A new year, a new you: Take command of your healthThe month of January provides a fresh opportunity to take command of your health and improve your physical and emotional health, job performance, and mission readiness. (Courtesy photo) by: Patricia Deuster
What are your goals for 2018 – have you thought about them? Will it be a new you for this new year, or a new year and the same old you?
This month launches a fresh opportunity to turn your vision inward and consider what you can do to improve your physical and emotional health, job performance, and mission readiness. These qualities are fundamental to success not only in uniform, but also at home and in the community at large.
Patricia Deuster is a professor at Uniformed Services University and director of the USU Consortium for Health and Military Performance.Total Force Fitness, or TFF, is a concept to build and maintain health, readiness, and optimal performance by connecting mind, body, spirit, environment, and relationships. Take a moment to reflect on your TFF goals for 2018. What matters most to you? Perhaps you want to enhance your physical endurance, better manage your emotions, improve your communication skills, regulate your anger, lose weight, or cut back on caffeine. Whatever you decide to tackle, success requires three steps: inspiration, commitment, and action.
Inspiration can be defined as recognizing the need or desire to make change. It also means making change happen through commitment and then action. Importantly, inspiration includes more than just the physical, psychological, and social and family domains of TFF. The spiritual domain is also vital to health and performance. Meeting personal goals requires some sort of spiritual connection. This isn’t necessarily in a religious sense, but it means looking at your ethical foundation, core values, reasons for being, and what matters most to you.
We live in a world and time of great discord, and this can be difficult to accept. A spiritual connection helps us understand that while we can’t control disruptive forces surrounding us, we can learn how to control our thoughts, responses, and reactions to them by living up to our ideals and values. It may be helpful to remember what the great leader and civil rights advocate Mahatma Gandhi said: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
What do the words inspiration, commitment, and action mean? First, you must be inspired by or recognize a personal issue from within. Perhaps you are overly reactive or you have feelings of fear and self-doubt. Or maybe you believe you know it all or you don’t act according to your values. We all have areas where we need to take ownership. Once we’ve been inspired to accept the need for change, this must be accompanied by intentionally seeking a solution and setting a goal – a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and reasonable goal.
After you’ve set your goals, it’s essential to make a commitment to execute them. This will take courage, concentration, and practice. The end result is action, which signifies success.
Acting according to deeply held values is very important to becoming a new you. The guiding principles you honor and strive to live up to reflect your inner core as well as your service-specific core values. Instead of reacting to your own thoughts and feelings, you choose to reflect and respond in ways that directly support your values. Taking action in support of those values will promote inner and outer flexibility, awareness, a sense of connection, gratitude, and optimism.
The following activities can help you decide the first steps to becoming a new you:
- Make a list of what matters most in your life. Examples include work, family, friends, being a good partner, being kind to others, being honest, being part of a community, and staying in good physical condition.
- Prioritize the list according to how much you value what matters.
- Grade yourself on how well you believe you’re living up to what matters.
- Identify several things you can do now and over the coming months to actively honor and live up to your top values.
- Every day, engage in activities that support what really matters to you.
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Airman builds medical relationships in VietnamAir Force Maj. (Dr.) Cody Butler, a physical therapist and commander of the 78th Medical Group Clinical Medicine Flight, poses with other members of his engagement team in Tam Ky, Quang Nam Province, Vietnam, Nov. 30, 2017. Butler was in Vietnam as part of a team seeing patients and building relationships with local physicians during the humanitarian assistance engagement Operation Pacific Angel Vietnam 2017. (Air Force photo by Jonathan Bell) by: Jonathan Bell
ROBINS AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. — An Air Force physical therapist stationed here was one of 50 U.S. team members who recently spent more than two weeks in Tam Ky, Quang Nam Province, Vietnam, seeing patients and building relationships with local physicians.
“Each day we bused out to a government community center where we provided family health, pediatric care and physical therapy assistance and dental care,” said Maj. (Dr.) Cody Butler, commander of the 78th Medical Group Clinical Medicine Flight.
“We would start seeing patients at about 7:30 in the morning and ran all day long,” Butler said.
Humanitarian Assistance Engagements
His efforts were part of Operation Pacific Angel Vietnam 2017 -- the last of four humanitarian assistance engagements that made up PACANGEL 17.
The program, which has been going on for a decade now, ensures that the militaries of various countries in the Pacific region are able to work together should a humanitarian assistance need arise. One of Robins Air Force Base’s physicians was given the opportunity to take part in the program, which is typically only attended by members of U.S. Pacific Command.
“I saw between 50 and a hundred patients a day,” Butler said. “To put that in perspective, I see about 10 to 15 a day while working at Robins.”
Building Relationships
The overall goal of PACANGEL was to try and build international relationships with the people of Vietnam. In addition to medical care, the team was able to go on a few evening excursions and experience the country outside of the treatment areas.
“It was interesting to see things like memorials and Viet Cong tunnels from their standpoint, where everything was, ‘The war against the Americans,’” Butler said. “So it was interesting seeing this communist country with statues and pictures of their leader Ho Chi Min everywhere as we’re trying to break the ice with these people.”
Butler said he interacted with some of the local Vietnamese physicians.
“In Vietnam, physical therapy is not well utilized -- people can’t afford it,” he said. “So, being able to teach these physicians some techniques and tricks of my trade, and then seeing them try it on patients, it was really neat to see them now have another option of care to provide to their patients.”
PACANGEL 17 conducted humanitarian assistance engagements in Bogo City and San Remigio, Northern Cebu Province, Philippines; Northern and Western Divisions, Fiji; and Gorkha, Nepal.
Butler said that by participating in humanitarian missions such as this, the Air Force is able to reinforce its capabilities to deliver assistance to areas that need it.
“You typically think of the pilots or launching satellites as making the difference,” he said. “But even us medics, we’re there to soften the hearts of the people and provide a service that only we could offer.”
Disclaimer: Re-published content may have been edited for length and clarity. Read original post.
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