Seven Steps to Optimal Wellness
By Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M. A., M.P.H.

When negative events affect how you think and feel at any moment, it's easy to lose sight of your personal power. After all, when difficult people are acting up, it's easy to become a helpless victim--blaming others for the sorry state of affairs. It's harder to take responsibility for overcoming your daily obstacles to maintaining optimal well-being on the job. The fact is, quality of life is contingent upon your willingness to take responsibility for each process and every outcome at any given moment.

What might life be like if you were to realize and express your optimal potential? How much easier would it be to master each and every challenge you face? What might you need in order to overcome on-the-job obstacles to self-esteem and professional success? Can you transcend the uncomfortable circumstances of your life and career to rejoice in your health, happiness, and greater stress-free productivity? This article provides the nuts and bolts--knowledge and skills--to do just that; rejoice in your personal power.

A NEW BEGINNING

Believe it or not, you already have everything you need for career enrichment and life fulfillment. You have an incredible mind, body, emotions, imagination, intuition, and will to make positive choices for better health and living. You even maintain a spiritual nature which automatically empowers your state of well-being. Now it's up to you to use your innate endowment for the benefit of all. You have the ability to constantly experience love, create happiness, be productive and fulfill your greatest goals. It's all a matter of choice, and the choice is yours right NOW! It's actually very easy once you learn the basics to help yourself and others move through fear, frustration, and limitation to love, faith, and creative self-expression. It takes time to master the dynamics, but miracles are possible and readily available.

Self-discipline is what's needed to achieve more than you ever dreamed possible. The following seven steps will assure your success in life, a more enjoyable career in dentistry, and support you on your way to achieving self-mastery, career-enrichment, life-fulfillment, more love, health, happiness, optimally satisfying relationships, and the power to be all you can.

SEVEN MAGIC STEPS

1. First Clarify your values, goals and purpose -- What's really important to you? List your first, second and third most valued desires and why you feel so strongly about them. Pray and meditate on these as your most precious goals to be achieved. Visualize them daily, ideally while relaxed and focused.

Endeavor to determine your unique purpose in life. What heart-felt yearnings inspire you? Everyone longs to be productive in some meaningful way. Certainly, promoting health, serving the needs of others is very important. Are there any other social service crusades to which you long to subscribe? Clarify these and set personal goals for life-long learning, career-enrichment, and life-fulfillment based on this knowledge and motivation.

2. Develop an action plan -- After considering your values and goals, establish priorities. Develop a step by step action plan to achieve your goals. Record on paper, or better yet, in your ongoing journal, what you will need to have, do, or be to manifest your dreams. For every need or action step, seek mentors or experts in the field to emulate. There's no need to reinvent any wheels. Do what successful people are doing and you will succeed. Your individuality will automatically be expressed along the way.

3. Develop your personal awareness and self-observation skills -- Take stock in your physical, mental, emotional, imaginative and intuitive abilities. Assess your intra-personal assets and liabilities. Which of these parts of you are optimally healthy and which are imbalanced, over or underutilized? A part of you is capable of observing your body sensations, mental thoughts, emotional feelings, imaginative visions, and intuitive insights. Realize you are greater than the limitations posed by any of these subordinate parts of yourself. Endeavor to develop optimal self-awareness and self-regulation skills.

4. Develop your strength of will and power of choice -- Begin to choose your fate by affirming your power to control your intra-personal dynamics-- especially negative thoughts. Shape your social outcomes by asserting your will with the intent to heal and be helpful. Use your personal power to master the challenges you face every day. Progress is made each day; one step at a time. Progress may appear slow but is forthcoming. Nurture the virtue and value of patience within you.

5. Always take action based on your highest good and goals-- You already clarified your highest values and greatest goals in step number one. Act consistently in support of these, in your best interest, and for the purpose of nurturing your own and other people's personal development and spiritual growth. Turn conflicts into opportunities by realizing the perfection in every situation and all of life. When problems arise, ask yourself, "What's good about this problem?... What's not ideal yet?... How can I make it more ideal, and how can I have fun doing it?" Always seek to determine your role in creating and resolving each "crisis" as an undeniable "opportunity". Remember, you choose to see every glass as half empty or half full.

6. Pay special attention to feedback -- Look up the word cybernetics in your dictionary if you don't know what it means. Life continues as a result of communication and feedback. You feel pain and negative emotions whenever you violate your natural state of homeostasis and health. Negative social experiences likewise are created for a purpose, and always by choice. To remain happy and productive, your personal choices must comply with a higher purpose, spiritual order, and/or God's will in order to maintain personal power; social and/or environmental health. Realize every negative is positive feedback for better health, living, and decision making. Take responsibility for every negative you experience. Learn to resolve each problem by assessing your role in creating it, then take affirmative action for correcting it.

7. Always be grateful, thankful, and forgiving -- God's universe is forever giving. All living and non-living systems are constantly empowered, revitalized, and rebalanced just for the sake of being. Unconditional love reflects this same power in each of us. You are capable of giving and worthy of receiving unconditional love. With this, the entire force of the universe supports you and your cause.

Be eternally grateful for everything you have, for all your gifts, abilities, and possessions. Start each day by giving thanks for all of life's (big and little) blessings.

Finally, forgive yourself and others for any past wrongs and/or harm done. You lose yourself in the present by being angry and/or resentful about the past. Every moment is an opportunity to experience life anew, and create it to be the way your heart desires. As Winston Churchill said, "Free will and predestination are identical". You have the power to let go of the past and choose your future. Give thanks for this awesome power and all your possessions.

CONTRIBUTING TO OTHERS

These seven steps to personal empowerment are the keys to career-enrichment and life-fulfillment. They are guaranteed to help you on your way to achieving more than you ever dreamed possible. Greater health, happiness, wealth, career and social success are all waiting for you. Clearly, you are a magnificent human being capable of manifesting any and all of life's pleasures. As a powerful human being, you have a unique role to fulfill in society and a major contribution to make to people's lives. Start by making a contribution to yourself for your own health, happiness, and personal empowerment. The healthier, happier, more self-mastered and inspired you become, the more you will be able to contribute to others.

About the Author

Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz is one of health care's most inspiring motivational speakers. He has authored numerous books and articles including his recent exposé on the Florida AIDS tragedy, Deadly Innocence, and his exposé on the world's most feared and deadly viruses--"Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola" published by Tetrahedron, LLC. (1996;$29.95 hardcover). Dr. Horowitz welcomes your communications and invitations. 

His e-mail address is: tetra@tetrahedron.org.