What is Mental Fitness?
Developing Mental Fitness through coaching enables an individual to feel in control of their environment, to develop the capacity to strengthen their performance and to strengthen their engagement to get more from themselves and those around them.
Being in Control
Developing Capacity
Being Engaged
The foundations of Mental Fitness
Mental Fitness is founded upon an ecosystem of 12 interlocking and interrelated pillars.
Sleep
Sleep
More and more research is showing how vital sleep is as a foundation of our mental fitness. Assessing our sleep patterns allows us to identify this as an area of focus to build into our personal and organisational wellbeing strategies.
Confidence
Confidence
How confident we feel in our work and professional life can influence other areas of our Mental Fitness.
Happiness
Happiness
Feeling happy and understanding our sources of happiness is a powerful driver of resilience and performance. Building our Mental Fitness in other areas has a powerful impact on our happiness.
Motivation
Motivation
Motivation is what gets us going and keeps us moving forward. Spotting a lack of motivation can often be an early sign of depleted Mental Fitness.
Optimism
Optimism
Optimism derives from the ability to pause and reframe challenges as positive opportunities for growth and development. It’s something we think we should be viewed as a skill to be developed, learned and applied.
Resilience
Resilience
Resilience is a core foundation, that is itself supported by several other Mental Fitness foundations. Our ability to deal with pressure from different sources, to be able pick ourselves back up when challenged either in work or outside of work
Physical Fitness
Physical Fitness
Physical Fitness supports our Mental Fitness and helps strengthen our ability to respond to life in all its richness. If we know how firm a foundation it is we can decide how much we need to focus on strengthening it.
Relationships
Relationships
Relationships give us resilience, provide motivation and optimism and are core to developing good Mental Fitness. Ensuring we know how to build and maintain relationships is essential.
Balance
Balance
As with depleted motivation an imbalance between work and life can be an early sign of depleted Mental Fitness, reduced performance and the risk of excessive stress and potential burnout.
Anxiety
Anxiety
Too much anxiety can leave us overwhelmed, unable to focus and undermine our resilience and capabilities. Managing anxiety can be a vital skill in our Mental Fitness toolkit.
Stress
Stress
Communication
Communication
Being able to communicate clearly allows us all to achieve shared goals. Good communication should lead to good performance, clearly understood objectives and well functioning teams.
Strengthen performance.
Unlock growth.
Strengthen individual and company performance
Mental Fitness is the capacity and ability to improve performance by taking control of your state of psychological and emotional wellbeing. Developing frameworks and structures to measure and support this drives performance.
Unlock personal and organisational development
Mental Fitness enables individuals to engage productively with their environment and growth their resourcefulness across the skills and competencies required for business growth.

Gain more insight
Insights, opinions, expert advice, tips and tools, a stream of useful performance development and wellbeing content.
View all Cognomie Insights ›
Disrupting Leadership Training – Why Leadership should be for the many, not the few.
There are typically three overlapping models that tend to get used by businesses for leadership training and development. The career stage model - Businesses invest in an individual (or individuals) at a particular stage of their career, often later into their...
How to create a wellbeing strategy for your organisation.
Creating an effective wellbeing strategy for your organisation can have a dramatic impact on organisational as well as individual development and performance. It barely needs stating that employee wellbeing has never been more important. Our Mental Fitness and...
What are your Mental Fitness goals for the rest of the year?
Whether or not you think New Year's Resolutions are a good idea, it's pretty common at this time of the year for people to make plans for things they want to achieve or “tick off the list” during the next 12 months. Taking some time to reflect and to define these...
How can HR help to lead the way in dealing with complex change
Can embracing complexity help HR departments build organisational resilience? The last two years of the Pandemic have been hard for everyone in the workplace and at home. But certain workplace roles have at times found themselves facing tougher challenges than...
Empathy and Beyond – Compassionate Leadership.
The idea that Eskimos have lots and lots of words for snow is a commonly understood shorthand for recognising that the more familiar we are with something, the more nuanced our abilities to describe it becomes. Here at Cognomie we share the view of a lot of people...
Why empathy is a vital characteristic of leadership
Empathy is not always talked about enough as a competency that is at the heart of strong and effective leadership. Empathy is about being aware of the feelings and thoughts of others and showing understanding of them, as opposed to just acknowledging them. Brene...
Vulnerable Leadership. Why being a Mental Fitness role model is integral to being an effective leader.
Various team members here have found themselves watching the global Netflix hit Money Heist to wind down over the last few months. It’s high octane, high adrenaline and high drama. One of the things we’ve loved about it here at Cognomie is the way it offers a not...
Robin Cartwright – Why I’m investing in Cognomie
Hello, I’m Robin Cartwright. I’m a Cognomie coach. I wanted to share a little about my story, and why I’m investing in Cognomie, because I want to encourage you to do the same. Bear with me, this isn’t a hard sell, but I do think it is an opportunity. A little...
How is your organisation responding to The Great Resignation?
The great resignation is impacting all kinds of organisations. We’ve been through immense change in the last few years. Covid has forced us all to change our lifestyles and working practices. It seems as though those changes are far from over. One of the hottest...
Wellbeing at Work UK Summit 2021 – Key themes
We’re back feeling energised and inspired after a week spent with our fellow delegates at the Wellbeing at Work Summit. We felt very privileged to be in the company of industry leaders practically engaging with some of the real challenges faced by all of us as we...
Cognomie launches crowdfund to power global growth into Mental Fitness market
Cognomie has today, launched a crowdfunding campaign to drive our next phase of rapid growth into the global wellbeing market, estimated at over $120bn. We’re delighted to be partnering with Crowdcube on this and expect to go into overfunding quickly. To invest in...
Wellbeing at Work UK Summit
This week the team at Cognomie are attending and participating in the Wellbeing at Work Summit, UK. It’s been unprecedented ground for many sectors, across the global, over the 18 months, from which lots of experience has been gained and new approaches developed,...
Mental Fitness Beyond Covid
Mental fitness always matters in the workplace but it matters now more than ever. Whilst it might be years before researchers understand the true cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that incorporating employee mental wellbeing into their COVID-19...
Mental Fitness and Leadership
How can Mental Fitness help create better leaders? Leading organisations in a fast changing world is challenging and requires constant agility and the ability to perform at the limits of one’s personal capabilities. Here’s 5 reasons why we think monitoring,...
Why Mental Fitness Matters
Mental Fitness is the capacity and ability to improve your performance through taking control of your state of psychological and emotional wellbeing. It’s generated through the ability to identify and manage your internal capacities such as focus, attention,...
Resilience: The Art of the ‘Bounce Back’
Is Resilience on your mind? It’s certainly on ours. Through our Global Mental Fitness Index we (at Cognomie), know that, not surprisingly, the world is feeling less Resilient right now than it did 12 months ago (pre-pandemic). We have captured data across...
Wellbeing at Work – 2021 Middle East Summit
We were delighted to sponsor the Wellbeing at Work Middle East Summit this year, particularly as wellbeing is becoming such a focus for the region’s most forward-thinking enterprises. It was encouraging and uplifting to hear so many positive stories from industry...
Geoff McDonald interview: Reset, restore and renew.
As we move through the phases of the pandemic it feels we might start to see the light of recovery around the corner. As we approach this time we’ve spoken to global thought-leader, Geoff McDonald, to better understand the priorities he envisages for organisational...
Why invest in optimism?
Optimism can be a powerful force underpinning our personal Mental Fitness. Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan write, following a multi-year organisational research project, in the Harvard Business Review ‘imagine if double the number of people on your team felt like...
Sleep Tips – 10 ideas for better sleep
Sleep is a vital part of our everyday wellbeing and our future health. Better sleep can strengthen our resilience and improve our productivity. So how can we get better sleep? 10 tips for getting better sleep Go to bed - It sounds a little simplistic. But how many...
Proactive resilience – preparing for winter
It doesn’t feel that many weeks ago that we were writing about how to best use the summer months to build up resilience that may provide the strength, energy and adaptability to face challenges later in the year. Well here we are, with a new found chill in the air,...
Relationships are a foundation for resilience.
Relationships and resilience are entwined. One of the things that fascinates and inspires us is how interconnected the foundations that support our Mental Fitness can be. They interweave like the poles of a tent, with each of the other poles strengthening the...
Benchmark your Mental Fitness:
Experience Cognosis for yourself
As part of your coaching programme, you'll gain access to Cognosis, allowing you to identify the areas of your personal development that will have the most impact.