In the world we’re living in, with politics and climate change and humanitarian crises filling our brains and our neighborhoods and our news feeds, I could not be more grateful to be nearly three years into my mental fitness training. What began as a curiosity after six months of intense work to reign in my growing anxiety turned out to be the missing tool in my client work and in my own mental health, and I couldn’t be more thankful for it – especially right now. Today I’d like to share how I found mental fitness and the difference it’s made in my life. 

Photo of a person with a cloth headband and simple dress with their back turned to the camera, looking out at a beautiful nature scene by Anastasia Shuraeva

Until my mid-thirties, I didn’t believe I suffered from anxiety. While I was diagnosed with and treated for “depression” as a busy early teen who’d started falling asleep in her classes and after school (in part due to the side effects from my allergy medication), I did talk therapy for a year and was told I was fine, basically, and the sessions stopped, because I was no longer falling asleep all the time and seemed functional and able to handle my activities again. 

My life up until that point involved a major identification with the word “busy”. When asked how I was doing, I said I was busy. I was in multiple theater productions (my record was three at a time), taking piano lessons, starting clubs and singing in choirs. I stopped dance lessons mid-way through eighth grade as my theater passion took over (and I’d recently given up dance competitions, which is another article unto itself), but I had added voice lessons into the mix by high school and was also required to participate in three sports or athletic programs each year at the private day school I attended. 

So yes. I was busy. And this identification with the word “busy” continued through high school, into college, and into my twenties, where any feelings I had of overwhelm or extra adrenaline or a racing heart etc. were labeled as “busy” at best and otherwise ignored. And when my body started showing signs of chronic health conditions, I pursued diagnoses for physical conditions without recognizing that there might be mental conditions worth exploring too. 

It wasn’t until I figured out how to support my husband’s dream (traveling as a touring musician) by having the two of us buy a used RV and travel the United States that things started to shift. I relied on adrenaline and discipline and problem-solving to get through the transition, even in the face of my newer symptoms of fatigue, but by the time we’d been on the road for six months or so, things began to shift. Without a theater company to run, with minimal lessons to teach and nowhere to physically be (unless we wanted to), my mind began to open up, and I found myself asking questions I hadn’t really delved into deeply and from a wise state of mind before. 

The questions looked something like these:

• Why have I been so successful as a creative, and yet I’ve never earned more than $50,000 in a year? 
• What are my beliefs around money? Around success? 
• Where do I want to be in ten years? In twenty? 
• Who am I if I’m living a simpler life? 
• What does community mean to me? 
• Who are really my friends? Who are the friends who believe in me, even when I don’t have anything to offer them but my friendship? 

As I began pursuing personal development for the first time, through programs and books and podcasts and an accountability group, I also was living with my husband in very close quarters on a daily basis for the first time. As he worked through his own mental health challenges, I started to see signs that I may also be living with anxiety for the first time. I began occasionally getting panic attacks – and they’d be triggered by my husband’s own struggles to regulate. I began to see with clarity my own signs of codependency and my struggles to maintain boundaries and protect myself from taking on other people’s emotions. 

In the midst of these studies, COVID hit, and as Ross and I were prepping for a move to Canada in light of the uncertain political situation and fears that we wouldn’t be able to maintain a unique lifestyle that we loved if we lost our rights to affordable health care and control of our own bodies, we learned to work through new fears and anxieties for the future. 

My body and mind were incredible to me during this time. I was working more hours than ever in my online businesses at the same time that I was overseeing a move to Canada, which felt like a fulltime job in itself. 

Is it any wonder that by the time we got settled into our new Canada apartment, maybe two months in, my anxiety kicked into overdrive? 

I finally felt safe, settled, and like I could relax. We’d gotten what we’d worked so hard for. We’d even crossed the border when such travel was still very restricted, especially on Prince Edward Island. And with this sense of safety and calm, my body said, ‘FINALLY!”. My anxiety rose to the top and spilled out all over the place. It was something like the way athletes get sick after the big competition or students and teachers get sick on vacation. 

I was having several anxiety attacks a week. Driving became especially triggering. It was when I noticed it was starting to get in the way of my work that I sought professional help. I went to a mental health clinic and got on the list to see a psychologist. I signed up for Betterhelp to have a more affordable option than the going rate, and I went through one mediocre therapist on that platform before finding someone who had a lot to offer me. After several months on the wait list, I saw an in-person psychologist on PEI’s dime, who unfortunately didn’t seem capable of helping someone as high-performing as me. (She didn’t know what to do with me. Sound familiar to anyone else?) I completed a local anti-anxiety program called ICAN, which gave me excellent practice with anti-anxiety tools like body scans, 5 4 3 2 1, breaking anxiety-producing tasks into smaller pieces and many more. 

In other words, I had a ton of support, which I’m grateful for. And I am sure it all helped, especially the anti-anxiety program, to get me through the worst of it. As I did the work, I started to observe myself going weeks and eventually even months between panic attacks. 

And then, thanks to a fellow life coach, I discovered Positive Intelligence. 

I took advantage of a free program for active coaches. Seven or so weeks of training in mental fitness, led by coach Shirzad Chamine and based on the most cutting edge science and research. We were required to maintain an accountability group and do daily check-ins with each other as part of the process, in addition to weekly group meetings over Zoom. 

I entered the program skeptical that anything free could be that transformative. But I was soon a convert. My husband noticed differences in me too. When it ended, I knew I was signing up for further study and to begin training so I could bring mental fitness into my coaching practice. 

There’s a lot about Positive Intelligence that resembles the personality study I’d been doing using the Enneagram since 2019. But there are a lot of distinctions too. While my Enneagram work had shown a brilliant light on where I was trapped in patterns of behavior, I hadn’t made significant progress in improving that behavior and growing toward a healthier way of being. (I had, however, developed a lot of compassion and understanding of how to be in better relationship with my family and friends and my husband – some major wins!)

With my new mental fitness tools and a daily commitment to practicing them (thanks in part to the genius Positive Intelligence app included in my study), things started to improve for me really quickly. 

I became calmer in the face of stress. I became less likely to get triggered by my husband or a family member or a member of my chorus. I became better able to tap into a wiser, bird’s eye view perspective of my life. I became happier, more easygoing, and a more effective coach, partner, friend and family  member. 

And over and over again, my clients who chose to study mental fitness with me also were reaping the benefits. They became less reactive, more able to handle grief, better able to get things done (from creating and living by a budget to making phone calls or regulating their own anger and anxiety). 

For me, and for so many in my work, mental fitness has been the missing piece. Instead of continually watching themselves repeating patterns but struggling to break free of them, they were able to be more effective and efficient, spending more time in that wiser part of their brain and quieting the negative and sabotaging parts of it. They were happier. And they got to benefit from a more healthy and regulated coach better able to guide them. 

With hindsight, I can see that the big piece missing in my own Enneagram studies in the first several years was a commitment to a contemplative practice. At most, I’d dabbled in meditation, and while I went through periods where I got out in nature daily while we were RVing (often for hours at a time), I didn’t recognize it for the meditation that it was, or that it could have been, if I’d taken the podcast out of my ears and really tuned in to my surroundings. Until I joined Enneagram trainings and workshops (rather than simply reading books or listening to podcasts), I wasn’t clear on how essential it is to pair Enneagram work with meditation and other tools. By the time I began doing that that, thankfully, I’d incorporated Positive Intelligence into my life. All of sudden, I was growing mental muscles. My mental fitness and Enneagram work began to support each other. 

I remember a few years back, sharing with delight an incident from earlier in the week with my first Enneagram cohort. 

At the time, I had a plastic bin next to my bed, and on it, I had a humidifier. I also had a variety of different possessions, including a book, as I was using the bin as a night stand. On this particular evening, I’d fallen asleep and reached over to grab something, and I hit water. Everywhere. Everything on the stand was soaked. 

Prior to my Enneagram or mental fitness studies, I would have been hit with a wave of self-revulsion for having made this mistake. My inner critic would have kicked into high gear. And then I would have been angry, jumping into action without stopping to think and cleaning all of it up myself. If at some point down the line I had thought to ask my husband (who was still wide awake) for help, I would have done so in an angry, frustrated state. When met with that heightened, angry and panicked state, my husband would have responded with his own saboteurs, and I know from past experiences this would have led to us both triggering each other and lengthening the process until we could each calm down, forgive as needed, and come to bed and fall asleep. 

Instead, I felt the water, realized I was very close to sleep and didn’t want to wake up and ruin that, so I called out to my husband. 

“Ross, can you help me with something?” I calmly asked. He came in, happy to assist, be helpful, and answer my calm request. I explained the situation and asked if he could help me since I was almost asleep. He agreed. Given that he struggles in those moments to know what to do, I then began making requests. “Can you go get a towel please?” “Can you put this over there?” I talked him through it, but did so calmly, lying in bed, and trusting him to figure out details of where to hang towels or set items to try. 

And when all that was done, I simply rolled over and went back to sleep. 

Nowadays, even in the face of this wild rollercoaster of a world, I am extremely grateful. For calm. For days where I am seldom, if ever, thrown off. Even in the face of hard things, it’s the rare day when I have to work hard to stay regulated. I’m able to preemptively do my mental fitness exercises long before a panic attack. And I am healthier, kinder, and more whole in my responses to the world. 

Do you have a mental fitness practice? Want to learn more about the saboteurs that are keeping you from living your best life, day in and day out? Imagine what’s possible for you in your relationships, your career, and across your life with this change! It’s never too late to find more joy in your life.