I read a great book called “Wellbeing” in the last years of my career, and it changed my perspective a lot on life and retirement. The book is part of a series of Gallup books that explore areas of Leadership and personal development. “Wellbeing“ is written by Tom Rath and Jim Harter, and it explores 5 basic pillars which form the building blocks of wellbeing. The book also comes with a Gallup questionaire that assesses your current state of wellbeing, online access to your results, amongst other cool online resources. The contents of the book explores these individual foundations of wellbeing and suggests the means to improve your wellbeing scores. The book is very insightful, and gives you extremely practical advice on what you can do to make your life experience better and feel better. I found it so simple and impactful, that I shared it with my work Team, family, and friends. We talked about setting goals to improve in certain areas, as well as reinforcing those areas that were already doing well.
The 5 essential areas that are explored include career, social, finance, physical, and community wellbeing. To suffer in any one of these areas will lower your overall wellbeing scores. When you really think about it, this is a relatively simple way to evaluate your wellbeing health, and it also highlights the fact that financial wellbeing is not the only pillar to work on, but simply one of many that lead to the overall goal of feeling better about yourself.
Gallup has some pretty strict copywrite terms, so rather than me spend a bunch of time figuring out what and how to share it with you, and writing about the various pillars of Wellbeing, I’m simply going to provide you with a link (below) where I think they are described well enough for you. Please take the time to read the following link.
I believe your personal wellbeing goes a long ways towards your mental health and success in every goal you have in life. With Covid recently challenging several aspects of wellbeing, you can relate to this book and the simplistic overview. This book gives you some easy areas to consider improving. Paying attention to your wellbeing, and nurturing and developing the described pillars will energized you, and set you on a path to better self awareness and mental health. I would definitley recommend this book as a read for anyone on life’s journey, starting out or already in retirement. Taking stock and improving your personal wellbeing is a MUST!