Mental Fitness Mondays: Bringing it all together
What’s the one thing we all need to consider?
Over the last few months, we've explored the different muscles that at Real Clear, we believe make people mentally fit. What we haven't talked about is how you bring all this together. And there’s one thing that everyone needs to think about:
Having a healthy balance of the components.
Let’s Get Physical
People who want to be physically fit need to do a blend of cardio, strength, stamina and flexibility exercises. However, in reality what people often do is overdo one of those things (or more commonly under-do them all!).
A few years ago I got into running. I lost some weight and that felt great, so I decided that running was my thing. I did more and more, often clocking around 1000 miles per year. I managed to do this for years, but I was barely stretching after runs and never did any strength exercises. After a while my body got tired of that and it started to complain! Now I have a healthy balance of cardio, strength training and lots and lots of yoga.
What about Mental Fitness?
This makes sense when it comes to physical fitness, but what about mental fitness? Again, the key is a healthy balance. Many people are skilled at being, say, empathic, or focusing well on tasks, or rising to challenges. But like me with running, they might be doing too much of one thing.
Take empathy as an example. What a wonderful skill to have, and yet it can be overused. If you find yourself unable to sleep well at night for worrying about others, that's a surefire sign that you’re overusing your empathy muscles. Sooner or later, you're going to wear yourself out.
Let's take another example, self-regard. It's great to be self-aware and it's great to think well of yourself but being mentally fit doesn’t mean thinking so well of yourself that you think you're better than everyone else. And being so self-aware that you become extremely self-conscious is also not a good thing!
The easiest way to check how balanced you are is to remember the Four Core Muscles of Mental Fitness:
- Self Care
- Self Organisation
- Self Development
- People Skills
The happiest and most energised people tend to balance all four and not overdo one to sacrifice another. How well do you balance your muscle activity? I know that I am pretty good at working out my People Skills and Self Development muscles, but on occasion will be less good at Self Care, and more frequently will be flying by the seat of my pants and feel disorganised as a result. Being aware of this has helped me to strengthen my Self Organisation muscles, which is in part why I actually manage to write and release these blog posts!
How balanced should you be?
No-one sustains healthy balance in all of the Four Core Muscles all of the time. But, just like how your body needs to be in homeostasis (internal balance of body functions and systems), it pays to get back into balance more quickly.
Things like busy times at work, lots of social invites or a bout of ill health are examples of typical things that take us out of balance. What this means is that some mental fitness muscles get used a lot, while others are left to weaken. As an example: Working towards a deadline might improve focus and prioritising muscles, plus motivation, goal achievement and purpose. But the Self Care muscles might get forgotten. Do this too much of the time and you’ll end up with a stress related illness.
A mentally fit approach to a work deadline would be to:
- Consider how you will include Self Care to keep yourself going as you work towards the deadline.
- Use your Self Organisation muscles to plan ways to get stuff done effectively
- Use Self Development muscles to rise to the challenge and get the goal achieved.
- Remember People Skills so that you’re still nice company for your loved ones.
What about you? Consider how balanced you feel in those Four Core Muscles.
Here are a couple of coaching questions to start that thinking:
- What have you been overdoing?
- And what do you need to prioritise more?
