For many, COVID-19 has caused major setbacks to daily lives over the past few months. Disrupting business, relationships, overall well-beings, and much more, we need to find ways to bounce back and set our lives back on a healthy track. In the recent 2020 Vision: Health, Wealth, and Happiness Series webinar, wellness expert Anna Stavaridis, leadership and mindset coach Aska Naito, and retirement income specialist Ivan Lovegren, go over certain topics and details to maintain a healthy, wealthy, and happy lifestyle. Enjoy the brief recap of the webinar’s main points below.

Healthy Mindset

Keeping a healthy mindset is wildly important to any job, relationship, etc., however during these times of uncertainty, that importance is amplified tenfold. Mental health is now one of the main priorities we as human beings need to focus on for the better of ourselves, but also for those around us.

Anna Stavaridis shared some helpful solutions in the webinar that can be utilized in both personal and work lives to help handle problems that may be found during COVID-19 and overall keep your mental health in check. These solutions are the following:

• Research: Use community, state, federal and BHCC resources to stay in the know and find what you need; inform yourself or find others that can inform you.
• Stay Protected: It’s important to social distance, wear a mask, wash your hands, and always get tested if you feel you have a temperature because risking anything puts others at risk too. You never know what could happen or what could be going on so once again, be smart and think things through before putting others at risk.
• Connect with others in your bubble: COVID-19 is still very much a threat and numbers of cases are still climbing, so we must be smart and remember to keep safe. However, that does not mean to shut yourself off from the world. Build your “bubble” of people you love and trust that you can connect with and talk to. Feel free to create a safe space with family, friends, neighbors, etc.
• Reach out to others: Reach out to people you maybe wouldn’t normally talk to or haven’t talked to in a while just to check in and see how they’re doing. Try building new bonds with people and talk with them more than you usually would, even if it is as simple as a good morning text. These small connections are important, and it makes people feel loved in a time where love is most needed.
• Get involved: Use the opportunities that your city, community, chamber, or church may have to plug yourself back into the social scene.

Physical Health

The next step or priority in efforts to take care of yourself is setting your goals to help lead to a more physically healthy life. This can be done by first defining what is or isn’t working toward a healthy lifestyle, and then considering what can be improved. This can include your nutrition, exercise, sleep, scheduling, and so on. Setting yourself first and prioritizing your own needs could drastically help figuring out a healthier way to live. It is okay to take time and invest in yourself if it’s what you need in order to find balance and happiness in your life.

Wealth – Financial Freedom

Finances are always a necessary subject to frequently visit to ensure you’re on track for a financial free lifestyle and retirement. Though it may not always be the easiest thing to look at, getting a sense of stability and control over your finances lifts a very heavy weight of your shoulders and relieves a major amount of stress. Gaining that sense of stability and financial freedom can be done through a five-step plan detailed in the webinar by retirement income specialist, Ivan Lovegren,. This five-step plan consists of five questions to ask yourself in the different stages of your financial life. These questions are:

1. Do you have control over day-to-day, month-to-month finances?
   • A yes or no question that is ok either way. You need to know this in order to set your goal and figure out where you are trying to go.
2. If you experience a set-back (illness, job loss, flat tire), do you have a safety buffer to keep you from creating debt.
   • Now that you have control over your cash flow and have a goal that you are trying to get to, if something were to happen that disturbed this stability, would you be able to recover from that. The last thing you’d want to have happen, is finally get out get out of number one, and just fall back into it. It’s important to prepare for the worst but hope for the best.
3. Have you built out a roadmap or budget that guarantees your financial path?
   • Though you already have your goal, this is where you make a plan that will allow to reach that goal. This question is going to set you on the right path to financial freedom in a certain amount of time. When looking at your cash flow and financial plan, and you’ve taken care of your necessities and future as needed, you could start to feel a bit of that financial freedom now.
4. Do you know what your goals are and are you on track to achieve them?
   • Looking back to the first and third questions, use this to take a step back and see how you are doing overall. This could be when you have some fun with your money and invest, check out stocks, or whatever it may be if you are still on track to achieve your goals.
5. Financial freedom – If not today, when?
   • Know when you are going to reach financial freedom and retirement and you might be able to relieve some of that financial stress today.

Finding Happiness

Common to all human beings, throughout our lives we are constantly in the pursuit of happiness. Though the means of reaching happiness may differentiate from person to person, the final goal is relatively always the same. The idea of being happy may seem somewhat simple, but by mistake, we often lose our way and forget the process and stages of achieving this feeling. In the webinar, mindset coach Aska Naito, addresses a helpful plan to help guide us back onto the right path and eventually find happiness. The plan to happiness is as follows:

• Permission to embrace discomfort: How are you dealing with discomfort? Especially during this time, we are all in a state of discomfort. We are confined, unable to see friends, go outside, do the things we’d like to do, and on top of that, we have other personal issues outside of COVID. As the first step to move on, we must learn to embrace discomfort because only when we hit our lowest point, do we open ourselves up to the greatest change. Discomfort can be seen as a gift and a learning opportunity to deal with our emotions and the situation that we are in.
• Resilient Mindset: What is resilience? It is the compacity to recover quickly from difficulty or toughness. Catabolic vs. Anabolic Mindset. We need to strive to maintain an anabolic mindset because in this mindset, we see a more constructive, high energy, positive person that wants to do well and achieve greater things.
• Flexibility & Adaptability: In an ever-changing world like today, we must be flexible and open to change in order to do well and accomplish our goals. This requires mental & emotional flexibility along with a strong yet gentle approach to creating win-win situations.
• Proactive Action Planning: Concentrate on what you can control and know you are responsible for your own destiny. Take time to situate yourself and decide how you are going to act as well as approach the issue.
• Understanding your why: Identify your 2020 vision statement. Similar to making a healthy lifestyle, understanding what is or isn’t working for you is a major part in knowing what you’re working toward and knowing why you make each decision or step.

For further information, contact:

• Anna Stavaridis | Meraki Fitness | 310.625.5490
• Aska Naito | ASKA NAITO Coaching & Consulting | 213.280.0766
• Ivan Lovegren | Ivan Lovegren, CDFA™ – Signature Resources | 424.255.6640