survival. We therefore need to consciously make an effort to see the positive things that are in plain sight.
This year, I could get lost in the negative story – if I shared it, people would sympathise – but it doesn't serve me. Although my business was affected by the pandemic, we have bounced back, our team has doubled, and we've brought on five more major corporate clients. The crisis gave us laser focus. We're busier than ever (businesses are finally realising the importance of mental fitness in playing the long game). My goal for the year was to travel less, move some of my business online, and spend more time with my kids. I didn't want a pandemic to deliver it, but mission accomplished all the same. I've also finally birthed the book that has been inside of me for the last seven years – there's a lot to be proud of, yet it's easily missed.
So, my mission with this book is for you to take away one key insight, exercise, anecdote, or tool that will positively affect your life – although I'm confident you'll take away much more than one. With everything that I share I've also shown how to apply it to teams because this is the work myself and my team do every day at Symbia.
I truly believe that we all have untapped potential within us. When we work on and enhance our ‘mental fitness’, we unlock possibilities in ourselves and in our teams that we didn't know were there.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my family and friends and everyone who contributed to this book and to the friends, colleagues, and clients who let me brainstorm and experiment with them. A special thank you to everyone who took part in my interviews: Tim Munden, Marcus Hunt, Nathalie Slechte, Dr David Wilkinson, Shawn Conway, Mathew McCarthy, and Aldo Kane, and our financial services clients, who all provided excellent insight on the topic of mental fitness in business and in life, bringing new voices and different perspectives to the book.
Tim Munden, you deserve mentioning twice. I'm immensely grateful for the work you are driving on the inner game in Unilever. Thank you for trusting me and my company Symbia as a partner on this important journey. I am extremely grateful to Stan Sthanunathan and Gemma Bumpstead of Unilever who were pioneers in bringing mental fitness into the Consumer & Market Insights (CMI) function and honoured us with permission to include the case study at the back of this book.
A special thank you to Ann Suvarnapunya for creating all the images for the book and being heavily involved in all of our Mental Fitness offerings at Symbia. Also, thank you to Suzy Hegg, whose brilliantly analytical brain was a great support when creating the Mental Fitness business case.
To friends, colleagues, and clients of Symbia who have trusted us with their leaders and teams around the world, we thank you for the partnership and the opportunity to have a positive impact on your people.
Gratitude to Georgia Kirke and Kat Lewis, who have skilfully navigated the minefield of mental fitness and expertly helped shape it into the book it is today.
Many thanks to Annie Knight and all of the Wiley team who helped turn a major life and business goal into a reality.
Last, but always first, to my husband, Johnny Nunes, and our two boys, Theo and Finn. How you created space for me to write this book during a global pandemic is a mystery, but I am eternally grateful for your never-ending support. You always said you were my number one believer – I know that's the truth because I've felt it every step of the way. To infinity and beyond ;-)
INTRODUCTION
The book's title, The Hidden Edge, Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business, is deliberately provocative. I felt it was important to ignite debate. Too often we just default to external factors being prioritised in business, budget, business plans, investment, market dynamics, and so on. These matter – of course they do – but they are not as important as the people who sit behind them. If we want businesses that are agile and adaptable to change, we first need people who are. Flexible business models are meaningless if we don't also have agile mindsets and behaviours. Your people are your business's most important asset. If we want resilient businesses, we must build resilient teams, and to do this we need to empower them with the knowledge and tools to understand and leverage their most important asset – their minds. This book is the first step.
When athletes are training, they know that success is dependent upon more than just their physical performance – their mindset, i.e. staying focused, motivated, and confident, has a critical role to play. This is often referred to as their ‘mental game’ or ‘inner game’.
We all have an inner game. It refers to everything that goes on in our minds: our thinking patterns, our emotional regulation, beliefs, mindset, and so on. It's a combination of these factors that drives our decisions and influences the outcomes in our lives.
Much like physical fitness, the strength of our inner game – our ‘mental fitness’ – varies throughout our lives and is equally something we have to work at.
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 enhance it. 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
