Are you or your clients putting off personal future planning?
You’re busy, there are goals to be met, succession plans to complete, a final day to plan.
Doctor visits, sleep, date nights, time at the gym all get put off for later. You think once the business sells, there will be plenty of time for those things.
There’s a lot of talk right now about longevity. But here’s the question that actually matters: what’s the difference between living a long time – and living a long time in good health?
There are six core things that can give you/them the best chance at an active future. The Big 6: six areas of daily life with decades (some would say centuries) of data linking them to the people who live the longest, healthiest lives. No expensive memberships. No wearables required. No special therapies. Just six areas of life that, when you actually pay attention to them, can completely change your trajectory.
Food. Movement. Sleep. Stress management. Community. Purpose.
Food –
What matters more than any specific diet is your relationship with food… the
habits you’ve picked up over decades, the patterns your family passed down,
and honestly, how often food becomes a stress reliever instead of nourishment.
None of that is a character flaw. It’s just worth noticing.
Small, honest steps beat a diet you’ll abandon in three weeks. Every time.
Movement –
You don’t need a gym membership. You don’t need a tracker counting your steps.
Walking is movement. Dancing in your kitchen is movement. Gardening is movement.
What matters is moving your body in different ways, often.. instead of sitting for most of your day.
Pick the kind of movement you’ll actually enjoy enough to keep doing. That’s the only kind that works long term.
Sleep –
It’s easy to skimp on sleep. But the data tells a different story. Sleep isn’t a luxury, it’s a core pillar of longevity. Short-term, poor sleep shows up as fog and irritability. Long-term, it’s linked to nearly everything else on this list.
I’ve heard from so many people who thought they only needed four or five hours a night to get everything done, until they actually prioritized real, deep sleep. Suddenly eight focused hours did what sixteen used to.
Sleep isn’t the thing to cut. It’s the thing that makes everything else work.
Stress Management –
Not all stress is bad. Some of it sharpens us, it’s the stress that fuels our best creative work and our sharpest problem-solving.
But there’s another kind of stress. The kind that’s constant. The kind that keeps us stuck in fight-or-flight, unable to think clearly or make our best decisions.
Too often, we just accept it as normal.
It doesn’t have to be. There are simple, free techniques that calm your nervous system, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and move your thinking back into the part of your brain where you can be creative and solve problems again.
Community –
If you’ve read about Blue Zones, the places in the world where people live the longest, community shows up again and again.
Not a community of people who think exactly like you and never disagree.
That’s not realistic, and it’s not even the goal.
It’s people who care about you and who you care about in return. People you can have a healthy, respectful disagreement with, and still show up for. The ability to manage conflict, and let your care for each other outweigh it, is what actually links community to a long, healthy life.
Purpose –
What do you have to offer the world? It doesn’t have to be a huge audience, it can be your neighbor, your street, your community.
Purpose is the intersection of your skills, your interests, your personality, and the things in the world that genuinely bother you enough that you want to be part of the solution.
Here’s what’s remarkable: giving in that way doesn’t just help others. It boomerangs right back to you, and that deep fulfillment is directly linked to a longer, healthier life.
In addition to increasing business value, preparing successors, or finding the best buyer, the personal planning is an essential component for a bright, engaging future well past the exit. (And just like the business exit, this personal planning should not be saved for the last second or even after the check is cut.)
Reach out to explore personal planning!
