Are you offering your employees the mental health support they need?

Feeling fear? It’s ok. Discover how to lean into fear rather than avoid it during this crisis and complex time.

This was the question raised last night at an event run by Campfire Collaborative Spaces. Guest speakers were Ben Jones , Entrepreneur and Founder from the Fulfillment Group, Aaron Stadlin -Robbie, Founder and Host, Talking Mental, Dr Hannah Redity, Clinical Psychologist and CEO, Mind HK and Catherine Hufton, HR Advisor, Linklaters.

In a survey of over 25,000 Australian Youth, two-thirds report that they experience a level of sadness, anxiety or stress that negatively impacts how they study work or live.

I doubt many of us can truthfully say that they’ve never made a new year’s resolution, the new year brings with it time for reflection and the drive to better ourselves. If you have made resolutions in the past, you’re likely familiar with the pattern of excitement and drive to complete your new goals, the certainty that ‘this year I’m actually going to do it!’, followed soon after by the slump that kicks in about mid-January when you realise that perhaps the goal of losing 10 kilo in two weeks or organising your entire life was a bit much to tackle.

When kids get a cut, most of them will instinctively ask for a band-aid, because as they are growing up we teach them how to take care of basic injuries. We know how important it is to take care of our bodies and we instil this in our children from a young age. There are regular subjects in school about health and the importance of physical activity for keeping your body healthy and yet both at home and at school we seem to entirely neglect mental wellbeing.

Self esteem….

Research has shown that girls’ self-esteem peaks when they are just nine years old. NINE. It then decreases substantially into their teenage years where it drops almost twice as much for girls as it does for boys. It’s a pretty scary thought, that young girls are living a substantial portion of their lives thinking so little of themselves, especially when we consider that self-esteem influences how happy we feel, the opportunities that we pursue and the choices that we make. We know how valuable our girls are, but if we want them to recognise it too it’s important that we better understand self-esteem and how we can support them.

If you are a mother of a young daughter, then please read this.

When was the last time you thought about your own mental wellbeing? Chances are it may not be something that you take stock of regularly. With the busyness and stress that is ever present in our modern lifestyles, many of us don’t take the time to press pause and evaluate our own mental state. With one in five of us reporting that we have taken time off work within the past year due to feeling stressed, anxious, depressed or mentally unhealthy it is probably time that we pay more attention to our own mental wellbeing.

Whether we are tired from a week at work, need a holiday after a holiday or we just feel flat. There are many proven psychological strategies you can employ to give you that much needed pick up. Which one will you choose?

When something goes wrong in a friend’s life, how do you respond? Typically, the answer to this would be something like, “I help them out” or “I make sure they’re okay”. But what if I asked you the question; how do you respond when things go wrong in your own life?

Many of us want to be happy, the pursuit of happiness may even be one of our goals, however research tells us that by aiming for it, we are actually preventing ourselves from achieving it.

I have had a number of people come to me lately who are “stuck”. Whether that be in their career, in a relationship or with making a difficult decision. Stuck or unstuck, its essential we all know how to think about our thinking. When we really know what’s going on in our mind we can control the way we react and feel about the situations we find ourselves in.

Have you ever looked at someone else’s life on social media and wished that your life were more like theirs?