AUG 31 — Malaysia is free. That part is history. But personal freedom is a different matter.

If a notification can break your concentration, a comment can ruin your day, anger can make your decisions and entertainment can keep you from doing what you already know must be done, then your mind is not free. It belongs to whatever reaches it first.

The Prime Minister spoke about it this Merdeka about jiwa merdeka. I agree. But a free spirit still needs a trained mind. Otherwise, it remains something we celebrate every August without applying it to how we live, work and lead.

In high performance, we call it cognitive control. It involves executive functions such as working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. Put simply, can you keep the objective in your head, stop yourself from making an impulsive decision and adjust when the facts change?

That is leadership.

You can have the title, the money, the company and the physique. If every inconvenience produces a temper tantrum, criticism makes you reckless and your ego refuses to accept new evidence, you are not operating at a high level. You are successful in public and poorly regulated in private.

A leader who cannot control his response has handed leadership over to his emotions.

I know how easily health and performance can drift, even when you know better. I have been there myself. I know what it feels like when your present condition no longer matches the standard you carry in your head.

It happens to the best of us.

Falling away from your standard is human. Staying there and building excuses around it is a decision. I chose to face it, correct course and get back to work. I am now on the road to recovery with one clear objective: to become free from the conditions that once limited me.

Before the body could change, the thinking had to change. I had to stop treating facts as something to fear and start using them as direction. Get the proper assessment. Ask the right questions. Find qualified help. Follow the plan. Train, recover and repeat.

And let’s keep it real. Mindset does not cure hypertension. Positive thinking does not remove cholesterol from your bloodstream. Cognitive control determines whether you face the test, listen to the advice, change the behaviour and remain consistent when motivation is gone.

The National Health and Morbidity Survey 2023 found that 54.4 per cent of Malaysian adults were overweight or obese. About 29.2 per cent had hypertension, 33.3 per cent had high cholesterol and 15.6 per cent had diabetes. Another 37.7 per cent were not getting sufficient sleep.

The latest Department of Statistics Malaysia report recorded ischaemic heart disease as the country’s leading medically certified cause of death in 2024, accounting for 17,421 deaths. Among Malaysians aged 41 to 59, it accounted for 17.6 per cent of medically certified deaths.

These numbers are not sitting outside our offices, homes and boardrooms. They are already inside them.

We call exhaustion commitment. We call five hours of sleep ambition. We ignore blood pressure because another meeting needs to be attended. We keep pushing until a diagnosis forces us to have the conversation we spent years avoiding.

Health cannot remain only a KKM conversation, and high performance cannot remain something reserved for national athletes. The Ministry of Education, Ministry of Youth and Sports, MSN, ISN, universities, employers and corporate boards must be part of the same discussion.

Malaysia needs cognitive fitness from school to the workplace. Attention control. Emotional regulation. Critical thinking. Sleep and recovery. Physical training. The ability to experience discomfort without immediately looking for an escape.

Look at the environment our younger generation is growing up in. Everything has become entertainment. Every meal, workout, argument and personal problem becomes content. Silence gets filled by a screen.

Our young people were not born weak. They are being trained every day by platforms competing for their attention. Adults handed them this environment. We cannot turn around and insult them for struggling to concentrate inside it.

We train the brain every day, whether we realise it or not. Spend hours jumping between short clips and the brain becomes good at jumping. Hold your attention on difficult work, structured training, serious reading or a real conversation and you develop a different capacity.

Before we demand better focus from young people, they need to see it demonstrated by us.

The Government has announced expanded AI access for 100,000 young Malaysians. Good. Give them the technology and every competitive advantage available.

But AI can make a disciplined young person faster, and it can make a lazy thinker more dependent. Before we give a generation faster access to information, we must teach them how to question it, verify it and think without allowing technology to do all the thinking for them.

Free thought does not mean refusing expertise. That is ignorance. A free mind can listen to experts, examine the evidence, admit when it is wrong and change direction without treating correction as humiliation.

Independent thought without discipline becomes impulse. Discipline without independent thought becomes blind obedience. High performance demands both.

My day begins with prayer and meditation before I touch the phone. I establish the main objective. I train. I monitor my health. I create distance between an emotion and my response. At night, I look honestly at whether my behaviour matched what I claimed I wanted.

That is not motivational content. That is cognitive training.

I am not interested in being another coach who counts repetitions, distributes meal plans and talks about six-packs. A gym can make somebody sweat. My job is to develop the person making the decisions after the session is over.

That is why I work with leaders. Their physical condition, emotional regulation and judgment do not affect them alone. Those qualities enter their companies, their marriages, their families and every decision made under their authority.

My message this Merdeka is straightforward. Malaysia cannot build strong institutions, winning athletes, resilient companies or serious leaders with minds that are permanently distracted and emotionally reactive.

We won the right to govern our country.

Now we must raise people capable of governing themselves.

A free nation cannot be led by distracted minds.

*Murad Zaidi is a high-performance consultant and transformation specialist

** This is the personal opinion of the writers or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.