How Improving Your Mental Fitness Can Help Boost Your Productivity and Success
help yourself feeling lighter, more efficient, and less stressed.
I have always been an advocate of boosting one’s mental fitness if one wants to be productive at work and succeed at whatever you do. The reason is simple or maybe not so simple-your state of mind drives your reactions and actions.
your state of mind drives your reactions and actions.
But what is mental fitness? A simple definition would be ‘to be mentally fit’ and you won’t be wrong but what if we look at it from the angle of focusing on optimizing performance?
Mental fitness is most critical and transformative whenever you feel stressed, frustrated, or hindered in any way by your environment or by the people around you. In these situations, you definitely become triggered, and you default to behaviors that may not be optimal.
When you’re triggered, your performance suffers because your brain is running an unseen script rather than clearly assessing and optimally responding to whatever is actually happening. It’s like endlessly repeating a playlist of your favorite “oldie but goodie” tunes without ever adding new songs to your list. As a result of being stuck in an old loop and interpreting the present through that lens, you are much more likely to make mistakes or poor decisions, damage your relationships, and miss key opportunities.
Some of the pain points you have to work through with your team are sometimes caused by leaders who acted because they were triggered.
TRIGGERED LEADERS CAUSE PAIN
The five “muscles” of mental fitness can help change your perceptions and internal reactions. They are :
1. Choose Personal Accountability
2. Choose Helpful Beliefs over Impeding Beliefs
3. Accurately Self-Assess Your Internal State
4. Hold Multiple, Disparate Perspectives
5. Modulate Your Own Physiology
As you apply these five muscles, you intentionally change your perceptions and internal reactions … you seek to see yourself and your environment differently. You break yourself away from those reflexive, automatic reactions that limit potential.
In fact, with well-developed mental fitness, you will ultimately find yourself creating results in both work and life that are probably far beyond your current expectations. You will feel different. You will feel lighter. And, you and others around you will notice and feel it too.
Third-party research has shown that many who develop mental fitness:
• Have more energy
• Experience less stress
• Stop taking things personally
• Build emotional intelligence
• Feel more in control
• Respond to situations with agility
• Achieve results quicker and with greater ease
• Build deeper trust and stronger interpersonal relationships
• Build mindfulness and break through self-imposed limitations
As you look at the world in a new way you will stop creating pain; you will start creating performance. You’ll breathe new life into your leadership, inspire others, and create the best possible outcomes in a world that very much needs you to be your best possible self.
Go thrive.
Some excerpts from Leading Lightly by Jody Michael (Greenleaf Group, released June 28, 2022)