In 2021, I began exploring mental fitness models. It wasn’t long before I signed up to become a licensed Positive Intelligence Coach, a path deeply rooted in mental fitness principles.
But what is mental fitness, really? At its core, it’s our ability to face life’s challenges with a positive mindset.
Mentally fit people spend less time stuck in negative thinking and are less likely to be overwhelmed by their emotions. Instead, they’re better able to tap into qualities like curiosity, creativity, empathy, fearless action taking, and being guided by purpose rather than ego.
A couple of years ago, Simon Sinek also used the term “mental fitness,” highlighting its growing importance in both personal development and leadership. Different practitioners have their own methods for improving mental fitness, and while their approaches may vary, the goal remains the same: to help individuals navigate life’s ups and downs with greater resilience and clarity.
But let’s be clear about what mental fitness is not.
It’s not about toxic positivity – pretending everything is fine when it’s not or ignoring our genuine feelings.
Mental fitness isn’t about avoiding our emotions or denying that we have them. It’s not about escaping reality or numbing ourselves to what’s happening around us. And it certainly isn’t about becoming 100% zen and unfazed by everything. Life will still be challenging, complicated, and at times, contradictory. These are natural parts of the human experience.
Mental fitness is more about filtering our experiences through a broader, more balanced perspective. It’s about cultivating the ability to view our experiences with greater awareness and understanding. It is about sweating less of the small stuff, that now feels like big stuff.
This means acknowledging our emotions, recognising them for the valuable data they provide, and then choosing how to respond.
It’s not about avoiding or suppressing emotions but about developing the skill to engage with them in a way that’s constructive rather than destructive.
These qualities are invaluable not just in our personal lives but also in our careers and leadership roles.
Yet, many of us don’t realise how mentally unfit we are until we’re up against tough situations.
Sometimes, the signs of low mental fitness show up in our everyday struggles. Here are a few examples:
- Experiencing a lot of conflict:
Ongoing conflict is a common sign of low mental fitness, whether it’s in our personal relationships or at work. This conflict might be obvious, like constant disagreements, or more subtle, like constantly feeling irritated by others. At work, this often means delays in decision-making, especially in senior teams where alignment is key.
- Difficulty making decisions:
Feeling stuck, going around in circles, or getting bogged down by details can all point to low mental fitness. For example, when our attention to detail turns into overthinking or unnecessary perfectionism, it slows us down.
- Frustration and anger:
It’s natural and healthy to feel frustration and anger at times – these emotions are valid and provide important data about our experiences and boundaries. This isn’t about avoiding anger, as suppression can lead to its own set of problems. However, when frustration and anger become constant companions – when we have a short temper or find ourselves getting angry every time things don’t go our way, or whenever we disagree with someone – it can be a sign of low mental fitness. Such frequent anger can indicate a lack of emotional regulation skills, which are crucial for maintaining healthy relationships and navigating challenges with a clearer, calmer mind.
- Low empathy:
Low empathy often manifests in how we relate to others. It can mean struggling to understand or accept others’ viewpoints or having difficulty putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, especially when their behaviour differs from ours. Sometimes it feels like a lack of “care” for others and can manifest also as poor listening skills. This lack of understanding can create distance in relationships and lead to further conflicts or misunderstandings, whether in personal settings or at work.
- Harsh inner critic:
A tough inner critic is another sign of low mental fitness. This can show up as being overly critical of ourselves, constantly judging our actions, or feeling like we’re never good enough. It often drives feelings of imposter syndrome, where we doubt our abilities and question whether we deserve our achievements. This lack of self-compassion can be just as damaging as a lack of empathy for others, as it prevents us from recognising our worth and can hinder personal growth and resilience.
- Low confidence:
While it’s perfectly normal to feel less confident in certain areas of life, especially when trying something new, a pervasive lack of confidence can also be a sign of low mental fitness. This isn’t just about having doubts from time to time; it’s a deeper, ongoing fear of failure, rejection, or not measuring up. This low confidence often stems from a poor relationship with failure itself – a fear that if we fail, it means something negative about who we are.
It can also be tied to being overly attached to the opinions of others, constantly seeking external validation to feel worthy. Building mental fitness helps us develop a healthier perspective on failure, seeing it not as a reflection of our worth but as a natural part of growth and learning.
There are many other ways low mental fitness can show up, but the key takeaway is this: it makes us less resilient. We find it harder to manage our emotions, and this can spill over into other areas of our lives. A bad day at work might lead to stress at home, and constant stress can lead to burnout. This sense of overwhelm impacts our productivity and time management, ultimately affecting our performance. Instead of approaching challenges with a clear, positive mindset, we let them consume us.
Mental fitness helps us learn to choose how we engage with our thoughts, frustrations, and concerns. It encourages us to develop an inner guide that helps us decide what deserves our attention and energy. It’s not about avoiding negative emotions -they are as valuable as positive ones. In fact, some argue there’s no such thing as a negative or positive emotion – all emotions are data.
What matters is how we handle that data.
We can learn to understand why we’re feeling conflict, stress, anxiety, or anger, recognise the important information these emotions provide, and then decide how to respond.
For example, instead of just seeing a situation as someone else’s fault and feeling justified in our anger, we might ask ourselves, “What if the other person has a point? Is my need to be right driving my anger? Why do I need to be right?”
This approach isn’t just useful for dealing with others; it’s also crucial for how we see ourselves. Our inner critic – the voice that tells us, “I’m not good enough,” or “I’ll never get that promotion” – is just another part of our mind that judges everything harshly, including ourselves.
By understanding our minds better, we can learn to extract useful insights from our emotions and then decide what to focus on and what to let go. This doesn’t mean we won’t face challenges or conflicts, or that our inner critic will disappear. But it does mean that we’ll spend less time stuck in unhelpful patterns, and more time making choices that lead to a better quality of life and stronger relationships, both with ourselves and others.
Mental fitness provides a roadmap to navigate life and leadership with more purpose and clarity, giving us the tools to move forward with greater ease.
