Another reason to improve your mental health

Physical health :: Sports || Mental Health :: Communication

My cross country coach used to tell us a story from a long time ago when he was a kid in school: He lived in the intersection between two very different wealth brackets, and one day during gym a rich kid and a poor kid got picked to be team captains for soccer.

My coach and all the other kids got into a line to be picked and the captains started to choose who they wanted on their teams.

Rich kid actually attended a soccer club, so he started picking his friends from the soccer club, while poor kid picked his friends from track who were just generally athletic.

As the teams stack up- Rich and his friends are high-fiving and yelling because they got all the picks they wanted to, they have all the technical skill, and this is going to be a stomp-fest.

But of course, the game plays out and it turns out that skill isn’t everything. The poor kid and his team run faster and for longer. The first fifteen minutes look like the game could be fair, but after that the game does turn out to be stomp-fest.

Easy lesson- proper physical health beats ‘skill’ 9 times out of 10.

The same thing is true in communication with mental health.

There are speakers who master communication from a technical lens- who enunciate perfectly, get passionate and energetic at the right points, and have all the right anecdotes, but who nonetheless are not as compelling as the random blue collar worker you talked to that one time.

Technical speakers are largely sterile because they don’t have authenticity, and it’s basically impossible to have charisma without authenticity.

The reason that most people do not present authentically is because they are not content with who they are, they aren’t willing to take the risk, and they aren’t actually happy.

If I get up on a stage feeling like crap and I’m obligated to be there- I might not be able to tell you that without losing my job or feeling embarrassed- but the great thing about good mental health is that not only will you feel better about what you’re doing and who you are when you communicate, but you’ll also be more willing to take social risks like telling the full truth.

Mental health is to communication what physical health is to sport.

Good mental health beats ‘technical’ skill 9 times out of 10.

The best things you can do for your mental health? Sleep, exercise, diet. Interestingly enough the best things you can do for your physical health too.

Before you move on with your life I want to leave you with one exercise that will help you really understand how much your ability to communicate can be affected by your mental state and the exercise also happens to be a performance-enhancing drug for communication:

Hyperventilation.

Before a speech/performance- recorded or otherwise, you find a comfortable position lying or sitting down, and do three sets of 30 full and deep breaths, breathing out the last breath fully and only continuing with the next set of breaths when you feel the urge to breathe.

You can also just follow this 10 minute guide from a breathing instructor that’s pretty popular:

At the end your brain will feel like you ran it through a sandblaster, and you’ll notice the quality of your communication increase dramatically. You’ll speak more clearly and with fewer stops or catches.

And the quality of your communication determines the quality of your life.

Best of luck, and good mental health.