The Healthy Minds Approach
We have reviewed hundreds of research papers from around the world and have hands-on experience teaching the skills of wellbeing to thousands of our ‘graduates’.
We have the qualifications and experience to lead the charge in helping companies, schools and individuals in reaching peak health, and to maintain this into the future. Mental health issues affect around a quarter of the population in any given year, and are the leading cause of disease burden in the population under 50 years of age1.
For companies, the cost to the Australian labour force is almost $49 Billion per annum, and when the impact on productivity and abstenteeism is averaged across all employed people, it amounts to $2,100 per person, per year2. Corporate Australia now recognises that a proactive, preventive approach to mental health is essential.
For schools, it is known that around 75% of recurring adult mental health problems have their onset before age 24 and 50% before middle-adolescence3, making the school setting a vital target for prevention. School-based approaches have led the way in prevention science in terms of the development of preventive interventions and improving theory.
Our goal is to be the leading provider of preventive mental health care and wellbeing training in Australasia. Having a healthy mind begins with understanding the ingredients of personal wellbeing, including a robust psychological skill-set and specific wellbeing behaviours. Here’s an overview of the Healthy Minds approach:
We teach the psychological skills that cause mental health.
It is unfortunate that in today’s world that unless we get referred to a health professional for psychological therapy it is unlikely we will get to learn the psychological skills that cause mental health. Thanks to Healthy Minds that is now changing. We take the sophisticated psychological skills that cause people to become mentally healthy out of the therapy room and into workplaces and schools through our tailored personal development programs and seminars.
Mental health and performance exist on a continuum.
Mental ill-health brings more than just a personal impact in terms of quality of life, it also significantly impairs functioning. On the other hand, learning the skills to self-manage your personal wellbeing will enable you to thrive. Where on one end of the scale sits psychological symptoms, absenteeism, poor concentration and work or school performance, at the other end lies peak performance, resilience and self-actualisation.
Wellbeing is about more than just your mind.
We support wellbeing behaviours.
Resilience can be learned.
More than just a buzzword, resilience is a set of specific skills and processes. Personal resilience:
- Is about coming under stress and not getting stuck in a state of psychological disorder
- Is having distress tolerance skills
- Is about being able to cope effectively with ‘negative’ emotion
- Is about building competence & confidence through an expanding comfort zone
- Comes naturally when our personal wellbeing is high
Ours is a different approach
At Healthy Minds, we strongly believe that true mental health requires more than just feel-good platitudes, positive thinking, or short-term solutions. We don’t catastrophise the normal experience of occasionally experiencing so-called ‘negative’ emotions, nor do we peddle the falsehood that everybody should feel positive mood states 24/7. Rather, we de-construct personal wellbeing as the foundation of mental health, quality of life, and being able to perform at your best… which is the true foundation of a sustainably ‘happy’ life.
Our training is always provided by registered psychologist-facilitators
Healthy Minds facilitators are not just engaging presenters, they are also highly trained clinicians with years of one-on-one experience supporting individuals to improve their mental health. Wellbeing training should be about more than just holding the interest of a group or audience – it should be provided by experts who can create a new skill set and promote healthy behaviour change.
By participating in the Healthy Minds Program, you will learn:
- The sophisticated thinking skills associated with mental health
- The function of emotions, and the keys to responding effectively to strong feelings, impulses and urges
- How to expand your comfort zone to achieve more than you thought possible
- The processes behind becoming a resilient person
- Why self-compassion is vastly more important than self-esteem
- That stress is neither inherently good nor bad, but that by managing stress effectively we can create a ‘peak performance zone’
- How to audit your wellbeing to devise a specific, individual plan to enhance your wellbeing and mental health
We currently offer:
- Workplace training in the form of our 2-hour ‘7 Secrets to a Healthy Mind’ employee wellbeing seminars
- 1-Day ‘Masterclass’ Training to managers, CEOs, HR professionals and 'Wellbeing Officers'
- 'Lunch & Learn' supplementary workshops
- School programs, including 1-day wellbeing intensives and the term-long Healthy Minds Program
- Parent education seminars
- Training for early childhood education groups
- Keynote speaking for conferences and professional groups
- Recognition for workplaces and schools by way of Healthy Minds accreditation
1BeyondBlue (Inder, Meadows & Cornwell, 2012)
2Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2016. Australian Burden of Disease Study: Impact and causes of illness and death in Australia 2011. Australian Burden of Disease Study series no. 3. BOD 4. Canberra: AIHW
3Gladstone, T. R., Beardslee, W. R., & O’Connor, E. E. (2011). The prevention of adolescent depression. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 34(1), 35-52.
