Health Skills

Developing health skills is probably as important as any other skills for personal success

The Personal Power of Taking Responsibility

A successful executive takes full responsibility for his way of responding to situations.
While it is easy to shift the blame to others for anything gone wrong, it actually weakened your own personal power.

Be it in work or leisure, every task that we undertake is an opportunity to build personal power. By blaming, we deny our own inner power, and our ability to take charge of our life and circumstances. It creates distorted state of mind, such as guilt, fear, resentment and depression. As we become depressed and feel inferior, we are weakened and more prone to mistakes. We become more defensive and develop a siege mentality, erecting barriers to outside interference. Unfortunately, these barriers also block our inner resources.

By denying personal responsibilities, we put ourselves in the position of a victim, and loss the possibility of becoming strong and free through the process. Gradually, we perceive ourselves as someone weak and helpless. Instead of building personal power, we weakened our personal power with increased dependence on others for happiness, livelihood and even existence. As our self-respect begins to erode, we enter a negative spiral of blame, dependency and disrespect.

By a simple examination of own experience, it is not difficult to notice how negatively our work is impaired when we embark on the habit of blaming.

Life is not short of problems. The great news is: We have enormous resources to guide us to direct our response to these problems. Resorting to blaming is not the way, as exemplified by the truly successful leaders.

Taking Responsibility for Your Health/Wellness

Our health and well-being is highly correlated to our propensity for taking responsibility.
You will notice that in our midst, there are people who tended to think that it is the doctor’s responsibility to cure our illness.

The truth is, there is no better place to exercise self-responsibility than in our health. Not too many years ago, medical science advises that we have little control over what happened in our body, and even less over disease. When we are inflicted with illness, our chance of recovery seemed to rest entirely in the hands of the doctors or surgeons. Besides taking the pills and going through the surgery, it seemed that there is nothing else we can do to help our own recovery.

These perceptions begins to change in early 1960s, when biofeedback was found to be able to control and change physical events in our body that were once deemed uncontrollable by the experts. Since then, we started to adopt regular diet and exercise regime to regulate our blood flow, control the firing of our muscle neurons and change our brain-wave patterns. We started playing a more important role in keeping our own health by developing health skills.

Psychoneuro-immunology, which focus on the study of the influence of mind and emotion on the immune system, brings forth the new realization that our mind has a great deal to do with our health. We learned how depression can inhibit our immune system and height the chance of cancer, and how anger and cynicism can cause the development of heart disease.

The above breakthrough in medical research gives birth to a new philosophy and practice of "wholistic health", which includes mind, body and spirit in the all-round development of health. It is possible to use mind power to influence the body for better health -this is the very essence of health skills.
We can take greater responsibility for our health, by learning health skills such as deep relaxation exercises, techniques of stress management, and proper diet.