November 2021 – Repertoire Magazine
Maintaining a lifestyle of health and wellness is hard enough without a pandemic. When you look at the last year and a half, are you happy with how you have treated your physical and mental well-being? Jen Widerstrom, entrepreneur and founder of GetUP CBD, was recently a guest on Parcels of Info, An NDC Podcast to discuss how to establish and maintain a healthy lifestyle that will benefit your personal and professional life. In this podcast, she describes a process that she calls “Three Factor Wellness” that breaks down how to navigate the “pathway to wellness.”
Logistics
When it comes to the logistics factor of Widerstrom’s Three Factor Wellness plan, she said it involves learning how to take better care of yourself. She explains, “Everyone asks me ‘what workout should I do?’ When I look at logistics, the last thing on my mind when I hear about you wanting to think about your wellness, your weight loss, your excitement towards just making this healthier shift in your life, I look at baseline health.”
She breaks it down into four categories: consumption, sleep, movement, and body talk. With these four areas in check, you can begin to course correct on any bad habits you might have settled into the past few months.
Longevity
Forming a plan is only the first step in the right direction, but it needs be a practical and sustainable journey for you. Widerstrom said, “I want you to look at yourself from a standpoint of being a student, using the metric of reps versus rules. When it comes to mental and physical health, it takes practice to get good at this.”
It’s important to remember that you are doing this for yourself, she said. When you approach your new lifestyle with the mindset of a student, you can allow yourself the grace to fail. Describing the student mentality, she said, “I have a lot of people get really hard on themselves for not getting it right away. Just because you failed the first time, doesn’t mean you failed and you should give up. You are taking reps and getting valuable insight on your ability to say what’s working.”
Loving the process
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, whether you are focused on mental or physical health, takes a multi-step process that requires constant work. Widerstrom’s third factor of wellness is all about loving the process and taking joy in the journey. It’s as much about self-healing as it is about self-care. She said “Learn about when you’re selling yourself short, learn when you’re cutting corners, and when you’re aligned. Because when you spend that kind of time in training, you start to realize that you can’t cut corners.”
At the end of the day, it’s all about seeing the bigger picture for yourself. Widerstrom said, “I love being a coach and I love being a trainer. I know you guys enjoy what you do. You’re in a field where you get by with what you are selling and what you are doing, and those connection points are really helping people. But what’s the bigger picture? What’s the bigger message? You are the only one that can answer that for yourself.”