Insight
Mental Fitness

Mental Fitness starts with our leaders

Dr Fran Longstaff
December 6, 2021
3
min read
Happy person in salon

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.

And our line manager may have said something like ‘make sure you take some time for yourself today’ or ‘make sure you have a lunch break.’

And then it’s likely that nothing really changed.

This is because there can sometimes be a mismatch between the things that line managers suggest others do, and what they do themselves.

Line managers have a responsibility to visibly make time for their own mental fitness during the working day to grant permission for the rest of the team to do the same.

As line managers at Fika Mental Fitness we understand that part of our role is to normalise mental fitness and champion the team to take time for their mental fitness. So what do I do?


  • Calendarise my lunch breaks.
  • Calendarise the swimming breaks that I take during the working day.
  • Attend our weekly Fika Table to talk through anything that’s going on for me with the wider team.

Mental fitness starts with leadership and management.

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Dr Fran Longstaff
Head of Psychology

Dr Fran Longstaff is Head of Psychology at Fika Mental Fitness. With more than 15 years' academic and applied experience in sport and exercise psychology, Fran oversees Fika's Behavioural Science output, designing and implementing organisation-wide Mental Fitness training programmes for Fika's client-base of more than 80 businesses, education institutions and healthcare organisations. She is passionate about training leaders and managers in how to build their own and their team’s Mental Fitness in order to transform the culture, output, productivity and happiness of their workplaces. Fran worked as a lecturer in Higher Education for 13 years before joining Fika, and still works closely with Fika's board of academic experts.

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