Measure of Competency - Analogy 1: Health

Today, I'm going to share with you an analogy that I hope will help clarify this whole aspect of competency development, and that is health.

When you think about your health, there's four pillars,

• nutrition

• exercise

• sleep

• mindfulness

And these four pillars combined create an envelope of what you can do for yourself to build your health. Each one is not sufficient by itself, and within each one, it requires repetition.

With nutrition, you need to put good food and clean water in your body so that your body can absorb the nutrients, and you need to be able to have food that is that your body can metabolize that and those nutrients out of and be able to utilize and you can't just do that one day and then eat pizza and diet soda the rest of the week. You've got to have a consistency about that eating create a pattern or repetition every day of good food that's nutritious, that's whole that is right for your body.

Exercise too: one push up, one sit up, is not going to help you in any way. In fact, your body needs to exercise your heart with aerobic exercise. They say, three days a week, half an hour each day of those aerobic exercises. If you want to build muscle and lose fat, there's other exercises for that. You do repetitions, “reps,” and that builds the muscle, that builds the strength that you need for your physical body. But it does it with repetition. You do it consistently over a longer period of time.

Sleep is the same way. Sleep is a time when your brain can cleanse itself of toxins, and I go into this in my course, Leadership Transformation. I'll put a link in the comments for that. You can't just get one good night's sleep and the rest of the time slack and do all nighters and stay up late and not get the amount of sleep you have to do it on a consistent basis, repeat it day after day.

And finally, mindfulness is protecting your mind doing regular meditation or just attentive focus, giving your attention to the things that benefit you. If you focus on things that will help you one part of the day, and then things that are really dumbing you down or making you angry, those are things that you need to cut out of your lifestyle and focus on the things that are going to help you. The mindfulness, the mindset, the thought processes of strengthening your intellect, strengthening your spiritual well being and your social well being.

These four together done in repetition. They say that repetition is the mother of all skills. They build a strong character, a strong body, a strong sense of well being. It builds confidence and good health brings positivity. You just feel good.

This analogy, really ties into the architect competency, because you do the things that you need to do to be competent and you repeat those on a regular consistent basis. And that's what builds competency.