Maintaining Hope in Adversity: Navigating Life Domains
Hello, listeners! Welcome to the Resilience Wins podcast. My name is Cheryl Riggen, a certified Life Coach and Trainer. I'm here to accompany you on a unique journey. This isn't about metaphors or analogies; it's about real people, real stories, and real adversity. I believe in the transformative power of personal journeys through the grace of God and hard work. We're here to explore how facing and overcoming adversity can lead to personal growth and success. So, join me as we delve into inspiring stories, learn from experiences, and discover how we can all navigate our paths through life's challenges.
This is Episode 3 of Maintaining Hope in Adversity, and our focus today is on Navigating Life Domains. Reflecting on the interview with Sarah, she came to a point in her life where she realized it was time to shift her focus from identifying herself as a woman with an ostomy to recognizing many other benefits in her life. This can be compared to the direct environment in which we live and interact. Like we interact with our environment, you could say Sarah, over time, found that her focus on her ostomy and Crohnā€™s disease became less central to her identity, allowing her to explore other aspects of herself. Our environment is divided into different parts. So, for instance, there are areas of life that we call work, health, finance, spiritual, friends, relationships, hobbies, and so on. These are what we refer to as life domains.
Changing the course of Sarahā€™s life to a different segment is comparable to switching between life domains. Rather than focusing on a single life domain, I believe that when we want to address the issues we are experiencing and determine how to enhance our well-being, it is beneficial to begin by analyzing our life in terms of the various life domains.
To begin with, think about how you would answer the following questions. What, in general, does your life look like? What are the most important life domains? What are the life domains that are going pretty well, and what are the life domains that need the most attention right now? The core question that we address in this presentation is, What are your most important life domains?
So, what are life domains? Life domains are different aspects of life. You could say a life domain is a segment of reality. It's a way to categorize and separate the various things that we do in life. So an example of a life domain is health, friends, leisure time, work, or family. There are many different ways to categorize life.
The most frequently addressed 10 life domains in research are health, family income, relationships, work, sex, life, housing, safety, self-worth, and education.
Different life domains can be compared to how Sarah was initially focused on her health and later realized other areas of her life, such as her career, friends, and social activities. You see, she realized her life was divided into different parts, and she began to navigate through these other parts of her life in the same way that we can choose to engage in various life domains.
What are the practical benefits of addressing our life domains?
Firstly, addressing life domains provides a more comprehensive picture of your life. Rather than asking yourself about what's going on in life, I think a more structured approach is to discover how youā€™ve currently designed your life. Realizing the complete picture of your life is important because, in most cases, focusing on one specific area of life without recognizing its effects on other areas can create unnecessary stress and anxiety. Once you start zooming out using this life domain approach, you also gain more options, a wider range of resources and solutions to find during your process of change to better well-being. For instance, by acquiring a complete picture of your life, you may find that you are overinvesting in one particular area, such as work. What you see here is that by gaining this overview of your life, you automatically gain more insight into possible ways to help yourself, such as spending more time with friends and engaging in leisure activities. This is a compelling way to restore balance in life.
Another benefit is that the life domain approach widens the scope of your self-definition. What is meant by this is that it is common to become very focused on the life domain with which youā€™re least satisfied. And while it is true that this life domain needs attention, devoting all of one's energy to it at the expense of other important life domains may not be a healthy approach. For instance, you may become so focused on trying to gain control over a specific problem that you devote no time to other meaningful life domains, such as friends and family. What happens then is that your self-identity, your idea of who you are, becomes predominantly focused on this life domain that is not going very well, which may result in a downward spiral.
Some practical advice before I conclude this podcast. Scholars have argued that there are at least 173 different names for life domains, indicating that the categorization process is quite arbitrary. People may use various names to describe the same thing, implying that the meaning of a label for a specific life domain may differ for individuals. What you call community may mean something completely different from what I call community. Therefore, I strongly suggest generating names for domains that accurately describe your areas of life. Why? Because, in any case, you ensure that the labels assigned to the different live domains resonate with you.
Iā€™ve included a link to a thought-provoking exercise, designed by Hugo Alberts, a Psychologist, Researcher, and PhD, to create awareness of the discrepancy between what you value in life and the extent to which you are living in line with your values. This tool assesses the time you are devoting to valued (and less important) life domains and the time you wish to devote to these domains.
Exercise Life Domain Diagram: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KcnZEMDiJOKNepTxqClw6M4sPRnr73AR/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for listening.
