When you get into personal development you will find that there are a million different little self-help tasks that you can do to improve and get better. The influx of new people trying to tell you what to do can be overwhelming and it can be difficult to know where to start.
Some suggestions are easy, some suggestions are hard, and some are just downright obituary for your situation. However, I believe that there are a few key activities that are essential to any routine; baseline habits that can and should be done everyday, or nearly everyday.
My baseline habits for everyday life are healthy eating, exercise, meditation, and sleep. These four activities are critical for any personal development journey.
This is because they have the widest range of overall benefits. The benefits are not task or career-specific, meaning they apply for everyone, which is why I have them as my baseline.
They are the foundation that all of your other personal development tasks build off of.
Let’s start off with eating healthy. There are infinitely many different ways to eat healthy and if you've read the Metabolic Typing Diet, you know that what is “healthy” is different for everyone.
The bottom line is, everyone has to eat. The food you eat is broken down into its component parts and then reassembled into what the body needs. You literally are what you eat, so it is essential that you choose wisely in this area.
An online basketball trainer that I had happened to be a certified nutritionist. He had an entire twenty-five minute video detailing the type of diet he wanted his players to have. In the video, he even suggested that what you ate was the most important aspect of your overall health and your playing career.
I’m not sure I would agree with the playing career part, but the overall health part I would definitely support.
Another important aspect of your overall health is exercise. If you’re an athlete, you don’t need me to lecture you on exercise.
Meditation, on the other hand, is a little more uncommon, a little more out there. I feel the need to explain this one because so many people have misconceptions about it. For example, my sister upon hearing meditation used to immediately tilt her head back, rotate her arms the sides, turn her forearms upward while making a circle with her thumb and index fingers like the sign for a three pointer, and go “oooommmmmm!”
That’s not what meditation is at all. It, in fact, could be sitting in a chair, pacing back and forth, or literally any task during which you focus all of your attention on the present moment.
The present moment is all any of us have which is why meditation applies to everyone and why it made this list.
I also touched on meditation here.
Finally, sleeping is an underrated task because unlike eating or exercising, when you do less of it (less quality food for eating), you probably don't notice any glaring immediate changes.
The changes instead are insidious and undermine you in every area of life without you necessarily noticing.
This is why among all of these, sleep is often the one sacrificed the most. We all are guilty of it, even though we know better. Sleep is when our bodies finally get time to recover and relax.
If you're an athlete, this is when muscle is built and if you're a (young) human, this is one of the few areas in your control that can have an impact on your height.
This factor was probably the only thing that kept me from trying to “Kobe” (RIP) my way to the top when I first started out (Kobe was known for putting in ridiculous hours training on ridiculously few hours sleeping.).
I would prioritize getting nine hours of sleep in hopes of growing taller and even though it didn’t work (read “hasn’t worked yet”), that’s still the number I aim for.
We are most productive and efficient when getting the proper amount of rest.
The reason all of these apply to everyone no matter what their goals are or what situation they are in is because they all have to do with the body. We all have a body and we all only have one body for the duration of our lives. That is why it is so important to take care of it. That is why the foundation for personal development, my baseline habits, are healthy eating, exercise, meditation, and sleep.
Athlete-Student
BucketsoverBooks
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