Mindset Is Everything

28 Sept

Why We Need to Train Our Minds as Well as Our Bodies

I’ve spent a large part of my life interested in physical fitness, but the older I get and the more people I work with, the more convinced I become that there is another kind of fitness we don’t talk about nearly enough: mental fitness.

I’m not talking about mental health. Mental health is incredibly important, but mental fitness is slightly different. I mean actively training our minds in the same way that we train our bodies. We go to the gym to strengthen our muscles. We practise yoga to improve our strength, flexibility and balance. We walk, run or cycle to improve our cardiovascular fitness. But how often do we deliberately train our thoughts, our focus, our confidence and our ability to prepare ourselves mentally for something difficult?

One of my clients competed for Team GB and completed Ironman events, and we’ve had some fascinating conversations about mindset. At that level of sport, physical training is obviously enormously important, but so is what happens inside your head. Athletes have long used visualisation and mental rehearsal as part of preparing for performance. They don’t only train their bodies for what they’re about to do; they practise aspects of it mentally as well.

And I think there is something incredibly useful here for the rest of us. You don’t need to be an elite athlete or an Ironman competitor to practise mental rehearsal.

Recently I listened to a brilliant audiobook called Visualise: Think, Feel, Perform Like the Top 1% by Maya Raichoora, and it really resonated with me. Maya is a mental-fitness and visualisation expert, and she talks about deliberately training our minds rather than simply allowing our thoughts to run the show. She teaches five approaches to visualisation — outcome, process, creative, negative and explorative visualisation. What I particularly like is the idea that mental fitness is something we can actually practise.

Most of us are already visualising every day. We just don’t realise we’re doing it.

Imagine you’ve got to give a presentation tomorrow and you’re nervous. You lie in bed imagining yourself forgetting what you’re going to say. You picture everybody looking at you. You imagine yourself going red and feeling embarrassed. That’s visualisation. You’re mentally rehearsing the thing you don’t want to happen.

We can do exactly the same with exercise. The gym is going to be horrible. Everybody will look at me. I’m going to be exhausted. I’m not fit enough. I’ll embarrass myself. You’ve already had an entire workout in your imagination and you haven’t even put your trainers on.

So what if we deliberately rehearsed something different? Close your eyes and imagine yourself walking through the gym door. See yourself feeling comfortable. Imagine putting your music on and beginning your warm-up. See yourself completing your exercises. Picture yourself finishing the session and notice how you feel afterwards.

That’s mental rehearsal. It isn’t magic. Imagining yourself exercising won’t make you fit while you’re sitting on the sofa. Mental rehearsal has to be followed by behaviour. But it can help us prepare for the behaviour we want.

I think this becomes particularly interesting when we’re trying to change our eating habits. Imagine you’re going to a party on Saturday and you know what normally happens. You arrive hungry, stand beside the crisps and before you know it you’ve eaten far more than you intended. Instead of simply hoping you’ll have more willpower this time, mentally rehearse the evening beforehand. Imagine yourself arriving. See the food. Imagine choosing what you genuinely want to eat, putting a sensible amount on your plate and enjoying it slowly. Imagine somebody offering you something else and hear yourself comfortably saying, “No thanks, I’m fine.”

Or perhaps chocolate or biscuits are your difficult moment in the evening. Practise that moment before it happens. Imagine opening the cupboard and seeing the chocolate. Then rehearse making the choice you actually want to make. Perhaps you make a cup of tea, have some yoghurt and fruit, go for a walk or consciously decide to have a little chocolate and really enjoy it rather than automatically eating half a packet.

The point isn’t that chocolate is bad. The point is that you’re rehearsing choice rather than rehearsing habit.

Then there’s our internal dialogue, and I think this is huge. Listen to the language inside your head during a workout. I hate this. I’m useless. I’m so unfit. Look how much better everybody else is. I can’t do another one.Imagine trying to coach somebody else using those words. You wouldn’t.

A good coach might say, You’ve got this. Concentrate on this repetition. Breathe. You’re stronger than you think. Look how far you’ve come. Well done. Keep going. That’s the voice I want my clients gradually to develop inside themselves, because ultimately I won’t always be standing beside them. I want them to become their own coach.

This is also why I love using affirmations in the music I create for workouts. If you’re listening to something rhythmic and uplifting while hearing messages about strength, confidence and perseverance, you’re creating a completely different mental environment for your workout. We’re preparing the body and the mind.

Preparation matters in everyday life too. If you know you’ve got a difficult day tomorrow, visualise yourself handling it calmly. If you’re nervous about starting at the gym, mentally walk through the experience before you go. If you’re changing your eating habits, rehearse the situations that usually trip you up. If you’re giving a presentation, imagine yourself walking into the room confidently.

And don’t only visualise the end result. This is something I particularly liked in Maya’s book: the distinction between outcome visualisation and process visualisation. It’s lovely to imagine yourself stronger, healthier or achieving your goal, but also imagine the process that gets you there. See yourself getting out of bed, putting your trainers on, walking into the gym, choosing your food, completing your workout, going to bed at a sensible time and getting up the next morning and doing it again.

Because that’s where goals are actually achieved.

We spend enormous amounts of money and energy training our bodies, but our minds are involved in almost every decision that gets us there. Do I go to the gym or stay home? Do I give up or continue? Do I speak kindly to myself or criticise myself? Do I automatically follow an old habit or pause and make another choice?

That’s mental fitness.

And just like physical fitness, we don’t practise it once and declare ourselves finished. We train it. We practise. We repeat. We notice when we fall back into an old pattern and practise again.

So perhaps before your next workout, spend two minutes training something other than your muscles. Close your eyes. See yourself doing it. Feel yourself doing it. Hear the voice inside your head encouraging you. Mentally rehearse the person you want to be in that moment.

Then open your eyes, put your trainers on and go and practise it for real.