How To Consistently Strive For Optimal Well-Being: The Livebnp Triangle

Our vision at Live better, not perfect is to empower millions of people to consistently strive for optimal well-being. We all can actively take our destiny into our own hands and work on improving the various areas that influence our well-being and happiness. 

To help our community achieve that, we created our own model: The Live better, not perfect Well-Being Triangle. In this article, we will introduce this triangle and discuss how to consistently strive for optimal well-being. We will also cover a definition of well-being and why it is important. 

Let’s dive in.

What Is Well-Being And Why Is It Important?

We all have a pretty good idea about what well-being is -- at least implicitly. We know if we are currently feeling well or not. It is strongly linked to happiness and satisfaction. That is why it is so important to take care of our well-being actively. 

But to do this, a vague understanding is not enough. We need a more explicit definition. We can then use this definition as the basis for a model that can help us continuously and consistently improve our well-being. 

Positive Psychology -- founded by Dr. Martin Seligman -- is an area that focuses on improving people's well-being and happiness. Rather than trying to heal people who are sick (like traditional psychology), Positive Psychology tries to help healthy people stay healthy. With this idea in mind, you can find a very thorough analysis of well-being in this article. The authors conclude their work with the following definition of well-being:

Well-being is:

• The combination of feeling good and functioning well.
• The experience of positive emotions such as happiness and contentment. 
• The development of one’s potential.
• Having some control over one’s life. 
• Having a sense of purpose.
• Experiencing positive relationships. 

From this definition, it becomes clear that well-being is a broad concept that covers many areas. It is a complex combination of a person's physical, mental, emotional, and social health factors combined with personal growth. If we don’t feel well, that can mean that one or several of those areas need work. The good news is that almost all of the areas can be worked on to improve well-being overall.

Introducing The Live Better, Not Perfect Well-Being Triangle

Our goal at Live better, not perfect is to empower people to achieve better health and happiness by improving all key aspects of well-being. In order to achieve this and help our community consistently improve their well-being, we base our work on the definition outlined above. In addition, we created the Live better, not perfect Well-Being Triangle. 

The triangle represents the three areas, which are essential for well-being:

1. Health
2. People 
3. Growth

We help the members of our community to improve all these areas. As a consequence, our members are empowered to achieve better well-being and happiness. We address the three areas individually, but they all also are very strongly interconnected and influence each other. So, if we achieve improvement in one area, it has positive side effects on others. This can work like an upward spiral lifting our community up.  

Well-Being Triangle: Health

We have health at the bottom of our triangle because it is the basis for everything else. In our model we split health into three areas:

1. Physical
2. Mental
3. Emotional 

Physical health includes your strength, endurance, mobility, energy levels, how often you are sick, how quickly you can recover from illness or injury, your weight and body fat, and eating habits. 

Mental health describes how well your thinking and behaving are. That typically includes how well you handle cognitive processes, focus, attention, alertness, reasoning, and thinking abilities. A mentally healthy person functions productively and makes appropriate decisions.

Emotional health describes how well your feelings are. It refers to the ability to manage your feelings and emotions, especially when stirred up. An emotionally healthy person can monitor one’s feelings. They can express their emotions and control their behaviour during pleasant as well as unpleasant life events.

As part of the Live better, not perfect community, we cover all three areas with certain levers. The most effective levers are the right nutrition (“right” for one’s individual goals and circumstances), movement (exercise), and recovery (sleep, yoga, cold exposure, etc). We also help our community members to think about and implement a healthy balance in life including stress management. 

Well-Being Triangle: People

The second area of the Livebnp Well-Being Triangle addresses people and relationships. Human beings are herd animals. Throughout history, we only survived because we could rely on each other in groups. 

But strong and positive relationships with people are not only necessary for plain survival but also for our health and well-being. The American Psychological Association outlines research that details how important close emotional connections are for health and well-being. The psychologists call for making strong relationships a public health priority.

Some of the benefits of social relationships include lower rates of anxiety and depression, higher self-esteem, greater empathy, and more trusting and cooperative relationships. Strong, healthy relationships can also help to strengthen your immune system, help you recover from disease, and may even lengthen your life.

On the flip side, loneliness can lead to disrupted sleep patterns, high blood pressure, increased cortisol, obesity, or a weakened immune system. Loneliness is also a risk factor for antisocial behaviour, depression (including the risk of suicide), and addiction (smoking, alcohol, and other drugs).

Members of the Livebnp community will get access to tools and methods to gain awareness of potential gaps and shortcomings in the people area of the triangle. Once we know, we can actively address that. And you are not alone. 

Well-Being Triangle: Growth

Growth is a holistic topic that is found in the other areas too (health and people) but is an area in our Well-Being Triangle in its own right to cover personal growth. Personal growth (also referred to as personal development or self-growth) describes necessary activities to develop your capabilities and potential, facilitate employability, and enhance the quality of life and the realization of dreams and aspirations. It has a positive impact on your life and increases your overall well-being. 

Another well-known model to describe this is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow Pyramid). At the very top is “self-actualization” the highest level of development. Self-actualization is defined as "the full realization of one's potential" and one's "true self." With the growth area of our Well-Being Triangle, we are aiming at achieving this state, too. 

Some concrete examples for self-actualization or personal growth include learning to: 

• Control anger
• overcome procrastination
• overcome laziness
• be more polite and considerate
• Become a more responsible person
• new things and developing new skills
• Change your mindset and become more positive

In fact, to achieve well-being and happiness there is no other way than to work continuously on personal growth. If you stop growing, you start shrinking. Just like a plant needs water to grow, you need personal growth to develop as a person to reach your full potential.

Some things are important to realize: You have the power to make changes and grow in any area of your life. This counters directly to what Martin Seligman called “learned helplessness.” We do have the power to address almost anything. And if you cannot change the thing, you can at least change your attitude towards the thing.

Growth goals may seem overwhelming. But the good news is that they can be broken down into smaller pieces and a step-by-step process. With consistent action in the right direction, growth and personal development are inevitable. A useful analogy may be the Sorites Paradox. This phenomenon asks the question “when is a heap of sand a heap of sand?” 

The answer is irrelevant. You start with one grain of sand. That’s no heap of sand. You add a second grain of sand. That’s also no heap of sand. You add a third, a fourth, etc. You keep on adding small pieces, step by step, day by day. And at some point, you have the heap of sand in front of you. This is a perfect analogy for personal growth. Consistency leads to progress.

Our Lighthouse Analogy

All our work is centred around the Live better, not perfect Well-Being Triangle. We offer several mechanisms to leverage the triangle through an online platform. These include:

• Live Q&A calls with experts
• Online courses
• Exclusive members' discussion forum
• Expert talks and webinars
• Resource Library including exercises, recipes, health studies etc.

We purposefully decided to go platform-supported community first and one-on-one coaching second because we believe that we can have a far greater impact on people's well-being. This model scales incredibly well. 

We love to use the lighthouse analogy, which describes our approach perfectly well. One lighthouse is enough to direct an immense number amount of ships safely into a harbour. Without a lighthouse, you’d need a huge number of tugboats to guide ships into the harbour. But that is a lot more work, less effective, and does not scale. 

With Live better, not perfect several coaches (Alex, Daniella, Heleen, Juli, Kevin, Manfred) came together to create and offer a platform-supported community that, like a lighthouse, guides people to optimal well-being.

How To Consistently Strive For Optimal Well-Being

We are not helpless.

We are empowered to address almost everything that makes us unhappy or impacts our well-being as an essential driver for happiness. Well-being is a complex combination of a person's physical, mental, emotional, and social health factors combined with personal growth. 

We created the Live better, not perfect community to empower millions of people to consistently strive for optimal well-being. Our members achieve constant improvement in their well-being, awareness of shortcomings and how to address them, expert advice, and motivation from like-minded people in the community.

Sound interesting?

Do you also want to strive for optimal well-being? Then discover our awesome community of individuals aiming to Live better, not perfect.