‘Breathing is Your Greatest Tool’: Founder of Mental Fitness Programs

By Kekeletso Nkele, small. Assistant

Q: What feels very liberating about mental fitness is that it’s very practical, like we need to train our minds to… respond in certain ways to calm our system down. It feels like, you know, in a world where we’re all craving practicality, it kind of is… How would you phrase that? Or what’s your thought on that?

A: The most radical act is to take over your own system in whatever way you can. And we can start with these very simple offline practices. Let’s just say breathing for number one, right? The breath is such a powerful tool to use.

It’s a tool you can use during meetings, you can use it between meetings, you can use it on the way to pick up your kids. We have to distill down to the very basic elements of what we are in control of. And then we have the capacity to shift our state.

Q: What are you most concerned about for people?

A: I want people to… imagine two different rings. One ring is consequences. And that’s the big picture. And then there’s a ring inside of that, which I would label narratives. What I’m most concerned about is people letting the consequences influence their narrative.

What I’m most concerned with is people not having an understanding of what’s real anymore, number one, and allowing sort of those external meta consequences that are real on one level, but maybe they’re sensationalized even more so, so that they feel exponentially impossible for us to deal with.

Q: What’s the opportunity in something like that? How do we, you know, manage our systems?

A: We have to create a separate system and really genuinely keep track of it. Keep track of it. We manage what we measure, right?

Let’s start measuring some of these invisible things that make this stuff simple, harder to do, because it’s so painfully easy often, right? And we’ll give you a few examples of how easy it is. I would say that to me, step one is to reclaim some of what it is that we’re paying attention to and what we’re measuring.

One example, these Premier League goalies in England, instead of piping in noise from the crowd to try to replicate, you know, the sound of the big match that was coming up, they put these construction-grade ear muffs on their ears. And they basically took away their hearing as a sense. So without hearing, these goalies are having to pay attention to things in ways that they wouldn’t have had to pay attention to before.

Q: If you had a Magic Silver Wand and you could implement one change instantly that you think would have the most positive effect on small businesses, what would you use the silver wand for?

A: The first thing I would do would be to teach you one specific breath practice. I’ll start with that. It’s called a physiological sigh. And it’s you inhale nearly full in your nose.

And almost at the very end, you top it off with one more quick inhale, and then you just exhale out your mouth. Research is showing that this is better than meditation. It is when you are in the red zone, this is going to bring you back into the yellow zone.

It is the sort of most stealthy, quickest way to speak to your own nervous system.

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