Training your emotional health for peak performance (feat. Joey Klein)

There are countless fitness training programs to optimize your physical health.

But what about training programs to optimize your emotional and mental health? 

Many leaders have wellness routines that include activities like going to a spin class, lifting weights, and eating well. And the truly gifted leaders are incorporating emotional and mental activities as a core part of their wellness routines, too.

However, unlike the physical realm, there’s a dearth of regimented programs for truly optimizing your emotional and mental well-being.

I’m talking about programs that help you reach your peak emotional and mental performance — not simply stave off burnout or survive. 

One program that does specialize in this arena is Inner Matrix Systems, a personal mastery training system for high achievers. The founder and CEO, Joey Klein, says he got the idea for Inner Matrix Systems thanks to his experience in competitive martial arts.

During training sessions, Joey would perform perfectly. But sometimes when he stepped into the ring for competitions, he would suddenly start underperforming. It wasn’t that his physical fitness had changed in an instant. It was that his emotional and mental fitness was poor. So, when he was faced with an intense situation like a high-stakes competition, he wasn’t always able to perform optimally.

Joey understood that he needed to train emotionally and mentally as much as he trained physically so that he could remain centered and even joyful during competitions.

This led to the creation of his program, Inner Matrix Systems, where he now coaches high-performing leaders to optimize their emotional and mental health and achieve better results in intense environments.

How Inner Matrix Systems works

Emotional responses are conditioned. If we grew up with models of anger and anxiety, it’s likely we’ll experience anger and anxiety responses by default (although how we express those emotions may be different than our caregivers).

But there’s good news: Because emotional responses are conditioned, they’re never permanent. This means that we can re-condition a new emotional default.

Inner Matrix Systems helps people do just this — condition a calm, joyful, compassionate emotional default.

How? By training people to…

1. Become aware of their emotional and mental state
2. Understand what information emotions are providing
3. Turn off certain emotional states (like anxiety) and turn on others (like peace)

Why your emotional state matters as a leader

Did you know that we respond to others’ emotional and mental states unconsciously? Before we even have time to form thoughts, we will sense the emotional states of those around us and be affected by them.

So, as a leader, you want your emotional and mental state to impact your team in a way that helps them be in a peak-performance state as well.

Listen to my interview with Joey Klein to hear him share…

• The story of a woman who went from nearly fired to the leader of the year through optimizing her emotional and mental health
• How to accurately assess your emotional state
• How to become more sensitive to the emotional needs of your team
• An exercise to get into a state of “centered neutrality” (relaxed, clear, and calm)

This is not an episode you want to miss! 

Interested in more?  Here’s another great Enlightened Executive interview about how emotions affect your health and leadership, featuring Dr. Bradley Nelson.