Connecting the Dots

In layman’s terms, the holistic approach to self-confidence entails assiduous development of a solid and fully substantiated trust in your abilities to live life as independently as possible.

This approach stems from clear visualization of the five essential components of your life as being intimately connected, inseparable within your whole person. Those who have read my book, It Really Is Simple: A Holistic Approach to Self-Confidence, already know that, for the sake of simplicity, I explore life from five angles under the sole condition that none of these is any less important than the rest. This condition is key.

In many people’s minds, the term “holistic” is commonly linked to their health — physical, mental, and emotional. But with self-confidence being a multifaceted reality, the method offered in the book extends to four other aspects of life, in addition to your health. Those are your spirituality, career, finances, and relationships. This implies that taking excellent care of your health is only a fifth of the way to attaining holistic self-confidence. 

I teach my clients to avoid fixating on a single aspect of their current situation — per their own perception — the area of their life that readily comes to mind as most problematic. Instead, I strongly urge them to also pay close attention to the other four aspects because, usually, if they’ve recognized one area that needs care, chances are the other four need it just as much, if not more.

Let’s say they have financial problems. Who doesn’t, you might ask? In addition to delving into the reasons behind their money shortage, I want to find out what has been neglected due to the lack of money. That’s why I ask about their current health, spiritual well-being, career success or lack of such, level of financial literacy, and relationships — the choices they make as to their daily interactions with people — why they hang out or how long they really need to stick around certain people, and how these people influence their decision-making with regards to the remaining four life components.

At first, we take small steps with each life component. But I’ll tell you that you need to develop goals and a plan in every one of these pillars if you want to be a harmonious human being, not in any way deprived or dependent on others for whatever the reason might be.

An example of lack of health would be when people are chronically sick, and I work with such individuals all the time because I am a nurse and have been in the healthcare system for over a decade now. So, you may have cardiovascular disease, including hypertension, heart disease, atherosclerosis, or stroke; then cancer and type 2 diabetes, to give you just the top three killers of Americans today, each with potential for multiple organ damage. And they often do, indeed, end up damaging multiple organs in patients in the process. Some people have one of these chronic diseases, but most have two or three such conditions. Then add autoimmune, neurological, other endocrine disorders, and anxiety and depression, of course, and you can get a picture of how sick our population is. Oftentimes, when I get referrals from hospitals or doctors for patients needing home care, I have to read through at least fifteen to thirty diagnoses in these patients’ medical history. Believe it or not, many of these people aren’t even that old. I’ve had multiple patients who’ve remained surprised upon asking how old I am and what pills I take at home and learning that I am forty-six and take no medications, let alone pharmaceutical drugs. These conversations tend to occur as I go through and write down their ten to, sometimes, forty prescription and over-the-counter drugs. A nurse in a home care agency I worked for in Syracuse, NY, once had a patient on seventy-eight pharmaceutical drugs, half of which were to counter the side effects of the other half!

With all these health disorders combined, a lot of money is going out of these patients’ insurance or bank accounts towards treatments, medical appointments, durable medical equipment, procedures, medications, special transportation, etc. In other words, their finances are compromised because of their poor health. When I educate and do my best to convince people to change their lifestyles in terms of diet or fitness habits, they often seem to not believe that it’s worth trying. What they really don’t believe, I’m afraid, is that they are worth the change, which indicates to me a significant lack of self-esteem. This can be the biggest reason for personal health neglect, other than pure lack of knowledge.

Looking at the financial life aspect next, we’ve all heard people say, “I just want to be healthy and happy. Money doesn’t matter so much!” Well, it actually does matter, because, if you are working long hours at a job or several jobs to make ends meet, not allotting a few hours to take care of your health, especially if you have children or a sick relative, your health will get compromised and you will find out how the price of healthcare can affect your financial situation and drastically limit your choices. After all, healthcare is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. This is why I teach my clients the importance of learning how to invest their hard-earned money into various cash-flowing assets unrelated to a job, so they can afford to work fewer hours and take better care of themselves.

So, what are you investing your hard-earned money in? Is it sitting in a savings account with no hedge against inflation? Are you buying liabilities that don’t grow in value? Are you spending it on people you really shouldn’t be spending it on? Or are you investing in your health through a gym membership and actually exercising at the gym, or buying high-quality organic whole food? Are you investing in yourself by reading books and learning from a mentor so you can expand your financial means and not have to always depend on an employer or anyone else to sustain you, as you get older?

At some point, you know, all of us will get older. Sooner than we’d like, too!

What happens when you get older? Are you preparing for being sick, poor, both, or none of the above? Have you made a plan as to how much your net worth would be by the time you turn sixty-five, sixty, or fifty-five — age is just a number, right?

What about the career life pillar? Many people confuse career with finances. They are not the same! Finances are about building consistent cash-flow through real, tangible assets. Your career, on the other hand, is a way to help others and learn marketable skills so you can remain needed and hard to replace in changing market conditions, meaning, you make an asset out of yourself. This is true whether you work for somebody, own a business, or both! 

Your career and finances directly impact your health, spiritual, and relationship choices, just as your health or relationships can affect the way you perform your work and the overall condition of your financials. These five life pillars are interlocked and never to be neglected if you want to be holistically self-confident.

I know many chronically sick people whose diseases can be reversed, but they like to rationalize that their family members wouldn’t get on board with a lifestyle change or that the money is not enough, and I tell them, “Actually, if you stop buying the crappy food you’re eating right now and replace it with whole, organic food, you would have money to establish a great diet plan and reverse your health condition.” Well, in many cases, they don’t like hearing that. The moment I place the responsibility in their hands by circumventing their reasoning that the relatives won’t cooperate or the money wouldn’t suffice — they really don’t like it.

In other cases, people may seem enthused at first but then, when it comes to applying these principles they give up because they ultimately have no trust in their own ability to regain their health.

The same holds true for finances. I have seen people drowning in $30,000, even $40,000 of credit card debt, to the point where the banks won’t allow them to use credit cards anymore, so they have to rely on limited means from a job until most of their debt is paid off. Usually, they don’t have high-paying jobs, which is why they get into these horrific debt situations, on top of being financially uneducated to begin with.

While part of my way of helping clients in the financial aspect is teaching them how to get rid of credit card debt, I always emphasize that the type of discipline needed to accomplish this is the same discipline that is required in bringing your health to an optimal level. This is why the system offered in my book works across the board with the five life aspects.

Just as food is one of the biggest temptations in life, especially poor-quality food, because it is so addictive and so tasty (according to the most common rationalizations used by people who don’t want to give up poor-quality food), so is spending hard-earned money for all the wrong purposes, like displaying status to keep up with the myriads of Joneses whom people assign special place in their lives for all the wrong reasons. The same focus and discipline are called for to reverse such habits as in every other pillar of life, as long as you learn to make a difference between the clutter and the essential needs associated with any of these pillars.

In conclusion, holistic self-confidence doesn’t only relate to excellent physical and mental health. Health is just one of five categories where you can and should be confident by being in control. Your career, finances, spirituality, and relationships are no less essential to your freedom of choice than your health.

That’s what I do my absolute best to impress on my clients during our coaching sessions. We create a plan, set goals, and push through it all via implementation. We then keep going until they see for themselves that they are entirely capable of doing an outstanding job in all life aspects and thus become more cognizant of their abilities to live holistically and build holistic self-confidence!