The mental health gym
Our mission is to inspire people to work on their mental health like their physical health and our vision is to put the world’s first mental health gym on the high street.
Our vision is big, it’s bold and it turns heads.
On paper it sounds great, but then, naturally, people ask “so what even is a mental health gym?”
“When will it be ready?”
“What will be in there?”
Straight away it evokes your imagination and then of course the practical questions come too.
For us, firstly what a mental health gym on a high street actually symbolises is incredibly important.
It represents a cultural shift in our current attitudes towards mental health. It shows that mental health has become a part of our day-to-day life, that people value it, that people are willing to pay for it and that there is demand for people to take their mental health seriously enough to go to their local mental health gym.
A gym is also a place of community, of gathering, of shared goals and values. This is so important for our mental health, so a mental health gym stands for more than just a combination of bricks and mortar – it stands for where we want the world to get to and how we want all of us to value our mental health and prioritise it.
In most gyms there is more than one way to workout too; you have weights, bars and a whole host of different machines.
There’s not just one way to work on your health and fitness – in fact there are thousands of ways and we all choose what we feel aligned to in both where we want to get to and what we enjoy.
We believe it’s the exact same with your mental health.
There’s not just one way to workout and we believe that in the future we’ll all be looking after our mental health in a variety of different ways.
Right now we focus on 1:1 Coaching, but in the future we envisage those Sanctus gyms on the high street with many more unique and varying ways for us to work on ourselves.
When we put a mental health gym on the high street, we won’t have done it or completed our mission, yet it’s a big milestone for us.
It’s the day we believe we’ll really make a statement for how we intend mental health to be in our world. An inclusive part of our lives, not something shamed and shoved into the corner.
We all have mental health and we’re going to create a world where we all find our ways to work on it and look after it too.
When exactly will that be, we don’t know yet. Right now we make Sanctus Coaching available in the workplace by partnering with brilliant companies. In this way, our Personal Trainers are meeting people right where they are, at work. Our focus is continuing to make Sanctus Coaching available in businesses, where we can provide an easy way for people to talk to someone about their mental health.
There’s a long way to go for us in the workplace, yet we know this is going to build us a really strong foundation for those first mental health gyms on the high street.
James x