From the veranda
Sometimes up, sometimes down.
ISSUE TEN | Why This Matters
This is the last part of the series, and it answers the question I get asked the most. So what? Why put a name on this, and eventually a number?
I will tell you where the number came from. Somewhere around the end of 2020, after a hard year in my own relationships, I noticed something. I could track my steps. I could check my budget and my net worth any time I wanted. Once a year I did my blood work and somebody told me how my body was doing. And for the part of my life that was giving me the most trouble, the people part, I had nothing. No way to see where I was, and no way to tell if I was getting better or worse. So I built it. That is the Realth assessment, and that is the whole reason it exists. I wanted a number I could look at.
Think about how we handle the other two. We take health seriously now. We measure it, we track it, we screen for problems before they become a crisis. We do the same with money. We check balances, we look at our credit, we plan. But the thing that affects our day to day the most, how we are with people, we mostly leave alone until something breaks. A marriage ends. A friend stops calling. The same argument keeps coming back. Then we look at the relationship, and most of the time we blame the relationship. Sometimes the thing to look at is the person inside it, and I am saying that as the person, not as a judge. If how I function is part of the pattern, then I am not stuck. There is something I can learn and something I can change.
Now here is the part people skip, and it matters. Your health can get better, and it can get worse. Your money can go up, and it can go down. Nobody thinks that is a flaw in the measure. It is why the measure is useful. If the number could only go up, it would not be telling you anything.
Realth works the same way. The score can fall. I made it that way on purpose. Most of us have had a year where we were better with people than the year before, and a year where we were worse. We just never had a way to know which year we were in.
Say Johnny takes the assessment in January and gets his number. He finds out which of the five areas needs his attention, he works on it, and in July he takes it again. Maybe it went up. Maybe it went down because July was a hard month, or because he was more honest the second time. Either way he now knows something he did not know in January, and that is the point. One score is a snapshot. A condition needs checking regularly.
So we have three conditions now. Health is the physical you. Wealth is the financial you. Realth is the relational you. We already understand that looking healthy is not the same as being healthy, and that looking wealthy is not the same as being wealthy. It is time to understand that looking good in your relationships is not the same as functioning well in them. And the first step is having a word that lets you ask the question. What is the condition of my Realth?
That is the whole idea, in four parts. If it holds for you, I would like to know. If it does not, I would like to know that even more. Reply to this email. And if you want your own number, the assessment is free at myrealth.com. Take it once now, and we will talk about taking it again.
The Work You Hide is out now, if you have not picked it up.
Talk soon, Deb.
"Realth lives in you, shows up in your relationships, and shapes the world you leave behind."