What is mental fitness and how can I get it?

Photo by Sven Mieke

We all understand the concept of physical fitness and have a sense of where we are with that. We know that good physical fitness can help us avoid risk of heart disease, strokes and other chronic illnesses, improve strength and flexibility, help us maintain a lower body weight and lower blood pressure, depression and even dementia.   

What we understand less well is the concept of mental fitness. It is a measure of our ability to deal with life’s challenges in a way that allows us to bounce back rather than be knocked over when things don’t go to plan. Unlike physical fitness which relates to muscular strength, mental fitness is about building strong positive, constructive neural pathways that allow us to view the world more objectively and in a more positive light. Mental fitness gives you the ability to silence the negative thoughts and access the bounty of your higher mind, the place where your best thinking and emotional intelligence lives. Like a swimmer who is more powerful in the water than they are on land, we may be mentally strong in some circumstances and less capable in others.

There are three steps to mental fitness:

1. Notice that something (some kind of ‘threat’) has triggered negative thoughts or behaviours
2. Centre yourself in order to decide how you want to respond
3. Use your higher brain (cerebral cortex/cerebrum) to chose how you want to respond

Sounds easy but it turns out to be very hard to do in the moment because our survival impulses are very powerful and can happen before we have time to really process whats going on.

Positive Intelligence©, a 6-week intensive mental fitness program that came out of Stanford University and is firmly built on neuroscience, cognitive and positive psychology, and performance science offers a simple toolkit that gives you:

1. A good understanding of your own saboteur thoughts and behaviours (Saboteur Interceptor);
2. A set of micro-mindfulness techniques that can be used anytime, anywhere (Self-Command);
3. Five “power tools” to amp up your emotional intelligence skillset (Sage Powers).

The program has been used by hundreds of thousands of people already and has yielded significant measurable results for a number of organisations including*:

• Trained salespeople outsold the control group by 37% (MetLife)
• Improved productivity in 93% of trained employees (Motorola)

Want to know more? Find out about your saboteurs here and then book a call with me and we can talk about your results - in a complimentary session, of course!


* Figures from https://www.positiveintelligence.com/program/