Good response for Mental Health Week

Thank you to the many clients, associates and friends of Guidelight, who kindly took the time to respond to and support our social media release recently - highlighting National Mental Health Week ! In particular it is very heartening to see that our articles and strategies about building up “mental fitness” & physical well-being rituals for people at work received such a great response from our business readers in the early part of October.

People who are interested in delving deeper into our ideas drawn from the field of advanced positive psychology, might like to subscribe to our complimentary periodic newsletter.

Utilising our knowledge of advanced positive psychology, coupled with powerful physical and nutritional routines, we are proud to champion an integrated approach that ensures your mental and physical fitness is powerfully aligned, revitalised and enhanced !

Simply go to our website www.guidelight.com.au and hit the subscribe button with your details.

Staff Health and Well-Being Lunch Time Workshop Series

As a manager, are you concerned about Staff Health and Well-Being?

Recently, Guidelight introduced our Staff Health & Well-Being Lunch Time Workshops and are achieving great results.

Do you and your staff suffer from:-

• High stress levels?

• Feel overwhelmed?

• Underperforming at work and at home?

Workplaces in the Brisbane CBD who wish to ensure that reduced stress levels and a good mental health focus are maintained for their staff are benefiting from our flexible one hour workshop series.

Typically we meet with between 6 to 15 people participating in a group together over a light lunch in their own workplace to learn about powerful tools from the fields of positive psychology and nutritional health.

By way of concrete example, a recently completed Lunch Time Series was held for the motivated administration team of 10 staff members at Scottish Pacific Finance. Across four consecutive Tuesday lunch hours we met in their offices to engage in a relaxed and powerful learning process that built high levels of trust and camaraderie among the participants.

Furthermore by utilising their individual workbooks, each staff member gained expanded skill sets around the “ Shrinking Your Worries” approach and physical, emotional and intellectual strategies to reduce stress and improve positive mental health focus in all aspects of their lives.

Evaluation ratings at the end of this program by the participants were consistently in the very good to excellent range.

Even more exciting was the increased energy, positive thinking and workplace harmony that flowed from completing this flexibly designed luncheon series. T

Talk to us soon about how we can smoothly design a Health and Well-Being lunch time workshop series specifically shaped to meet the needs of your own workplace.

Read more about the Workplace Programs Guidelight offers http://creatinghealthierworkplaces.com.au/staff-training-workshops

Relationship Building – Important Strategies for Home life & Work life Success

It is not uncommon for each of us to become complacent and sometimes take for granted the interactions we have with significant other people in our busy lives.  Although we may intellectually understand the importance of seeing the world through another person’s eyes, often our clients identify that ( upon mindful reflection in the consultation room ) they have typically defaulted to responding to others as if on autopilot. As an encouraging reminder, listed below are some excellent areas to focus upon, when we are looking to improve the quality and depth of our interactions with significant people in our personal and professional lives.

Enjoy describing situations that you perceive differently from the other person without injecting blame or judgement or criticism of them into your conversation.  This will result in the other person not needing to become defensive or feel threatened, meaning they are much more likely to process your perspective and give you an open response.

Relationship Building - Strategies

Feelings

Explain the feelings that have been generated for you by that particular situation, without expecting/assuming that the other person must feel the same way about this situation as you do.

Focus

Focus on solutions and positive steps that you and the other person can collaborate upon and create together into the future, rather than struggling to make the other person adapt/conform to your own perspective.

Explore

Explore the positive consequences and verbalise the benefits for you and the other people involved in implementing the solutions your open conversation with them has generated.  You may also want to articulate the negative consequences in not adopting collaborative solutions and the risk of staying stuck in an old negative mindset or pattern together.

Encourage

Finally, go out of your way to choose words of affirmation, praise and encouragement for the other person in your communication.  This could mean that rather than highlighting a handful of matters that did not go so well with each other, you instead put a joyful highlight under one particular aspect of the relationship that is going well and build upon this as the focus.

Why Do So Many Good People At Work Struggle To Perform At Their Best ?

For the past 20 years, Guidelight Psychology has had the privilege of assisting thousands of individuals on the Gold Coast around work and career issues and challenges, which have been affecting their wellbeing and peace of mind.

What are the Main Work Issues?

 In one particular calendar year, we asked every new client who was currently employed, to identify the key issues that would typically restrict them from thinking and feeling at their best in dealing with work and home-life balance issues. 

More than half these people, a staggering 53% of everyone we asked, said that the number one reason they were seeking our assistance was to better deal with relationship difficulties that were interfering with their sense of wellbeing.

Difficult Relationships Affecting Work

For some, these relationship issues were primarily centred around people in their workplace like a colleague, boss, customer or suppliers. 

Other clients indicated that relationship issues with spouses, children or extended family, were their primary concern. 

And others identified that both work and home relationships were collectively under pressure to the point where the person could no longer think or feel at their best.

It is heartening to be reminded that most of these relationship difficulties can be improved with the assistance of an empathetic psychologist. In counselling, you can:

• develop broader perspectives and insights;
• improve your communication skills;
• learn advanced positive psychology techniques;
• identify and practise useful workplace strategies;
• and stress management techniques.

To begin to change your life for the better, come and talk to a Gold Coast Psychologist at Guidelight Psychology. We would love to work with you to find the positives in your relationships at work and home, as well as ways to deal with the negatives, to improve your outlook and wellbeing.

Interactive Stress Management Workshops are Good For People & Essential for Business

Guidelight introduces Interactive Stress Management Workshops

 

Worksafe Queensland is a government department that is championing the need to focus on mental health as a key priority for every employer.

It is the case that a healthy worker ( mentally and physically ) is up to five (5) times more productive than an unhealthy worker.

Mental well-being and resilience for people in the workplace is enhanced through targeted staff learning and development programs.

As experts in the field of mental health and well-being in the workplace Guidelight Psychology delivers a range of interactive Stress Management Workshops in half day and full day staff group formats.

These programs are embedded with powerful tools and strategies drawn from our specialist knowledge of Advanced Positive Psychology.

Even if your workplace is not yet ready to contact us to engage our full workshop approach, please enjoy reading about some simple but powerful strategies each person can adopt right now, on the Worksafe website:

https://www.worksafe.qld.gov.au/injury-prevention-safety/mental-health-at-work

How 34 kilograms Got Between Me and My Son

34 kilograms got in the way of a better connection with my son and now is the time to enjoy healthy leisure and fun outdoors playtime during the upcoming holiday season.

What will inspire YOU to make a change?

Over the last few weeks I have shared my transformational personal journey that I have taken during this year.

Last week we ran our final leadership forum  for the year, where I unveiled our new program – Creating Healthier Workplaces, an integrated health and well-being program combining the psychological aspects as well as the physical aspects of making health changes.

As we head towards the holiday season, I thought I would share with you an insight into a major change I have experienced which cannot be accounted for by a waist measurement, weighing scales or the time to complete a run.

Too often in life, we can default to accepting the mediocre and end up living a life of limited and partial enjoyment. Most likely this is because we forget the fundamental benefits of an integrated commitment to our long term health and well being practices.

This pattern, of limited focus on personal health routines, coupled with our negative capacity to psychologically minimise, justify and rationalise away any slackness or poor decision making; simply habituates us to our less than optimal stateof well-being.

We justify it thus…

It’s just because I am busy at work and getting closer to fifty that I have put on all this extra weight and one day.......in the never, never land of  some mythical, fanciful retirement future......., I will then finally be able to work less and enjoy more relaxing leisure time.

My anecdotal story below is a small personal example of the bounty that unfolds when we give ourselves permission to make health and well-being a priority in our lives - NOW !

My 20 year old son recently moved back into the family home to relax on his holiday break for a couple of weeks, after a big year of living out of town & ( allegedly ) studying hard as a full-time university student.

To my delight he has stayed reasonably healthy while living on campus and playing lots of college sports throughout the year, in between a few social drinks no doubt.

He has always been a much better surfer than I, and as a born and bred Gold Coast boy, a big priority on his holidays has been to catch up on a few waves.  Luckily for me, I get invited to come along for a paddle as well sometimes, and here is where the tale of our recent beach trip early last weekend morning gets really interesting...

Thanks to my transformational health & wellness journey throughout 2013, I am now 34kgs lighter than I was in January.

In the past, with that much extra bulk pushing down on my mini-mal board I would have typically been pounded in the break, paddled desperately hard like a panting dog struggling to get through the break and maybe eventually staggered out the back in an exhausted state to rattily catch two or three rides before I was spent!

However what a magnificent difference this time, pacing smoothly with my athletic son and flying effortlessly out the back together.  Next, powerful full strokes with easy breathing as I paddle joyfully onto wave after wave after wave and almost no fatigue!

Just pure fun that had been missing for me for far too long!

Remembering my out of shape body and limited strength, coupled with easily losing vitality and quickly fatigued - from back in January - I laughed about how after even catching one wave in to shore back then, would have resulted in: an out of breath; poor recovery struggle as I got washing machine pounded back in the dump zone like a big, fat, floundering fish.

My point is that my hard work of the past 11 months to get fit, lean and healthy again was fully repaid in just that one joyful shared experience last weekend of surfing effortlessly for an extended time in a graceful, relaxed fun activity with my son.

Whatever health and wellness goals you are currently working on, may I respectfully encourage you to focus on the benefits, pleasure and delight you will experience as you become, fitter and stronger and playfully step up into more and more fun outdoor healthier activities....this makes the journey so rewarding, satisfying and worthwhile... just keep going and enjoy the rewards !

What will inspire you to make a change?

I’d love to hear you comments, and what precious activity you would like to claim back, please feel free to share with us in the comments.