Jodie Rogers - The Hidden Edge

Just as we exercise our muscles to become stronger, through focus and practice we can modify and strengthen our mindset and thinking style to help us bounce back from the setbacks and challenges that come our way. In business, the level of mental fitness in the individuals who make up your organisation is your business's ‘hidden edge’. In other words, mental fitness is a competitive advantage in business.

Negative thinking patterns play a significant role in depression and anxiety. If we make no attempt to work on them, our ability to self-regulate diminishes, our emotional resilience becomes fragile, and, overall, our mental fitness suffers. Whether we are talking at the level of organisations, teams or the individuals within them, when ‘mental fitness’ suffers, so does performance.

It's important not to weaken our mental fitness but, equally, we need to be putting in effort to enhanceit. Being more aware of our thinking style – and using techniques to avoid thinking traps and manage self-limiting beliefs – gives us more control over how we respond to the events and situations in our lives.

Our minds are our most important asset. But do we take time to look after them? Have you ever stopped to notice your thought patterns? Are you aware of the effect they're having on your life?

The ways we think about ourselves or the world can help us or get in our way, support or harm our health, enable or inhibit our success at work and in our relationships. Our inner game can play for us or against us – it can hold us back or propel us forward. So, the question is: Have you mentally set yourself up for success? Are you and your team ‘mentally fit’ and prepared for the challenges ahead?

If you can master your thinking and your mindset, you can release confidence and potential within your employees that they didn't even know was there. It's this that will amplify their personal presence and impact both in life and in work. It is this that will keep them flexible and creative in the face of uncertainty.

The challenge is that most of us have not been taught this. The education system doesn't have it as a topic on the curriculum. Unless you are working in the field, have a natural curiosity for the topic or have found yourself in therapy at some point, it's unlikely that you have come across both the knowledge and the tools necessary to navigate and influence your cognitive and emotional experience of the world.

This is why it's such an important topic. People aren't naturally learning about it, and there's no mandatory reading, which seems ridiculous when you think about it because there absolutely should be!

And this lack of understanding shows up in companies of all sizes, industries, and locations all around the world. I've worked with leaders and their teams in countries on every continent across the globe over the course of the last decade. I've helped companies in industries from fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) to aviation, finance to telecommunications, entertainment to marketing, supply chain, R&D functions, and many more. I've worked up and down the food chain with everyone from interns to CEOs. Irrespective of the many variables that set one company apart from another, I have observed the same set of blind spots in all of them when it comes to mental fitness.

The first is that leaders come to me with a multitude of culture- and business-related goals and challenges that they think they need help addressing, but they are not usually the ones that really do need addressing. Companies do not always diagnose their issues correctly to begin with before settling on a solution, and so, the wrong things repeatedly get addressed. Or at least, the real issues are not being tackled and therefore continue to fester.

For example, leaders will often say of their organisational challenges:

‘We need to increase productivity!’

‘We need to refresh our strategy.’

‘We need to define roles and responsibilities.’

‘We have to create a “ways of working” manifesto,’ and so on.

Indeed, these may be the outcomes they seek, and they are possible to achieve, but they are not enough on their own to ensure ongoing productivity, happiness, and creativity from everyone throughout the organisation at every level. Because they are all tangible and visible, whereas we need to equally explore what lies underneath these. What beliefs, values, and mindsets are within the people working towards the business goals? If I were to take every brief of this nature at face value, I could deliver exactly to such expectations as the ones listed above, and the clients would be happy upon delivery, but their challenges wouldn't be resolved.

Here are the four fundamental reasons why:

The person who perceives the team's challenges and has the authority to act on them and do something about them is usually a leader. By the very nature of their position, they don't fully know what is actually happening ‘on the floor’. It's much like when parents of teenagers don't have the full picture (and I'm not saying company executives are like teenagers). It's simply human nature to shield details from those in authority.

By focusing on the assumed best solution – for example, the new strategy, organisational chart, roles, and responsibilities – there is an underlying assumption that the ‘problem’ presented is the right one to be solving.

Briefs for change created by leaders, usually, unwittingly, work on the ‘symptom’ level and rarely seek to uncover the ‘cause’, because the symptoms are confused as being the cause.

In the fast-paced world that we work in, results and outcomes are favoured over process. This means that the time in the journey from current Point A to desired Point B is crunched to accelerate outcomes. Because of this, the outcomes are diluted and often superficial. I find that the more energy and focus are invested in the ‘how’ (the journey from uncovering the underlying cause to introducing solutions), the better, more impactful, and longer lasting the results, every time.

Team and company leaders' perceived challenges are valid. They are very valuable indeed. But they must be considered as just one input. Other valid perspectives on the real issues with teams and culture also include those of each member of the board, leadership team, wider team and people who work with the team.

Only with that complete bigger picture and a view of the teams ‘inner game’ can you start to build a view of the mental fitness levels within your company, separate symptoms from cause, and know where to focus your energy. You can then point at core problems, reframe them and do the work to really know which challenges need to be solved first. More often than not, core problems are not always immediately visible, because they are at a mindset level. Therefore, seeking to work on both the visible and invisible obstacles to performance can be a game changer for any team.

Mental fitness is grounded in emotional and social intelligence, and it's this insight that then prepares us to embrace change, be resilient in the face of setbacks, and effectively manage emotions, ambitions, and behaviour. It's a journey, one of self-discovery and awareness, and one which can (and does) take years.

In the following chapters, I seek to show you how and why this insight matters. I will demonstrate how small but significant changes to your perception, thinking, and mindset can make a difference to how you experience, and subsequently show up in, life and business. My intention is to demystify the workings of the mind by sharing some basic neuroscience and behavioural psychology and showing you how to use this knowledge to unlock behavioural change within yourself and your teams.

I encourage you to read this book with yourself in mind first; play with the subject matter and complete the exercises for yourself. In doing so, you'll see the power that small tweaks to your perception, thinking, and belief systems have to completely change your experience of life. Once you've experienced this insight first-hand, take it to your teams and to your organisation. I have a number of ways I can support you in this, which you can find at www.symbiapartners.com.