Why Mental Fitness Is Your Hidden Competitive Advantage In Business - The Gloss Magazine

Why Mental Fitness Is Your Hidden Competitive Advantage In Business

With a background in psychology and interpersonal communications, Irish author and psychologist Jodie Rogers spent 20 years as a corporate insider. She says she spent years shaking and waking people up to their limiting beliefs, the thinking traps in their minds and the emotional patterns playing out in their businesses. Now she is a mental fitness advocate. Here’s why …

The goal of mental fitness is to strengthen the mind. Yet when people talk about mental health, they still think of illness, meditation, or deep breathing. The issue with this is, many believe they’re fine as long as they’re not ‘ill’. The catch? The absence of illness does not equal health.

This poses an interesting challenge. Because while it’s true that many companies have wellness or wellbeing teams that largely focus on keeping people out of the ‘illness’ phase, they’re still leaving a massive opportunity on the table in not investing in mental fitness.

Businesses are made up of people and people have minds, emotions, beliefs, values, and attitudes. Over the thousands of workshops that I have run throughout the world have taught me that most leaders, understandably, are more comfortable addressing the tangible. But the real potential lies ‘between’ the tangibles.

If we want real results in business, we have to work at the human level.

For example, the topic of change and uncertainty. These past two years we have undergone disruptions and change on a massive scale. To simply address the business angle of this massive shift is missing the mark. It’s developing skills and addressing attitudes that set apart the ‘sinkers’ from the ‘swimmers’ and this is a testament to the importance of mental fitness in the workplace.

According to a CIPD 2020 report, investing in wellbeing initiatives is correlated with better employee morale, healthier, more inclusive workplaces and reduced work-related stress. 

I make a definitive case for the return on investment in mental fitness programmes for companies in my book The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That  Matters in Business.

The numbers could not be clearer: for every $1 spent on wellness, the ROI is anywhere from $2 to $14.

According to a CIPD 2020 report, investing in wellbeing initiatives is correlated with better employee morale, healthier, more inclusive workplaces and reduced work-related stress. That translates into an eight-fold increase in employee engagement per a World Economic Forum study.

What are the implications of practicing mental fitness in your team? If you can master your thinking and mindset, you can release confidence, creativity, and potential within your employees.

This approach will increase the positive impact employees are able to make professionally and personally. This is a proven system that is now being adopted by some of the best-known brands in business.

In The Hidden Edge, I include an in-depth case study of Unilever as a company that has invested heavily in training and education around the idea of the ‘inner game’. Unilever is fully aware of the importance of investing in mental training. The reasoning is simple: mentally and emotionally healthy people equal resilient, happy and flexible teams. This will lead to a healthy, successful company.

Team building, leadership, creativity, prioritization, problem-solving, and agility are just a few of the highly sought-after skills that are only achievable through mental fitness work.

If you want to have a thriving economy, you need successful and healthy people. If you want successful and healthy people, you are remiss to ignore your people’s most important asset – their minds.

ABOUT JODIE ROGERS: I’ve spent years shaking and waking people up to their limiting beliefs, the thinking traps in their minds and the emotional patterns playing out in their businesses – first as a 20-year global corporate insider with a background in psychology and interpersonal communications and now as a mental fitness advocate at Symbia. The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business, an Amazon #1 Bestseller, is now available online at symbiapartners.com and Amazon.uk

Jodie Rogers is a human behaviour consultant, founder of Symbia and author of The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business out now, priced at £18.99.

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