Mental Fitness

How do you build a team of mental athletes at work? Use mental fitness to boost productivity, overcome burnout, and achieve peak performance.

Anxiety is the theme for mental health awareness week this year. As a Psychologist, I could write a whole article on the science of anxiety. 

Our mental health isn't something we should only pay attention to when we're struggling. Psychologists have been working on a recipe for both success and happiness. And mental fitness is the key ingredient. And just like our physical fitness, it’s something that we need to work on proactively. 

Just like physical fitness is made up of different systems and structures, so is mental fitness - the 7 skills of mental fitness which include; confidence, positivity, focus, motivation, meaning, connection and stress management. At Fika we have validated our own proprietary mental fitness scale to quantify the role that mental fitness plays in these outcomes at an individual, team and organisational level. While also using it to inform our smart recommendation engine.

Walking the thin line between burning bright and burning out is a challenge in the modern world of work. Despite employers best efforts, people are still exhausted, detached, and feeling "stuck". But burnout is rarely about the individual. It's about the environment where the individual works in. We surveyed the workforce to find out and developed a new approach to burnout prevention that tackles it at an organisational level.

Temperatures have dropped and summer is well and truly over. And as sunrise gets later so does our wake up time which means early morning runs and gym routines start to slide.

Culture starts at the top - so as leaders, the first step we can take to creating a culture of mental fitness in our organisations is to become mental fitness role models ourselves. 

The Great Resignation. COVID-19. Hybrid. Today’s managers and leaders face the perfect storm of headwinds – and two years on from the start of the pandemic, they’re running on empty.

The truth is it’s no wonder we’re so bad at acknowledging our mental fitness as our own responsibility, when as a society we haven’t been given the knowledge, skills or value system that would enable us to manage it. 

I’m sure at some point in our career we’ve all sat in front of a line manager and had a conversation about how overwhelmed or overworked we feel.

When are we going to start celebrating it, not just keep trying to 'fix' it?