Mastering your own mindset in modern finance

Emma Storr

Content Marketing Manager, MoneyNext

Emily Cook

Founder and Performance Coach, Found Coaching

In the fast-paced environment of financial services, sustainable success isn’t just about skill: it’s about mastering the neuroscience of how you think, feel and recover.

In the high-stakes finance industry, technical ability alone isn’t enough. Sustainable performance requires mastering your internal state. As the pace of change accelerates and complexity increases, leaders must learn to harness their emotional intelligence and brain health to thrive in volatile environments.

“Your emotional state is everything with high performance,” explains Emily Cook, founder of Found Coaching. “It allows you to either thrive and think clearly or the opposite.” Learning to regulate emotions, especially under pressure, is crucial for decision-making, resilience and connection. In a world where cognitive overload is the norm, cultivating self-awareness and calm is quickly becoming a strategic advantage.

Tools for emotional agility

Cook encourages the use of simple strategies like breathwork or body scan meditation. “In as little as 10 minutes, it calms your amygdala — your emotional centre — and activates the prefrontal cortex,” explains Cook. “It helps you stay composed, clear-headed and socially aware.”

These techniques are no longer niche; they’re becoming essential in the financial sector’s performance toolkit. As institutions become more digitised and fast-moving, the need for leaders who can stay grounded, adaptive and emotionally intelligent is only increasing.

Modern professionals are more
distracted, disconnected and
burned out than ever.

Understanding burnout

The 2025 Burnout Report from Mental Health UK found that 9 in 10 professionals experienced high or extreme stress last year; 1 in 3 feel that way often. “Burnout is a stress epidemic,” says Cook. “And it’s not just about workload; it’s also about control, values alignment and community.”

To stay grounded, Cook urges clients to revisit the brain health fundamentals: sleep, movement, nutrition and mindset. “These are the first things to go when we’re stressed, but they’re the exact things we need most,” she explains.

A framework for performance and flow

Cook’s approach is data-driven, rooted in science and built around a three-stage framework:
1) Energise (building powerful habits for more energy and less stress)
2) Visualise (gaining complete clarity on what you want and why)
3) Optimise (increasing access to your peak performance state: flow state)

Flow state is the deep focus state (being ‘in the zone’). It is shown to amplify focus, productivity, speed of learning and creative problem-solving while reducing stress and burnout symptoms.

“Modern professionals are more distracted, disconnected and burned out than ever, just when focus, bold thinking, and resilience are needed the most,” says Cook. Flow state is a vital tool in helping individuals, teams and businesses achieve sustainable high performance.