Check out our annual gift to Healthy Minds clients – the ‘Holidaying with a Healthy Mind’ podcast.
This year’s podcast includes Dr Tom Nehmy covering:
- An invitation to review your wellbeing heading into the holiday season
- A re-cap of some key themes that have been front-and-centre in wellbeing this year
- An overview of our most impactful piece of content from 2023 ‘The Top 5 Myths About Mental Health’ (we were overwhelmed with the response!)
Listen below (MP3):
Please enjoy this podcast and from all of us at Healthy Minds have a healthy, happy and safe Christmas.
Best wishes,
Tom, Nick & the Healthy Minds Team.
Understanding and fixing them can transform your business.
Blind Spot #1: Wellbeing is considered separate from work performance.
When your people are well, they will be high functioning.
This includes psychological skills, bodily health (sleep, diet, exercise), relationships, purpose, and balance.
When these wellbeing factors are enhanced, your people will be more motivated, energetic, engaged, and productive. And they will be more willing to take on challenges.
If you want to improve staff performance, start by improving their wellbeing.
Blind Spot #2: The CEO is not involved in the wellbeing strategy.
Because you cannot separate wellbeing and work performance, CEOs and leaders must necessarily be interested in the wellbeing strategy of the organisation.
Corporate wellbeing is a key driver of the bottom-line, and even share market performance.
If your CEO is not yet involved in the wellbeing strategy, it’s time to start a conversation about why it matters.
Blind Spot #3: Interventions are focused on remediating problems rather than prevention or wellbeing enhancement.
When your house is on fire, it’s urgent. It mobilises resources, and everyone celebrates when the crisis is over.
But if you stop someone’s house catching fire in the first place, you’ve achieved something much better. But there’s less urgency in being proactive, and no well-defined point of celebration.
Prevention isn’t sexy, but it is very important. There’s a lot workplaces can do to prevent anxiety, depression and chronic stress in their staff.
Blind Spot #4: Leaders who lack psychological skills are ill-equipped to support their teams.
If you don’t know what healthy thinking is, how can you know if your thinking is healthy? How can you coach and support others to apply this crucial skill?
If you don’t know the purpose and function of emotions, how can you support others in their emotional self-management?
High performing organisations ensure their leaders understand, model and coach the skills required to have a healthy mind.
Blind Spot #5: Decision-making is not data-driven.
Good intentions are nice, but they can be disastrous when relied on for corporate wellbeing strategy.
A scientific evidence-base is the most robust rationale for your decision-making.
By including data from your own staff, your strategy becomes even stronger.
Well-crafted wellbeing surveys enable you to direct your resources where they will have the greatest impact.
When you’re data-driven in your approach, you can have confidence in the outcome.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Are there any other blind spots that should be listed here?
We help resolve these blind spots – get in touch if you’d like help with your corporate wellbeing strategy.
Author – Dr Tom Nehmy is a clinical psychologist and Director of Healthy Minds Education & Training
Following the success of Tom’s recent article ‘The Top 5 Mental Health Myths’, Paul Taylor interviewed him about the myths for his podcast audience.
Listen to the full podcast episode here:
The Healthy Minds program is now available as part of the respective government school wellbeing initiatives of NSW, Victoria and SA.
In 2022, Healthy Minds was recognised at the top tier of evidence quality and admitted to the Victorian Government’s Mental Health Menu for schools. By 2024, all government schools, including metropolitan Melbourne, will have access to the ongoing fund to implement wellbeing initiatives. We are excited to have commenced work with several Victorian schools and look forward to expanding our impact in the coming months and years.
At the end of 2022, the Healthy Minds program became available as a quality-assured program in the NSW Department of Education’s Student Wellbeing external programs catalogue in the theme of Resilience.
And most recently, South Australia’s Department for Education announced its External Wellbeing Programs Directory, on which Healthy Minds is featured.
We are excited to see the commencement of systematic attempts to present evidence-based intervention for student wellbeing in schools. For more information on how your school can implement Healthy Minds, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Each year Healthy Minds creates a 30 min podcast as a Christmas gift to our network to encourage listeners to ‘Holiday with a Healthy Mind’. After sourcing feedback from clients we tackle the following topics in this short podcast:
- How to recharge after another challenging year
- What wellbeing factors are most topical at the end of 2022
- Successfully navigating family time
- Managing the Christmas period if you are alone
- Dealing with financial pressures
- What are our expert psychologists are focusing on at this time.
Speaking of psychologists, here is some background on our experts.
Dr Tom Nehmy – Director
Clinical Psychologist | South Australia
Dr Tom Nehmy is the founder of Healthy Minds. More than 45,000 people have attended his workshops, training programs, invited addresses, and conference presentations across Australia and overseas. He has co-authored 10 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and was awarded the 2015 Flinders University Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Doctoral Thesis Excellence. His book Apples for the Mind is out now.
Laura Eyles
Psychologist | Queensland
Laura is a Psychologist with over 14 years experience in creating positive solutions for people and organisations across Australia and NZ. Her successful track record in organisational consultancy, clinical interventions and stakeholder management has equipped her to adapt and lead through uncertainty, manage ambiguity and to solve complex problems. Laura has a particular interest in occupational challenges (stress, burnout, adjustment) and performance enhancement (executive coaching, leadership, team dynamics and resilience).
Please enjoy this podcast and from all of us at Healthy Minds have a healthy, happy and safe Christmas.
Best wishes,
Tom, Nick & the Healthy Minds Team.
Press play below to begin the podcast…
INTRODUCING: The Ultimate Corporate Wellbeing Playbook!
If you’d like an insight into our combined 20+ years of corporate wellbeing experience, and to learn the strategies that leading companies are using to massively boost the wellbeing and performance of their workforce – then this is for you!
For a limited time, my Healthy Minds co-Director Nick Lee and I want to share this little book with our professional networks at no cost. Why? We think it provides a valuable resource that will help you improve how you do wellbeing in the workplace regardless of whether you choose to work with us. It also provides detailed insights into how we work with leading companies in more than 20 countries, which may inspire you to work with us too (if you think we’d be a good fit).
To grab your copy, visit: https://lnkd.in/gSm9azQ
Introducing the Healthy Minds Wellbeing Index
At Healthy Minds, we often get asked: “How do you measure wellbeing?”
Too often corporates need to rely on indirect indicators such as absenteeism, staff turnover, and productivity.
While these indicators matter, they are a consequence of wellbeing… and many other factors. This leaves a diluted, complex picture at best.
We have come up with a solution.
The Healthy Minds Wellbeing Index (HMWI) is a 35-item questionnaire that takes your staff only 5 minutes to complete.
Developed by leading psychologists, the HMWI will objectively measure the six core wellbeing factors in the Wellbeing Wheel.
It also allows:
✓ An overall index score, which can be used to benchmark and compare states / companies / industries
✓ Six subscale scores to see the relative wellbeing strengths and opportunities within a group.
✓ Comparison between states and management / non-management as well as the ability to track wellbeing changes over time
✓ The ability to curate a comprehensive wellbeing strategy based on real-world data from your own staff
✓ The examination of 8 single-item ‘Indicators of Importance’
✓ The opportunity to direct staff to internal resources specific to their identified areas of developmental needs.
We are launching the Healthy Minds Wellbeing Index in Mental Health Month (which is October in Australia).
If you’d like to explore a data-driven wellbeing strategy to unlock the wellbeing and performance of your staff -> get in touch with us to be a part of a special opportunity to trial this in your workplace.
Huge congratulations to our very own Healthy Minds Director Nick Lee, who has been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his incredible charity work in the prevention of bowel cancer. Nick has saved many lives through his work as Founder and Chair of the Jodi Lee Foundation.
We are extremely proud to have Nick work with us, also pursuing his passion for prevention at Healthy Minds.
[Photo credit: Cath Leo]
It’s very exciting to see our clients recognised for prioritising the wellbeing of their staff. Having partnered with Diageo Southeast Asia on some innovative wellbeing training projects, we are beyond thrilled to see them win Health & Wellness Initiative of the Year in the FMCG Asia Awards.
Led by the amazing Abhilasha Krishnan, Diageo Southeast Asia were recognised for a number of wellbeing programs and projects, one of which was their leadership sessions with Healthy Minds’ own Dr Tom Nehmy.
The fabulous win was detailed in this article by Retail Asia.
