Living a truly healthy lifestyle requires more than just a healthy diet, and it begins with a healthy mindset. Being able to look holistically at your body, mind, and food will make it easier to incorporate healthy changes. Just like good food fuels your body, so does a good mentality; these two go hand-in-hand!
Throughout the month of August, our friends at Steve & Dan’s Fresh BC Fruit have been working on their organizational mindset. Vik Maraj from Unstoppable Conversations, a long-time customer of Steve & Dan’s and now mentor, came and spoke to their management team about developing a conscious culture – the act of continuously assessing their values and principles to ensure it aligns with their overall goal of bringing fresh fruit to the Edmonton area and surrounding community.
The farmer’s market business, like all others, has its challenges. While there is a lot of love, hard work, laughs, and lifelong connections, there can also be conflict, lying, selfishness, and jealousy leading to issues maintaining a healthy mindset. Steve & Dan’s recognizes the importance of being able to navigate these hurdles with confidence and ease to successfully meet their number one priority – bringing their customers fruit that they can count on and enjoy each and every week.
In order to focus on fruit, family, Mother Nature, their team, and their community, they need to first focus on developing and learning as human beings. This is applicable not only to an organization, but also to us as individuals. It starts within! In order to meet our goals, we need to consciously check-in on ourselves internally and refocus our behaviors and thoughts to encourage growth.
Here are a few ways to consciously check-in on your own mentality:
- Accountability: Take ownership of your actions and behaviors. Understand that you have control over the decisions you make and how you react to things that feel out of your control. If you fall behind on a habit or goal you’ve been working on, don’t beat yourself up over it, but take accountability and make a plan on how you are going to recover and succeed the next time by creating a healthy mindset.
- Integrity: Be honest and true to who you are and what you believe. Understanding what matters to you at your core is incredibly important to act as a guiding principle for how you treat others and live your life. Consider – are you proud of the person you’ve become? If your answer is no, what can you do to change that around?
- Loyalty: Loyalty to a brand or another individual seems obviously beneficial, but what about loyalty to yourself? At the end of the day, you are the most important person in your own life and staying loyal to what you need is the basis to feeling great from the inside-out.
- Fairness: While setting goals and striving for greatness is incredibly important to individual satisfaction and motivation, it’s also important to be fair to yourself. We all have bad days and life brings a number of challenges – sometimes seemingly all at once. When you fail, which we all do sometimes, treat yourself with grace and forgiveness. Hold yourself to the same standards and expectations as you would others.
- Communication: One of the most important ways to take care of yourself is to speak openly about how you’re feeling. This can be by venting to a friend, speaking with a counsellor, or even just recording a daily journal on how you are feeling that day. Know that there is no wrong way to feel but admitting it and verbalizing it is one of the first steps to understanding and managing it.
Come September, try checking in on your mindset and set small goals to begin making healthy changes. Visiting a farmer’s market is a great way to incorporate more fresh, local products into your diet, but it is also a chance to reinvigorate your mindset by getting outside, supporting local businesses, and enjoying the sunshine while we still can! Check out Steve & Dan’s website for a list of available markets or shop their online market and have a variety of local products delivered right to your door!
