Marek Fialkiewicz

Honors 495

Professor *INSERT NAME*

April 2, 2023

As my senior year concludes and graduation is on the horizon, I find myself the busiest I

have ever been. I am enrolled in 7 classes which equate to 21 units, I have an internship that

takes about 15 hours each week, and a job on the side in which I usually work about two shifts a

week. With all of this going on it is very hard to give myself a break when I have to be

constantly working to graduate and pay my bills. The good news is that in all the craziness that

has happened this semester, I have been able to keep a positive attitude and find wellness (in

varying degrees) of all the aspects of my life.

I initially thought of wellness as something you did to calm yourself down from work,

and that it was only applicable to one aspect of your life. As pessimistic as it was, I didn’t even

associate the idea of wellness with work or school life; to me there was only physical wellness

and mental wellness. That was until we discussed Swarbrick’s model and how to apply wellness

to all aspects of your life. I consider myself a positive person, so applying this model to my life

wasn’t the hard part. After I thought about how I incorporate wellness into my life, I realized

how inconsistent it was for some parts.

Before learning about Swarbrick’s model, I realized my wellness through rock climbing.

It was a great way for me to forget about all my stressors and let go; a place where I felt free

from time and life. To me, this elated feeling of freedom was what defined wellness both

physically and mentally. But a shift happened after I learned how to apply Swarbrick’s model. It

made me reevaluate where I find happiness in my life, and I realized that there is a lot of
wellness that comes from my schoolwork, occupation, and financially. All of these have to do

with how I incorporate excellence into my life.

To me, excellence is using your full potential to achieve what you can. I started to realize

that even though I was having the busiest semester of my life, I wasn’t experiencing burnout, and

I associated that with my constant strive for excellence. It makes me feel validated and

accomplished when I work hard and use my ambition to achieve excellence. Education wise,

even though I have seven classes, I still go to all of my classes, participate, and complete the

homework assignments to the best of my abilities. Work wise, I currently have a project

management internship in which I do my best to help the company I work for. Financially, I find

excellence by budgeting and saving my money appropriately. Setting financial goals and hitting

them. In all of these scenarios, I feel happy with the work I have done, and I feel comfortable

where I am in life which is the reality of wellness.

Another complication I had with wellness was that I was associating it with solely happy

emotions. I had a very black and white perspective, if I was happy, I was “well” and if I was sad,

I wasn’t. This turned into a toxic downward spiral as I would convince myself that I wasn’t well

whenever I was having bad consistent days. Luckily, I would turn around that negative emotion

quickly, but this didn’t hide from the fact that I was living in an emotionally inconsistent

mindset. Grounding myself, I recognized that wellness is much more about being in a content

state in the long run rather than being happy in any given moment. Incorporating excellence in

my mindset I realized that I could be much more consistent with my wellness as I knew that even

on the hard days, I was still working toward my goals and achieving the excellence I set out to.

When thinking of excellence, understanding the longevity is essential. Achieving a life of

excellence doesn’t mean doing one thing to the best of your abilities and then calling it a day. It
is a commitment to doing what you can to achieve what you want. The reason my wellness was

flawed and inconsistent was because I didn’t truly understand the meaning of excellence for a

while. I had misconstrued the lines between excellence and perfection. When I wouldn’t get a

desired grade on my test or I would fail at a sport I was trying, I would get discouraged and it

used to have a huge effect on my wellness. I was always very growth oriented so when I kept

failing and it kept having an effect of me, I wondered what I could change to be in a more

consistent place. I then realized that it was my constant strive for perfection that was hindering

my potential wellness.

Perfection in itself is unattainable, and it creates a black-and-white, end-all-be-all

mentality. If you don’t do something 100% correct then you can’t consider yourself perfect,

which is what I was really struggling with. My strive for perfection had pushed me to look at

myself as an ultimate failure. I understood how unhealthy of a mindset this is, so instead, I

started looking at being excellent instead of perfect.

To me, there are two ways you can look at achieving excellence: one being trying your

best at every small thing you do, and the other being much more holistic and drawn out, trying

your best to make yourself happy throughout life. I like to associate my current mindset with the

latter because it ties in closer with self-development. The long and bumpy road to life-long

excellence is not linear and that is okay. This was a big turning point with how I viewed myself.

I realized that I didn’t have to be perfect at everything, all that mattered was that I was giving it

my all. Sometimes I was going to fail, or I wasn’t going to do as well as I thought, but through

those experiences you are learning and improving which is the true essence of excellence.

The way I learned how to master the mindset of excellence wasn’t through school or

internships, but through rock climbing. This is a sport that I have done since freshmen year that I
have had a (no pun intended) rocky relationship with. When I started the sport, I immediately

was going online, especially to YouTube, to looks up tips to improve my climbing. Still with my

perfection mindset, I rapidly exceeded everyone’s expectations as I was doing harder climbs at a

rapid rate. Then, I reached a climb that no matter how I went about it, I couldn’t do it. Then I

found another and another and another, etc. I was devastated and being the sport that I had

recently become enthralled with, I didn’t know what to do. I felt like a failure because I was

excelling at such a rapid pace, and then I hit my plateau like a brick wall. I started getting so

frustrated with myself and so focused on having the perfect technique that the sport had lost the

fun, and because I was climbing out of anger now, my technique was actually regressing.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time this had happened either. Through my years of diving,

swimming, soccer, tennis, golf, etc., I have had a history of rapid and early improvement, sudden

plateau, and eventual decline which led to me quitting. I didn’t want to lose rock climbing like

the other sports in my graveyard, so I took a week off to rest and think, and that’s how I started

internalizing excellence.

It wasn’t hard to piece together my obsession with perfection was ruining my wellness,

but it was hard to come to terms with it. My whole life I had been under the impression that to

maximize your potential, you needed to be the best at everything. But when I actually

internalized what that meant, I realized that I was setting myself up for failure with that

mentality. I am never going to be the smartest person in the world, the most athletic, the most

outgoing, so by holding myself to that standard, I was destined to disappoint myself. This was

the beginning of my turning point. I needed to start cutting myself some slack and understand

that all the work and effort I put into everything is enough. The biggest lesson I had to learn was

that the path of excellence isn’t linear. Changing my mindset to excellence didn’t mean that I
wasn’t going to fail anymore or even become complacent with my fails, it just changed the way I

viewed them. Failures are learning experiences. They are a way for you to figure out where you

need improvement to start building yourself up stronger, and by fixing my relationship with what

I perceived as failing, I started having a much more stable mindset.

This switch changed the entire way I viewed achievements in every area of my life.

Firstly, with rock climbing, I stopped being so technique heavy and went in with the goal to just

do my best. Because I am taller, it turns out that being so technical was actually hindering me,

and I started creating my own free-flow style of climbing. With school, grades used to be a

determinator of self-worth, but now I just acknowledge it as feedback. If I get a good grade, that

means I understood the material and instructions, and if I get a bad grade, that just means I still

have areas to work on in that particular class. Everything was now a learning opportunity rather

than an ultimatum.

The biggest effect of this was not something I was expecting, yet something I desperately

needed: a consistency of wellness. As I stated earlier, my previous version of wellness was based

on how things were going in my life. But my new version of wellness through the lens of

excellence helped me understand that even if I wasn’t the best or didn’t get a perfect score, I was

trying my best and that was enough. I started regaining control of my emptions and although the

highs weren’t as high anymore, the lows were definitely not as low, and now I can confidently

say that I live in a state of content.

This is not to say that everything is perfect though. I still have my times when I put every

ounce of effort into something, don’t get the desired results and beat myself up over them. That

being said, the process of combating those negative emotions is much easier. I ground myself by

understanding that learning process is applied to my emotions as well.

and excellence comes together. Obviously, once you are out of college there are much more

responsibilities and hardships to go through, but one thing I want to take into this portion of my

life is the addition of Swarbrick’s model. Being able to apply these methods of achieving

excellence through learning and that leading to my wellness stability in every area of my life

from emotional to monetary is the goal. Instead of being someone plagued with the fear of doing

anything wrong, I will end up rolling with the punches and live a much more fulfilling and

genuine life. That is why even now with my 21 units, internship, a part-time job and all the

stresses that come from looming graduation, I can find wellness by achieving excellence.