How to review, measure and track your wellness progress

You’re committed to a healthy lifestyle to be the best version of you but how do you know if you’re making any real progress?

Taking a daily stock of your energy level, stress level, sleep quality, mindfulness and nutrition choices, is important for everyone who is trying to live a healthier life. It will help you notice trends and patterns such as, you tend to eat more on high-stress days or sleep better when you exercise in the morning, so that you can tweak your personal wellness plan for optimal results. And it can help you appreciate the small achievements—like feeling more confident when you make active choices that serve you, like eating better and exercising regularly. By tracking your progress in key areas of wellness, you can stay motivated and learn to appreciate all the little improvements you are seeing.

That’s why we developed the ASWA Wellness Tracker – to allow you to pause, review, measure and monitor the most important aspects of your personal wellness. The Wellness Tracker is an in-depth review that measures your wellness and is most effective when used in conjunction with a wellness program that builds and develops your personal wellness literacy*.

Research and development

ASWA programs are based on decades of research and drawing inspiration from respected wellness leaders such as Dr John Travis MD, author of the Wellness Workbook and the Wellness Inventory Model that differentiates a thriving life from a surviving or struggling life, and Dr Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of positive psychology. Collaboration between experts in the areas of nutrition, stress resilience, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, purpose, values and beliefs, has resulted in the development of a series of questions that are strong and reliable predictors of key wellness outcomes. The higher a person rates these items, the better his or her chances of being engaged in life and at work, having a purpose, good health and wellness, and enjoying a full life. Research has consistently shown that one’s perceived sense of wellbeing is a vital indicator of actual health and wellbeing.

As we selected the questions for the Wellness Tracker, we were consistently mindful to ensure that the elements for measurement were daily wellness aspects of your life that you can control.

We know that the ability to measure your wellness is important for  taking control of your wellbeing and enabling you to make active and intelligent choices about how you want to improve your wellness – much like stepping on the bathroom scales regularly.

Wellness Literacy

The really vital aspect that you will see changing however, is your personal wellness literacy* – your knowledge, tools and support – so that you can more confidently navigate life’s natural highs and lows – for sustainability of your personal wellbeing.

The ASWA Wellness Tracker has a variety of questions covering the Principles of Wellness, which form the foundations of ASWA’s wellness training programs:

• Purpose – what is most important for you to lead your best life
• Values – that drive your decisions, responses and behaviours
• Resilience – to challenges in daily life
• Mindfulness – for embracing the present moment
• Breath – the engine that drives movement and mind
• Nutrition – for nourishment and optimum energy
• Movement – moving more throughout your day
• Sleep – better quality sleep

ASWA’s wellness training programs integrate the Wellness Tracker as a core component to empower, educate and enable you to take control of your personal wellbeing.

As an ASWA wellness program participant, you are asked to do a personal review of your current level of wellness with ASWA’s Wellness Tracker, at  the beginning, at the half way check-point and at the end of your Wellness Within personal wellbeing program, so that you can clearly see your progression from the steps that you take through your journey. The Wellness Tracker analysis can however, be undertaken at any time during the program.

When you undergo the Wellness Tracker you will receive a score indicating your overall level of wellness, as well as your score relating to each of the Principles of Wellness, represented as a bar graph.

The Wellness Tracker is designed to educate, empower and enable you to achieve greater levels of wellness within yourself, not to test you. The intention is to provide you with insight into yourself so that you can have clarity on the wellness aspects of your life. Together with the tools, techniques and strategies that you develop from your wellness program you will be able to optimise your ability to achieve and sustain wellness in your personal professional life.

Your Wellness Journey

Once you have a snapshot of your overall wellness and the aspects to focus on to optimise your level of wellness, you can then build your wellness literacy and start actively adding more wellness aspects into your daily life as you move through your wellness program.

If your Wellness Tracker results are not well-balanced or some areas are smaller in size than others, we recommend that you spend more time on the topics that you rated smallest in and allow yourself more time to practice implementing the tools and actions within these topics into your life as by doing so, you will be giving yourself the best opportunity to gain the biggest return on your time and efforts.

Sustainable Growth

Move through your wellness journey at a comfortable pace. Small, incremental changes are the most effective and are proven to be far more sustainable than huge changes all at once. And although it is an 8-week program, the reason you have 12 months access to this program is that you will have the greatest ability to achieve and sustain wellness if you continue working on and refining your daily wellness routines.

Write Your Story

As you embark on your journey to achieving wellness within, it is important that you continue to challenge your thinking. It’s up to you to write your own life story and play your chosen role in it.

We all want to be happy and successful. We all want the most that life has to offer us. And we would all prefer to have all of this without the stress, frustration, exhaustion and a general lack of health and wellness that commonly comes from striving to be ‘successful’ in today’s world.

It takes effort to create a thriving life.

We are all leaders of our own lives. You are the leader of your life. Nobody can do a better job of leading your life than you. The definition of a leader is one that creates an inspiring vision of the future and then motivates and inspires people to engage with that vision. In the case of your life, you create your own vision of your future and then have strategies in place to motivate and inspire yourself to turn that vision into reality. Being a positive and inspiring leader of your life, in your home and/or in your workplace, absolutely positively influences those around you and encourages them to live their best life too.

To live your best life, experiencing wellness within yourself is an essential first step. Wellness in life is an adventure, a learning process that presents opportunities for you to learn and grow along the way. And yes, sometimes you will divert off your road to optimum wellness, and you know what, that’s okay. Emotionally intelligent leaders strive to learn from mistakes, because they know how valuable they are for growth, both personally and professionally, and for the ability to move forward.

Your personal GPS Satellite

The strategies that you will learn in the Wellness Within program will be your personal GPS satellite, to know when you need to pause, to check in with yourself, to remind yourself what is truly important to you, to get back to the basics and then to just do it, with small incremental steps that all of us can take to make big changes to our lives.

By understanding what’s important to you and developing your strategy for success, our goal of developing the Wellness Tracker and the ASWA wellness programs, is that you will feel empowered to commit to living your best life, moving from surviving to thriving. To embrace a life filled with purpose, clarity, inner calm, connection, engagement, inspiration, support, balance, intention, confidence and authenticity to be the best you – that’s what you deserve and what those important to you deserve.

*Wellness Literacy is “the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic wellness information, tools and techniques needed to make active choices for optimum health and wellness” (adapted from USDHHS).