What’s more important: physical fitness or mental fitness?

Trick question - they both are equally important.

There's a misconception that somehow, what you see in the mirror matters more than what's happening inside your head.

And it makes sense why physical fitness traditionally gets more attention, right? Physical fitness is visible to the naked eye. You can look in the mirror and see whether you look fit or not.

Mental fitness is not as visible. Same thing with sleep fitness.

But all of it compounds.

The good news is more people are taking all of it seriously now. Mental fitness, physical fitness, sleep fitness are all valid forms of fitness.

You can see this with the rise of brands like Headspace, Calm, and Eight Sleep - all companies that focus on mental and sleep fitness to improve and compound effects in physical fitness.

This is a common pattern I see: I work with founders who really take care of their mental health. They connect with family and friends. They have community. They sleep well.

These are the founders that make decisions from a place of possibility. That's what allows them to make bets that are calculated and bold. They don't let fear or anxiety rule their decision making.

On the other hand, you have founders that don't sleep enough, they use substances, they don't see a therapist. They're not doing the things they need to do to take care of their mental health.

Those are the founders that typically will have their companies go under because they make decisions from a place of fear. Or they'll make good decisions but burn themselves out in the long run. Those are the ones that usually have some sort of existential life crisis even after they've achieved success.

A Story About Fear-Based Decision Making

I once worked with a founder who had maybe about five months of runway left. Our work together was really a hail Mary: it was a last-ditch attempt to try to solve the problem and prevent his company from going under.

When we unpacked his first session, it became super clear that he was making decisions from a place of fear, and that this was something that was deeply rooted in the way that he grew up.

He had a really hard relationship with his family. He didn't feel like he could be honest with them, which made it hard for him to be honest with himself, and that bled into the way that he ran his company.

He was afraid of losing investors' money, afraid of not finding product-market fit, and afraid that he would never be successful.

It was even to the point where he was afraid that if he was anything short of successful, nobody would love him, nobody would care for him, his partner would leave him, and he would die alone.

Our first session together was a really hard session. Before we met, he struggled to admit that fear was the way he ran his life for as long as he could remember. Our coaching call was the first time that he was willing to admit that this was the case, and that it was not sustainable.

So what did we do?

We identified first that he was in fear. He had no idea how fearful he was until we really talked about it.

Then, I encouraged him to do what I tell all my coachees to do when they're in massive fear: fear journaling.

Fear journaling is basically writing out the absolute worst-case scenario of what will happen if your fear comes true.

Part of the impact of fear journaling is looking at the ludicrousness of just how absurd your fears are once they're written down on paper.

Once we were able to fear journal, the advice was to do the opposite. This is a dialectical behavioral therapy tactic where you do the opposite of what your brain is telling you to do.

So if your brain tells you "don't take the big bet because it's not going to work," you imagine what would happen if you did take the big bet.

If you're able to realize through working with a coach or partner that no, it's not existential, you do it anyway. If it turns out you made the wrong decision, you have learnings. If it's the right decision, you come out better for it.

My coachee and I did that for a week or two, and it was like magic.

It was almost like overnight he became a completely new person.

His partner actually ended up reaching out to me about a month or two after we started working together and was like "I don't even recognize my partner anymore. He's not paralyzed by fear, I feel like he has a renewed sense of self, I am more in love with him, our dates are better, even our sex is better. Everything is better."

That really just shows how when you take care of the mental fitness, everything else improves alongside with it.

His company turned around. It is extremely successful now.

He took bigger, bolder bets. Some of them paid off, some of them didn't, but that didn't scare him. He was able to make the right hires. He thought with a lot better clarity.

He's physically fit, too, and the mental fitness was actually helping his physical fitness as well.

Now, my former coachee is motivated by desire and drive rather than by fear of disapproval, of shame, of guilt. It helps him as a better leader. He leads board meetings better. He fires people that are underperforming. He promotes people and pays them better when they do well.

We don’t need to work together anymore, because he now knows everything he needs to know. And that came from being mentally fit.

The Playbook: Building Mental Fitness Through Reps and Recovery

Mental fitness is like any other kind of journey or fitness.

It's all about consistency, and consistency is always better than intensity.

Here are my six steps on building peak mental fitness.

The Transformation

Mental fitness changes everything.

Not just how you feel, but how you operate.

Mentally fit operators make different kinds of decisions. They handle their teams differently. They approach board meetings differently.

They take calculated risks instead of playing it safe out of fear. They fire under-performers. They promote and pay high performers well.

They don't allow short-term thinking to impact long-term benefits.

That's the operator you're working toward becoming.

Until next time,

📌 Resources mentioned:

• On Overcoming Self Doubt | Coaching Founder

• See Hear Feel  | Shinzen Young

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