Welcome And Show Purpose

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Welcome back to the Sweet Spot with Dr. Derek Sweet, a board certified psychiatrist specializing in sports and performance. In the Sweet Spot, we explore what it takes to stay steady and perform when the pressure is on and the moment matters. Stay tuned for Dr. Sweet's Win It All Wednesday.

Spirituality And Meaning Under Pressure

Work And Leisure Finding Balance

Friendship And Social Health

Love As A Core Human Need

Self-Direction And Personal Agency

Final Takeaways And Subscribe

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Today I want to address the five life tasks. I pull this from the Wheel of Wellness research and studies done by Myers and Company. Now, the Wheel of Wellness is pretty complex. It's a large wheel, and so many things can be pulled from it, but today we're going to spend some time just on the five life tasks. And what are these tasks? They are spirituality, work and leisure, friendship, love, and self-direction. I'll repeat. The five life tasks are spirituality, that's one, work and leisure, that's two, three, friendship, four, love, and five, self-direction. Now, these are fairly obvious life tasks, but I want to go through them anyway with you just so that we can see if we have some synchrony and alignment on what we're thinking today. So the idea of spirituality would be: do you and I, do we have any kind of a spiritual connection or awareness, right? That we are meaningful beings involved in meaningful behavior that is purposeful, that gives us direction, that brings us fulfillment. Or conversely, are we in a meaningless world with meaningless activities and nothing means anything? And that too is a spiritual insight, as long as we're conscious about that, and somehow that is bringing us a level of freedom and fulfillment. The idea is however you plug into your spirituality, be aware that it's metaphysical, right? Beyond the physical, looking beyond what's just in front of us to connect to an experience of the world and the universe and ourselves. So developing a spiritual life and a spiritual way of being also helpful, I believe, to managing and dealing and confronting life's surprises, challenges, its spontaneity, and sometimes the often difficult and tragic or hurtful and harmful things that happen to us. That we can in some ways tap into our spirituality, find and find another way to process it through a spiritual lens, transcend our circumstances, find a meaning in it, and find freedom or solace in that. Well, then we truly are healthy from a spiritual perspective. And that's the first life task is to find spiritual awareness and really connect into it. The second life task is obvious to us, it's work and leisure, that's not not hard to understand. Ultimately, we want to work in a job or career or profession that brings us joy, happiness, peace of mind, and fulfillment. And we also want to be engaged in leisure activities that bring us into a deeper sense of awareness and also bring us joy, happiness, and fulfillment. So work and leisure are two tasks that we must pay attention to. If we're in a job that we don't like or a profession that's really not right for us, that can be a real trigger for causing stress and anxiety and then opening up a pathway to illness. Similarly, if we don't involve ourselves in any leisure activities and we don't give ourselves permission to follow leisurely activities, well, what happens is that we become stressed and the door and the pathway to illness is open. So those of us who ignore leisure or who dive too deeply into work or allow our work to frustrate us, well, we are probably at risk and may want to start thinking about a way or something that we can do on a daily basis to cope or to manage the stress associated with either the lack of work or being overworked or being unhappy at work or with the lack of being involved in any leisure activities, or conversely, being overly involved in leisure activities. So again, it's all about the balance. Now, we've reviewed two of the five life tasks. We've looked at spirituality and then we look at work and leisure. The third life task is about friendships, finding and making sure that we have meaningful friendships, certainly social ties and being friendly and connected with another human being is what essentially most beings are designed for. We're designed to interact, and not having friends, being socially isolated, has been shown through so much research to be a trigger for illness or unhappiness or an anxiety disorder of some kind. So I'm not saying we shouldn't be alone. Certainly, there are times when being alone is important, certainly for reflection and meditation and for peace of mind, being alone is there's nothing wrong with that. But having an absence of social ties and having no friends and having no connectedness emotionally bonding with others is a trigger for stress, anxiety, and illness, and also robs us of the fulfillment of being connected with others and enjoying collectively experiences that we are designed to enjoy. So, yeah, friendship, not being involved with friends is a trigger. And also, if you have the wrong types of friends, friends that lead you into the wrong kinds of activities or leave you feeling less fulfilled or feeling badly about yourself, well, then that's also something that probably should be addressed. So let's look at the fourth life task, which is love. The experience of love is truly at the center of our beings. We want to love and be loved. There's an author, I forget his name now, but he wrote that there are only two states: love and the absence of love. It's amazing how we crave and desire to be loved, affirmed, and connected in that way to others. We even find a need to love our work and to love our career. Athletes and performers who love what they do, they communicate that in the work and how they execute their functions. So love is a critical force that provides us with motivation, it provides us with fulfillment, it provides us with peace of mind. And the absence of love or the opposite of love, which would be hate or hurting and causing pain willfully to others, can be a really difficult and very, very stress-inducing force. So we want to work on loving others, but I would also add loving ourselves. And where we find that we may be doing harmful things to ourselves or to others, we may want to cease and desist from that because it only creates more pain, more struggle, and more difficulty. Love essentially is a freedom when we are doing it correctly or engaged in it properly. So now we are on the very last of the five life tasks. Just by way of review, we looked at spirituality, we looked at work and leisure, we looked at friendship, we looked at love, and now we're at the very last one called self-direction. Self-direction is the ability to be one own's agent in getting to the things one wants to get to in life. And it has some subdivisions. Actually, there are quite a few subdivisions for self-direction. I'll quickly kind of mention them to you. They are sense of worth, sense of control, having realistic beliefs, also having an emotional awareness and coping skills, a sense of direction, and also has involved in it problem solving and creativity, a sense of humor, our nutrition, our exercise, our self-care are all involved in our self-direction, our ability to manage stress is involved in our self-direction, our identity, our gender identity, our cultural identity is involved in our self-direction. So the life task of self-direction has subdivisions in it that I don't have the time to go into with you, but I wanted to let you know that you do have the power to manipulate these five life tasks. The idea of your self-direction, your work and your leisure, your spirituality, your friendships, and the way you love are all under, to some degree, and to a large measure, your control. This is Dr. Sweet, and thank you for your time.

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Thank you for listening to The Sweet Spot with Dr. Derek Sweet. If today's message was helpful, please feel free to share it and subscribe. There's no cost to subscribing, and it helps others discover the show. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow for another inspiring message from Dr. Sweet and the Sweet Spot team for science, soul, and success today with Mr. Sweet Spawn.