Your health is another aspect of your life that can benefit from strategic thinking. This is largely because getting and keeping yourself healthy requires a lot of planning and forethought. You then need to take action to work the activities into your schedule. This makes them work well with strategic thinking. Of course this is my main reason for sharing this series of articles with you.
Strategic thinking about your health requires a slight modification of the process. When you sit down to make your plan, you need to include a list of both your goals and your challenges. Everyone has health challenges, whether that is a chronic illness, a high-stress job, hereditary issues, or something else. You could of course tie in the challenges with the “planning for obstacles“.
The goals are things that you want to achieve with your health. As with everything else, they should be concrete. A health goal can be something as simple as losing ten pounds. Alternatively, it can be as moderate as avoiding catching Covid (again). It can also be as complex as reaching age 80 in relatively good health.
The challenges are things that you have to pay special attention to in order to maintain your health. If you know that stress makes your health issues worse, for example, you may need to develop strategies to identify your triggers and manage stress better. All of this can go into your plan.
Your strategic plan for your health should be detailed enough for you to follow it and for it to help you reach your goals. It can be short in timescale, as in a year or less, or cover what you expect to be the rest of your life.
The type of things you should include in your plan include everything from your exercise plans (How? What? When?) to plans for getting your checkups and routine preventative tests. Many people do not do these latter two and end up at the doctor with a serious or even fatal problem that could have been resolved if they had been in sooner.
Applying strategic thinking to your health will not allow you to live forever. It will not stop you from developing cancer or dementia in your old age. Appropriate action can however help you reduce your risk factors for these and other life limiting conditions. It can help you be healthier for longer and help you catch health problems when they are early enough, for better, easier treatment.