Written by: Catherine Elizabeth Wood, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Mental fitness is about having the ability to stop in the moment to consider how you will respond to a challenging situation. Mental fitness also gives you the ability to consider how you want to respond in the moment.
A situation can be an aforethought, an external stimulus, or a feeling. Being mentally and physically fit will give you the ability to choose your response in the moment. Having the ability to respond positively and constructively to a situation, can help you to avoid sustaining or causing emotional and relational injury with mental fitness.
Physical fitness gives you the ability to function better in your daily life by being stronger and energised, and less prone to accidents and injury.
Like physical fitness, mental fitness needs constant building in helping you to be a healthier version of yourself. Mental fitness is about having and maintaining a state of wellbeing and constantly building an awareness of how you think, behave, and feel.
Resilience is part of mental fitness. Building resilience gives you the ability to advance despite adversity towards your desired outcome. This means to keep moving towards what you want to achieve in your personal life or work life, despite the challenges you may face.
By improving your overall wellbeing – both physically and mentally – you will have the ability to function at your optimum. This results in being able to respond to the demands of the day more easily, reduce stress, increase positive emotions, and experience a sense of achievement.
What are some strategies you can use to maintain a state of calm?
Avoid your triggers of stress
If a trigger of stress for you is being around toxic behaviours in the office, you could choose to change how you respond in this environment. Setting and clarifying which behaviours you expect from your team from the start, is a great way to steer these types of situations to ensure you remain in a state of calm to respond positively and constructively.
Challenge your perception
You can challenge how you perceive a situation and therefore how you respond to it. Our perceptions are often based on past similar experiences. Your brain automatically looks for patterns to build automated responses. Therefore, if a situation occurs which is like a situation from the past, how you responded to the past situation, is likely to be your default response to the current situation. This happens unless you have tapped into your ability to change your response, in overriding your automated response.
If you are constantly building an awareness of how you think, behave, and feel, this will give you the ability to challenge your perception of a situation before responding, and choose how you want to respond, which will result in a positive outcome.
Becoming ‘unstuck’
If you are struggling to find clarity and focus to give clear direction to your team, it is time to prioritise your overall wellbeing.
Clear thinking is only experienced in a state of calm, so it is important to have a strategy to ensure you can bring yourself into this space when needed. Feeling ‘stuck’ in what you are seeking to achieve, is only experienced in a state of stress and overwhelm. Therefore, you need to identify what it is that brings you into a state of calm for you to become ‘unstuck.’
As an example of this, I worked with a client who realised she needed to have routine and organisation in at least one area of her life to experience a state of calm. My client realised being in a state of calm gave her the ability to respond to the demands of the day more easily.
My client’s strategy was having a morning routine of preparing for the day the night before and setting allocated days and times for social activities combined with regular exercise.
My client is now able to maintain a state of calm by ensuring she has routine and organisation in her personal life. This has given my client the ability to consider how she will respond and how she wants to respond to any challenges which come her way.
Contact me for an online appointment to see how building personal strategies can shift you from experiencing chaos to maintaining a state of calm.
Catherine Elizabeth Wood, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Catherine Wood, is a leader in mental resilience, science-based coaching through neuroscience, and creating new habits for behavior change. After an acute brain injury as an adult left her having irrational thoughts and self-doubt, Catherine developed an interest in neuroplasticity to understand how she could challenge her self-beliefs, promote helpful thoughts and create new habits for behavior change. Catherine has since dedicated her life to helping people to establish their self-belief in who they are as their best self to drive helpful thoughts and create new habits for behavior change in the workplace and in their personal life.
Catherine is the Founder of Life Renewal, the online coaching business combining leadership coaching and team coaching with evidence-based techniques in neuroscience. Catherine helps leaders drive employee engagement by modeling leadership behavior across 7 key leadership skills. Catherine has helped clients through her own coaching programs, workshops, and digital courses including "Mastering Emotional Competence in Leadership." Catherine has been a guest writer for Thrive Global which included an article on "Seeking Opportunities While Navigating Uncertainty", and she hosted a resilience series including "The Neuroscience of Resilience".
Catherine's mission: Science-based coaching for collaborative leadership behavior.
