUARY 2015 Wellness By Michael Lindfield W as this past holiday season truly gratifying to you? Did you set a course for how you wanted it to unfold with clear intention and focus, or did events and expectations sweep you along for the ride? Whatever your experience this past holiday season, it's probably a good reflection of how you're living your life all year. If your holiday season passed without gratification, it might be time for some soul searching. Maybe it's even time to identify what really and truly nourishes your spirit. This month's Wellness article encourages you to reflect and discover your soul food, as it were. Michael Lindfield, a highly respected consultant and executive coach with more than 40 years of experience working with individuals and organizations, offers advice for how to unleash our creative power and live a life of considerable influence and personal satisfaction. Enjoy! Tamela Thomas, Wellness Manager tamelat@wac.net 206.464.4639 Making time for yourself Unleash your inner power Make self-nourishment your soul priority T oday's fast-paced society finds many of us sprinting at full speed. As we begin a new year, now is a good time to stop, breathe, and take stock of our lives. Most of us aren't trained to live at the breathtaking velocity our professions seem to demand. The beginning of a new year offers us a chance to pause, reflect on our achievements, and reassess what drives us. The quest to "be the best we can be" is noble and natural, and holding a positive vision of success can propel us along our professional and personal journeys. For some of us, however, the notion of what constitutes success may need to be refined. Often, checking off the boxes on our to-do lists still leaves us without a sense of meaningful achievement. There appears to be a natural evolution in the careers of many highly accomplished individuals that causes them to shift their reference point from "success" to "significance" with a realization that as they grow older it's more important to feed the soul than the ego. Many members of the millennial generation have reached the same conclusion at a much younger age. Author Harold Kushner summed it up perfectly when he declared: "Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it." It takes courage and clarity to stop and question the many personal and collective beliefs that dictate what success should look like. It takes even more courage to follow our dreams and engage in activities that nourish the soul at the expense of the ego.