Remember, these questions are meant to guide your reflection on your health and wellness journey. You don’t have to answer all of them. Use them as a starting point for your journaling, especially if you’re uncertain about where to begin. The aim is to help you articulate and understand your experiences and insights related to health and wellness.
Easy
Uncomfortable
Fucking Brutal
We’ll talk about a topic we’re into right now, both of us: Health and wellness.
Health and wellness. If you’re healthy and you’re well mentally, physically, this one will be not much for you, right? Maybe you just want to provide tips and strategies, and thank God you’re in that space. If you’ve had some medical or mental trauma or issues. This is a real good point to talk about that.
Definitely. This is a moment where you can talk about daily or weekly routines that you have that contribute to health and wellness. You can explore your own health balance. And this doesn’t mean that you have to pretend that you are a perfect specimen and you do everything right. This could be an opportunity for you to talk about ways that you’ve changed or grown or things that have gone wrong. In my stuff, one of the things that I’m gonna talk about is getting sober. It’ll be coming on 20 years since I had a drink. And that was a major change in my life that I think is important for my kids to know that story. Evolving health perspectives…
I mean, stop for a second. That’s an amazing story to tell your kids because imagine you get hit by a bus and one of your kids has a problem with drugs or alcohol in the future, and they pull this thing up and they’re like, “Dad went through this and here’s his advice.” You never got a chance to really have that conversation with them in a raw way. That’s really powerful.
Yeah. I mean that’s really the foundation of this whole “Legacy X Project” is you might never get the opportunity to say some of this stuff in any other way because we don’t know when our ticket’s being punched.
Being Gen Xers, we’re next in line after the boomers.
That sounds very “Dio-like” but I guess it is. That’s a Gen X reference for you. I think for health and wellness, just thinking about where you are, what challenges you faced, how you’ve overcome them, how you haven’t, how you still struggle with them. I think that’s important for them to hear too. These are all things that you want to discuss, that you wanna talk about. And if you wanna stick around, we’ll talk about some specific questions and prompts for you.
Yep.
Let’s get a little more into the detail of what you were just talking about. One thing that I thought about is, “What sucked?” What I did wrong? Maybe what just happened to me? Trauma that happened to me, how I dealt with it. Like everything, there’s a real opportunity to have conversations with your kids about the shitty stuff.
Oh yeah. I’m not shying away from that. I think related to that, I’ve thought things—and this is pretty common in health and wellness space—I thought things were healthy and then it turned out they weren’t. And I want my kids to hear that. I want them to hear that I was wrong about things and I may have told them things when they were younger that are turned out not to be the greatest advice in terms of health and wellness. So I think getting into the challenges that we face… Here’s another place that this has a lot of value: your children, your offspring, if they’re genetic, they share your DNA. There could be health challenges you face, that by sharing that with them is going to help them avoid some of those possible outcomes.
You’re right. In today’s day and age, you have all the DNA testing kits and all that stuff. You could pass that stuff down, but yeah, you’re right there. There could be some things that you wanna make sure they understand. Like, I got colon cancer when I was 50 years old. No one in my family’s ever had cancer before. Let alone colon cancer. So, “You guys might wanna get colonoscopies done in your forties.”
If you’re a woman and breast cancer is something that runs in your family and you’re leaving this video or audio for your daughter, that could be a moment. When else are you gonna have that conversation? That’s not an easy thing to talk about. And so this might be an opportunity for you to pass along really important information.
Well, it is an opportunity. It’s gonna come down to whether or not you wanna—how important this is to you and, if you’re willing to talk about it out loud. You may not be ready to talk about this at all because this is difficult to talk about. I get really deep with the stuff with my therapist, but you know what, I’ve already made that video for my kids where I talk about how therapy has been a game changer for me mentally in my mindset and has helped me accomplish so many things. I’ve already made that video for them, and I’ve found it to be so important that I’ve actually already had that conversation with them in person because I was like, this has been such a big difference on my life, that I feel I don’t even want to make a video for you for later. I need to tell you right now. And that’s another thing that will happen when you’re creating these videos or these audios is you may just get to a point where you’re like, you know what, this is really, really important. I need to talk about it now. And that’s a good thing too. You’re growing through the uncomfortableness of talking and reflecting on things, traumatic experiences that have happened in your life, and it’s very powerful.
I think this is definitely one of the topics that we’re covering where I think it’s pretty black and white. I think you’re either gonna be willing to kind of dig into this and share it or not. And either way is fine, but what we’re saying is there’s not a lot of ambiguity here. You talk about your own struggles, your own successes, and related to health and wellness, and you’re just sharing that.
So get deep, talk to them, give them advice and strategy. I always say the two greatest teachers in life are trauma and failure. So you have this opportunity to talk about those things right now, especially from the health perspective because when they’re in their forties or fifties, and if you’re gone, you’re not gonna have that opportunity to do that. Imagine if you’re gone they are able to pull up an audio of you talking about the day you found out that you got cancer. Maybe you died from that cancer. How you overcame it, how you got through the chemotherapy and through the trauma from it all, that can help them. That will help them.
And I think too that this is where you can also tie into some family legacy. I know that one of the recordings I want to do for my kids about this was watching my dad pass and that end of life process and, what that meant and, what I saw, and how that impacted me and what I learned from that. And I want to pass that along to my kids, and I think that’s part of what this health and wellness section could be too.
I’m going through that right now. My mom is 83 and she’s in high level dementia right now, and she doesn’t recognize me 95% of the time. I’m watching a slow goodbye right now and it’s absolutely heartbreaking and terrible. And heck, that could happen to me. And you know, I can make a video for them now and go, “Hey, look, if that happens to me… I’m going through it right now. Here’s what I want you to understand. Don’t beat yourself up… I’m not there.” This is important stuff. I’m looking in the camera. This is really, really important, powerful, emotional things that are worth it that you need to do that are gonna pay dividends for you post life, that are gonna change your children’s lives and help them get to where they need to be to be healthy, spiritually, physically, mentally, financially, everything this is important to do. The tough stuff is tough for a reason, but it will work out.
So get cracking on health and wellness and we’ll come back with the next lesson.