The Five Aspects of a Complete Person
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Complete Person
When I think about what it takes to be a well-balanced and "complete" human being, my mind immediately goes to fitness. In college, I was a pitcher on the baseball team at Radford University. Being a pitcher requires much more physical fitness than most people realize — running, weightlifting, stretching, rehab, rest and recovery, icing, and more. I spent hours every day taking care of my body, chasing one goal: gain the most velocity while maintaining command of my pitches and staying healthy for an entire season.
That's a great fitness goal — if all I ever wanted to do was be a pitcher. If I was focused solely on becoming the best pitcher I could be, it makes sense I'd need to sacrifice other areas of my overall fitness.
After my playing days, I joined a CrossFit gym, sure I'd jump right in and be a star — after all, I was an ex-Division 1 athlete. I quickly learned just how many areas of my fitness I'd been neglecting as a pitcher. I was so focused on one area that I'd completely ignored other, critical ones. CrossFit exposed those weaknesses, and to this day I'm still working to improve them.
We don't have the luxury of becoming hyper specialized in the context of being Fully Available. People are more complex than that.
There's a time and place for specialization and focus — but those are intentional decisions, made wisely. There's a critical difference between intentional specialization and being unintentionally one-dimensional. It's essential that we don't neglect any of the five aspects of availability. We may spend more time on one than another — that's fine, because time isn't the measure of whether we're accomplishing our goals. An employee who "works" eight hours a day and accomplishes nothing is far less successful than the one who works two hours and brings real value.
Time is not the measure. Effectiveness is the measure.
Finding the Line
Improving physical fitness is a never-ending pursuit — it can literally consume your whole life. For most of us, there's a point where we have to say, I'm in good enough shape to be Fully Available in every other area of life. That's for you to decide, but I'd challenge you not to let yourself off the hook too easily. Find the line, and don't be afraid to occasionally push past it to test the boundary.
CrossFit and ultramarathons have helped me understand where that line is for me. When I trained for an ultramarathon a few years ago, I fully immersed myself into hours of running and hiking trails, studying fueling strategies, and consuming every piece of content I could find. The problem wasn't even running so much while raising three kids, all under 3 — I did most runs before sunrise, starting as early as 3am to get 20+ miles in before breakfast. The real issue was my energy declining as the day went on. I'd muster through the morning, but by the afternoon I needed a nap while my wife handled the kids. By race day, what I was most excited about was being done so I could be more available as a husband and father. Since then, I've trained for longer events, but now I plan ahead so the other aspects of my life don't take the hit.
Find your thresholds in each aspect of availability — spiritual, emotional, physical, intellectual, vocational. How far can you push each one without sacrificing the others?
The Five Aspects of Availability
There are five aspects of availability common to every person. As we grow in these five areas, we make ourselves more available to God — a better vehicle for Him to use to bring about His Kingdom. The five aspects are:
Spiritual
Emotional
Physical
Intellectual
Vocational
Neglecting any of these will eventually stop your growth, or cause you to crash and burn. You may spend more time in one area than another — that's unavoidable and probably necessary. But remember: time is not the measure of your accomplishment. Effectiveness is.
Think of each aspect as a room in the same house — the house being the Fully Available version of you. Each room has its own character, its own challenges, its own rewards. But they're all connected. Neglect one long enough, and the whole structure begins to weaken.
A Brief Introduction to Each Aspect
Spiritual — Mastery of the spiritual life is the first and most important part of becoming Fully Available. Everything starts here, and everything leads back here — the hardest to master, but the one that produces the most fruit. In short: the spiritual aspect is your relationship with God, and from that, everything else flows.
Emotional — There are two parts to the emotional aspect: relationship with self and relationship with others. The two are interconnected, but it's important to intentionally keep them separate — I can't have a healthy relationship with others if I never put time into my relationship with myself. Emotions are our path to our most effective and influential self, and, if we don't take control of them, our path to ruin.
Physical — This is an area largely ignored by many people, which is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. I don't mean the things around us — I mean our bodies. Our physical health, and using the vessel God gave us to carry out His mission. Everyone has their own baseline for optimal health; some struggle with chronic illness, some are perfectly healthy. This aspect is about working with the cards you're dealt to grow your body into the optimal vessel for God's will.
Intellectual — To grow here, we need to become intellectuals — not necessarily in the way you're thinking, but in the sense of exploring things on a deeper level. We need to get away from taking things at face value, challenge ideas, and find real answers to the questions that help us grow into all God created us to be.
Vocational — There are four options for a vocation: marriage, priesthood, religious life, and devoted single life. You can only take on one, because each will take everything you've got — and that's where you'll find the greatest joy and adventure in your life if you go all-in. There's no better way to find God than through a vocation, and no better way to impact the world. This aspect is as much a part of you as your physical body.
