Mental Fitness and Crisis Management - Mark Luckey

Foreign. Resilience, focus and adaptability are those, I guess, core pillars of mental fitness. Resilience, broadly speaking, comes from doing hard things. So every day I do tough stuff. Generally speaking, there's two things that I do for that which work beautifully and they both benefit so many other ways of body, mind and soul. First one is six days a week I train pretty hard. So four days a week I'm up at five and most of those days I'll get about a 75 minute workout in. Later on in the day I'll walk the dogs. If I'm having a pomodoro day, I'll get four or five minutes exercise in there. So. So when I'm doing my big sessions, I do train myself pretty hard at some part of it. The second part is often when I get home, I shower and get in the ice bath. That is hard and I'm willingly doing both of those. So I want to get into the ice bath, for example. So to build resilience, we've got to do tough stuff and I do my tough stuff from exercise and the ice baths. Focus. About three different ways I look at focus. One of them is the night before. I plan my work and I make myself or I do my very best to those be the things that I've got to do the next day in the order that I've got to do them. You can either try and improve your focus or decrease the clutter or the distraction. So I do my very best that when I start my day, I've removed as many distractions as possible and that can be anything from a clear desk or it can be a note on my keyboard, which I've written the night before, that says only work on this document. Don't read email. As soon as we open email, we're bombarded with 20 lines of thought and they take up a bit of mental capacity. Whereas if I'm focusing just on that one document I've got to edit or write, I'm only thinking about that one thing. And the third part of that is I try and work pomodoro whenever I can. Schedule in three hour blocks into my day as part of my planning process, sticking to 40 minutes on, 10 minutes off, resting before I get tired, and really sticking on those tasks to give myself the best chance of getting them done. Adaptability is one of the tougher ones to work through and explore because adaptability means staying calm. If things change or they go to shit and it's trying to prepare for something that you've got no idea what it will be and when it will happen. And I think the best tool that can go with that is, over time, building up a mindfulness practice. Yeah. And mindfulness, what is it? Mindfulness, journaling. Get your thoughts down on paper and get some reflection of what you're thinking. Meditation or box breathing is going to chill you out a bit and bring you back into your body. And the more you do it, the more you sort of generally feel grounded or centered throughout the day. For me as well, I take phone calls outside, or I go outside every couple of hours barefoot and walk around in the grass because it's nice and it takes my mind off the digital world. And all of those things combined mean that in that moment of pressure, when the shit starts hitting the fan, it's just sort of, alrighty, there's a fan. There's a bit of mess happening. Okay, I'll just observe that and I'll stay cool. And by having that sort of suite of tools together, it really helps us keep our cool in the moment. So you can start, let's say one starts with low emotional intelligence or EQ versus. Say something. Iq, Intelligence quotient. The IQ is hard to raise. The EQ will raise with effort and consistent practice, if you like. And the great thing about learning emotional intelligence techniques is you put in the work and as soon as you start doing them, you get the results. And so as a result, we don't feel overwhelmed in trying to become more emotionally intelligent. We actually feel less overwhelmed the more we learn. Because, for example, we develop skills like empathy. We might look at someone and go, my God, they're an idiot. And we develop anger and negativity and close them out. And emotional intelligence would encourage us to exercise empathy with that person. So instead of looking at them like they're an asshole, we might look at them and go, wow, I wonder why that person's behaving that way today. And empathy and anger can't exist in the same conversation. Is something like journaling. Start with 5 minutes, 30 seconds, 3 days a week, maybe try and build that up to five minutes a day. Then the next thing people say is, well, what do I write about when I journal? Because it's quite hard to get started. So you can use things like the Nikan reflection, which, loosely speaking, is, what was I given today? Or went, well, what did I give today? How did I make someone else's day better? And then the third question is, you know, where did I cause pain? Or where did I cause discomfort? And it gives us this sort of internal introspective and external view about our place in the world, then what that does is that building of awareness starts to unearth a few more thoughts. Another really simple journaling technique, and I did this a lot in the pandemic, was I'd read books on my digital device and I'd highlight passages that I really liked. When I finished a book the next morning, I'd sit down with it and maybe over a couple of coffee breaks during the day or lunch, I'd hand write down those passages from those amazing authors from, you know, modern neuroscience to the stoic stuff. What happens as we write it down is it almost feels like it's our thought because of the disfluency and the pace at which we write kind of matches the way we think. When we write things down, we lock them in a hell of a lot better. And so that simple practice really builds a lovely foundation of understanding and connection. And it begins the process of building a vision or a why. Because the why or the vision is what drives us through a whole mental fitness process, practice, and an ongoing kaizen, or journey of continual self improvement. Because we understand why we need to do the work on ourselves to improve the life that we want to lead.