by Gary Bertwistle

While we can be congratulated for our efforts to cultivate a healthy body, many of us neglect our mental fitness. Here are five simple strategies that you can use to achieve optimal fitness for your brain.

For ultimate health, mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness because mental fitness contributes to our over all emotional wellbeing. And as such, we should assess our emotional health regularly, and try to consider the particular demands or stresses we may be facing and identify how they are affecting our daily lives.

We need to recognise that we are allowed to take a break from our worries, concerns, work and relationships. We must recognise that setting aside even a short time every day to improve our mental fitness will reap significant benefits in terms of feeling rejuvenated and more confident. We’ll work more productively, smarter and feel more balanced and calm.

Society is only beginning to understand the value of the imagination and mental fitness, even though it is fundamental to so many parts of our life and contributes enormously to the quality of how we live on a day to day basis.

It is also important to realise that the better you can create and/or problem solve, the more rewards you are likely to gain. These rewards can come in not only the satisfaction of finding a new way to approach something, but also financially.

Consider this – if you work for yourself then the better you can problem solve for your customers or clients, the more money you’ll make. Anyone who does business with your company effectively has a problem, and they’ve come to you because they believe that you can fix it better, quicker or cheaper than your competitors. What they’re really buying from you is your problem solving ability. The better you are, the more business you’ll get, and the more money you’ll make.

If you work within a company, the better you can problem solve for your management, the more rewards you are likely to receive in terms of bonuses, wages, rewards and incentives. Your management employs you to solve problems for them, so the better you are at it, the more they’ll want to keep you around and the more they’ll want to reward you. If you are not problem solving any better than the person sitting next to you, then why should they employ you? They employ you because you can problem solve better than the next person.

Having said this, creativity, imagination and problem solving are a learned process and you can learn to get better at it. So while you’re working out in the gym, think about your mental fitness, and how much time or resources you’re putting towards getting better at your creative thinking and the ability to create options for yourself and the organization you work with.

Creativity is not something that some people are born with. Its something that everybody has, but like everything, if its not used, you lose it. The brain is the only organ that the more its used the better it gets. Next time you’re at Fitness First working out your body, set yourself a plan to make your brain creatively fit.

Top 5 Tips for a Fitter Brain

1. Ask more questions. Even when you know the answer to something, ask the question.
2. Stimulate your Mind. Get outdoors, read, listen to some new music, go to the supermarket, explore a new street, walk or catch a train, talk to a stranger, see a movie, grab a good book.
3. Exercise your brain with new creative activities. Paint, draw, do poetry, write a story, do a crossword, watch a quiz show.
4. Relax. Spend some quiet time relaxing, contemplating and writing things down as they come to you. Meditating is an excellent way to stimulate your creative mind.
5. Break your habits. Do something different each day. Go to work a different way, do something different at lunch, read a different magazine, go to a movie you wouldn’t normally see, go to the theatre, take up a new exercise, or take a day off. Breaking habits is very important for breaking routine.

Gary speaks to audiences around the world about unlocking their thinking, imagination and ideas in the areas of performance, problem solving, innovation, marketing, strategy, creativity and learning. He is the author of The keys to Creativity and Who Stole my Mojo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.