The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said that you never bathe in the same river twice. Because it’s never the same river and it’s never the same you.
Yet, why is it that we keep banging up again the same problems, experiencing the same reactions to situations and thinking the same thoughts? What happened to mental fitness?
Thoughts that judge us, make us feel inadequate, overwhelmed or thinking we can’t cope?
Why would any sane person choose to listen to half the crap that the mind thows at us?
In the world of learning and development or leadership training, we’ve heard the terms ‘fixed mindset’ and ‘growth mindset’ – but what does that actually mean?
You can have someone with a growth mindset who believes they can learn and develop, but will still find themselves people pleasing, hyper vigilent and overthinking.
Mental Resilience in the Workplace
What strikes me from years of working with people and delivering employee wellbeing and resilience webinars is that most people keep showing up the same way every day.
Not because they have a fixed mindset, or a growth mindset, but because we all have habitual and conditioned ways of thinking and feeling. Conditioned ways of being that have been cultivated over decades.
We see people in the workplace struggling with stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout to name a few, and think we need to deliver mental health awareness training or offer stress management training.
After 14 years of working in the field of workplace wellbeing, the single biggest thing I’ve seen that’s needed to move the needle and create mental resilience doesn’t lie in giving people a bunch of tips and technques for managing stress.
What’s needed starts with awareness. Otherwise known as metacognition.
If we aren’t aware of our conditioned thought patterns, behaviours, beliefs and emotional responses, then nothing will change, no matter how many wellbeing initiatves you roll out.
The simple reason for this is the huge percentage of how we show up every day is a mememoried set of programmes run by the unconscious mind.
If you’re done with investing your learning and development budget and not getting a clear return on investment, I invite you to watch this video, where I explain metacognition and why this is the true place to start to creating a resilient workforce.
If you’re looking for workplace wellbeing approach that creates positive changge, our employee wellbeing and resilience webinars are built around exactly this principle.
