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I had my annual physical exam last week. It went well, for one entering his seventh decade, due in part to my mentor’s challenge this year to pay closer attention to the physical dimension of my life.
As I sat on the table awaiting the doctor, I thought, “We all get an annual physical checkup. I wonder if we should also get an annual exam in the other seven dimensions of our whole life?”
That muse inspired what will be a series of thoughts on this question: What would an annual checkup in the other dimensions of life look like? We’ll explore that in a series of posts here over the next several months. Let’s start with the social dimension.
Basic Measurements
We all know the drill at an annual physical. An assistant calls us into back into the examination area and has us step on the scale then asks how tall we are. (I wonder why they don’t measure our height and then just ask us how much we weigh?) Next we head to a room and the assistant takes our temperature and blood pressure. These are the easy-to-observe measures of physical health.
What would be the equivalent measures of our social selves? Remember, we define the social dimension as “our friendships…leisure…play…time off…vacations…renewal…some fun…sabbaticals from the pressures of life…” There are two main elements of this dimension: our friendships and how we rest and play. Here are some easy-to-observe basic measures of social health:
- How many close friends do you have?
- Name them.
- What do you do each day for rest, play or fun?
- How do you take a long break from the pressures of life each year?
These are easy (though not necessarily simple to answer) questions that can identify our current state of social health.
Health Information
At a physical exam, the next step is a long battery of questions from a nurse and from the doctor on our current state of health: family history, physical and eating habits. Having long experience in annual physicals, I now know the questions so well I can almost answer them before they are asked.
How would that look in a social checkup? A doctor or nurse of the Social Dimension might ask:
- How many purely social contacts did you have last month? How did these deepen or enrich your closest friendships?
- Do you have any friendships that you would consider harmful or the capacity to be harmful? In what ways are they (our could they be) harmful?
- When you were a child, what did your family do on its long vacations? How long were those vacations?
- When was your last long (2-weeks or greater) break from normal life?
The Examination
The point of every physical exam, of course, is the doctor’s actual examination. It is his or her poking and probing, looking and listening to the inner workings of the crucial functions of our bodies. This is the part I like the least, but it is the most necessary.
A doctor of the Social Dimension might probe in these ways:
- Tell me about your last significant contact with a particular friend. What did you do together? What was the substance of your conversation? What activities did you do together?
- In what ways did your closest friend strengthen or deepen you as a person? You have an idea of who you want to be at the end of your life, how did that friend help you along the path to that end?
- How did you strengthen or deepen your best friend as a person? Who does he or she want to be in life and how do you encourage progress on that journey?
- Tell me about your last significant break from the routines of life. How long was it? What did you do to during the break? How rested did you feel at the end?
- Describe for me how you create time for leisure and play during each day. What do you do? How long are you able to engage in leisure or play in an average day? When you are finished, how rested and restored are you? How is a weekly break for leisure and play similar or different than a daily break?
Lab Work
The final stop in a physical exam is the lab. A technician takes a few vials of blood, smiles, tells us to have a nice day and the physical is over. At least we hope it is over. Until the doctor’s office calls, or we receive a lab report in the mail, most of us have that nagging voice in our head saying, “I wonder what the lab will see that the doctor did not?”
There is, of course, no “vial” of social fluid that can be extracted from us and tested in a lab. An attentive doctor of the Social Dimension, though, will take the results of a checkup and spend some time thinking through the results:
- What else should we pursue?
- In what ways was my “patient” socially healthy and in what ways are there signs of poor health?
- Did he or she show any signs of trying to conceal or deflect attention to a particular area of life?
Or, perhaps the doctor will see a need to seek out counsel from a trusted colleague over a particular matter that needs further attention.
Results
I suspect the population of us as social people would reflect the population of us as physical people: many of us are in good health, though everyone has some area they would agree could be better if given sufficient attention.
Some, perhaps, would show signs that need some follow up work and closer examination to discover the real picture of social health.
Others would also show signs of very significant issues that must be addressed immediately and may not have been discovered outside of the annual checkup.
There Are No Doctors of the Social Dimension!
Quite true. But there are many skilled mentors. The best of mentors will be able to help a people thrive in all the dimensions of their lives, including the Social Dimension.
Need an annual social checkup? Find a good mentor. We at Leadership Design Group can help.
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