Looking After Your Mental Wealth

What are you currently doing to assist looking after your mental wealth? Wealth is all about investing and future planning so we should really be addressing our mental health as a form of investment. We know the topic of mental health is very much at the forefront at present, however mental wealth is focused on looking after all areas of our health and wellbeing and taking the appropriate steps to make us wealthier.

A key starting point is understanding that we’re all on a mental health spectrum, which may sound a bit dramatic to some, but it’s a fact! We’ve all got successes and failures, problems or issues but at the end of the day, mental health can be very positive or it can be very negative depending on which side of the spectrum we currently sit. 

When I talk about looking after your mental wealth, this is very much focused on looking after yourself, dealing with isolation and having the right power team around you, the people supporting you. These are techniques and tactics that I use to help look after my mental wealth to keep me true, to keep me grounded. From a balance of wellbeing, fitness, health, nutrition and diet and everything else that goes with it. It’s all part of your mental wealth and the fact that so many of us at times forget about looking after ourselves or are less than wealthy here is a real issue.  

Recently I took a Mental Health First Aid course, which is a seriously enlightening programme and should ideally be invested in by all of us. It is said that over the next while it will become mandatory for organisations to have mental health first aiders in conjunction with their existing standard first aid officers. Mental Health is a huge hidden challenge for so many with the best disguises you could possibly create, so many of us can share stories of individuals where we didn’t see it, or could have seen it if we had just asked some better questions and listened more effectively, sadly that is not always possible.

I started looking into my own performance, happiness and productivity within the confines of my own mental wealth for several reasons. Firstly, to get a better understanding and a grip on mental health. I’m not a trained mental health practitioner or a psychologist. It’s an area that I wanted to investigate and learn more about – I was feeling uneducated in an area where we shouldn’t be.

I work with a lot of clients and have three young adult children. There are certain clients that I work with who are suffering from, or struggling with, all the levels of mental health at any given time. Ranging from depression and anxiety to just full on procrastination, FAFFing about and lack of purpose and direction, these can be the cause or the symptoms dependent on the different things that are going on in their lives.

Where my own mental health is concerned, there have been times where I have been challenged by members of my own family that some of my sporting activities are akin to self harm. I previously have never believed this and felt the association was a bit harsh, I just happen to enjoy my sports and I do a lot of it. There are times when if I’m entirely honest that my consistent sport and exercise, be that big runs, Quadrathlons or swimming The Channel can actually be an avoidance tactic. My discipline to fitness far outweighs my discipline to my business development or picking up the phone and making phone calls in the business world. And this causes me harm – while it’s not traditional self harm it is harming my performance, my bank balance and levels of success in other fields of my life!

How can we get better then at looking after our mental wealth? The key thing is to understand all elements, the things that you do when you are on fire, the ingredients that really help to look after you versus the bits that we need to do less of, stop entirely or conversely, do more of. With the right people around to make sure that we’re able to do this more of the time, most of the time. There’s no such thing as perfection, something that I’ve said for years and even though my father always instilled in me that “It’s got to be done right, it’s got to be done the right way – i.e. his way”, that’s not fair and it’s not realistic a lot of the time and only sets us up for multiple failures.

When we have the right people helping us on our journey and we can ask for help our mental wealth grows exponentially. Add to the pot that when we do ask for help and people step up to support us then the magic really kicks in, success appears to get easier and guess what? – it becomes a lot more fun as well.

Part of my mission of looking after my own mental wealth is to have a lot more fun in everything that I do, whether that be work, play, family, travel or yodelling on the top of a mountain! Here is my challenge to you. How can you improve your mental health, wealth, by having more fun and enjoyment, with things that you do more than time, most of the time?

As always, if this newsletter has triggered some thoughts and some conversations that we should be having, please pick up the phone or drop me an email. Let’s see what we can do to help you invest better in your mental wealth.