My business provides organisations with strategy, training and support to create and sustain mentally healthy workplace cultures, and my passion to drive change in this area stems from my own personal experience of battling mental illness.
The global pandemic is affecting everyone’s mental health in some shape or form. As my specialty, not only do I understand this but, if at least there is some good to come from my past experiences, I have found that having learned to cope through adversity and developed resilience through some tough times has helped me through the past 6 months.
There are a few techniques that I have learned that I hope will help anybody that find themselves struggling to cope during this uncertain time:
1. Recognising and changing mindset – It helps to bring my cortisol down (stress hormone) in order to get out of a reactive way of thinking and into a place where creativity and conscious decisions thrive. I take 3 mindful breaths or listen to a 3 minute guided meditation to help bring my cortisol down in order to decide who I want to be rather than doing things I think other people expect of me.
2. Routine – Having a morning routine of some sort works wonders. Exercise, journaling and writing down 3 things I’m grateful for radically changes my perspective for the day.
3. Be Yourself – Learning to be myself, 100% open and accepting of who I am was a long journey and one that started really small. It’s practicing courage everyday by speaking to other people and putting myself out there which has allowed me to get more comfortable with who I am and care less what people think of me – I know the people who are in my life love me for who I am not the double life version of myself.
4. Reduce or give up alcohol – Giving up drinking turned down the volume of negativity in my brain and allowed me to think clearly – I am now 13 years sober.
5. Learning – This is the age of free information If you want to learn something you can – including how to be happy and thrive no matter what adversity you’ve faced.
Listening to our Adversity to Advantage podcast is a good place to start as it’s filled with tips and ideas for how to change your life no matter where you’re at. Watching YouTube clips about people I admire who had a tough start in life – finding out what they did to better themselves, mimicking those things myself and experimenting with what works for me – the information is out there, we just need to know that we don’t know and put it into practice.
