This week we revisit mental fitness and the type of people we see undertaking our mental fitness program, why it worked for them, and why they joined, to begin with. If you've been thinking of joining a mental fitness coaching program for any reason, this episode might just answer some of your questions and prompt you to take the leap.
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to this edition of The Coaching Conversation. I’d like to take the opportunity to revisit one of the subjects that we've talked about a couple of times previously, and that's the subject of mental fitness. From this perspective, I'm going to talk about the kinds of people that we see going through our mental fitness programs and indeed why they're on the program in the first place.
To contextualise that, let's just talk about and recap what mental fitness actually is; Mental fitness is the ability to respond to life's challenges in a more positive way, on a more regular basis than before.
We all know that if you react to life’s challenges in a negative way that builds and builds and builds and creates a negative vortex that sucks you down, and you begin to feel a lot of stress and a lot of pressure - lots of negative feelings like embarrassment, shame, disappointment, guilt, and so on; possibly even fear. We all know that when we have a whole host of positive vibes going on, that creates a vortex upwards, a positive, or takes away from feeling despondent. So mental fitness is the ability to understand that you're being dragged down, stop it, use techniques to replace those negative thoughts with positive thoughts and go forward in a more constructive and hopefully happier frame of mind.
Our six-week program does exactly that. It creates the awareness of what it is that's happening in your life and how you're responding to it and gives you the tools to intercept the negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts. It’s a science-based program - it's not a philosophical program and it won't turn people into strangers that no one ever knows. It's just a way of helping everybody cope with life's challenges, part of the human condition.
So, who do we see going through our mental fitness programs? Well, this is really interesting; this is perhaps going to be surprising for some of you listening to this.
The first thing is it's not all about senior executives. It's not all about business owners and boards of directors, people in high-powered, highly stressed or highly pressurised jobs. (Though there's clearly a fair share of those). We also have the middle-ranking managers; people who are aspiring and developing their careers or people who are very expert at what they do and have been for some time. They're really looking to get more from that role more from their life than perhaps experience. It would be wrong to assume also that it doesn't apply to junior people. We have a whole raft of people at relatively junior levels that the organisation believes are worthy of investment and support.
Now, very few of our coaches going through the mental fitness programs are people that wouldn't necessarily have said to themselves ‘Crikey, I really, really need some help’. Very often that people who are very ordinary, just like you and I, who are perhaps in a situation where they really want to improve their mental fitness and that general level of happiness. So, it's not all about being in an extreme position of stress or pressure or an extreme position of mental fatigue. It's not about that. It's often about people who've just recognised there's a better way ahead. There's a better way of enjoying life and more comfortable with enjoying what they do for the hours that they do it.
What we see in our mental fitness programs is very widespread; business owners and their leaders, people in junior positions, men, women, young, old, you name it, they're in those groups. And that's fun as a coach. That's fun. That's what you want. You want to help as many people as you can. All of the time. The more diverse the team that goes into mental fitness programs, the greater the outcomes for all concerned because they see that this person may have a high-powered job, this person has a less stressful job, but nonetheless, they're still benefiting and exactly the same way to exactly the same extent as each other.
Indeed, a different perspective on life is very helpful for us all in learning and developing our mental fitness. So, our six-week program ends and people move on to do more, and this program continues for the rest of their lives in the same way, that if you're looking to run the marathon, you'd often start by running couch to 5k. Give it a try!
That was the latest edition of The Coaching Conversation. I hope you found it interesting. I hope you found it useful. You can find out more about our coaching programmes at theexecutivemindset.co.uk
If you want to reach out you can send us an email at theexecutivemindset@sagegreen.com you can book a free 15-minute coaching session at theexecutivemindset.co.uk which will give you a really good feel for how coaching can help you.
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