In my last article I outlined a comprehensive mental fitness system Optimising Your Own Performance (OYOP) which has been used to provide students with the ability to resolve many psychological difficulties, here are just a few of them:
1. PhD student who had failed to resolve 15 years of self-harm (cutting) stops cutting after two months of OYOP
2. Oxford student stops constant unhelpful comparisons on social media and develops a healthier relationship with their parents
3. Ukrainian student alleviates her social anxiety and finds life much more satisfying and uplifting
4. PhD student whose depression was caused when their experiments were failing to achieve desired evidence redesigns their paradigm and progresses in upbeat mood regardless of test results
5. Medical student whose mind, despite medication, was telling them to engage in harm either to themselves or someone else received three OYOP coaching sessions and within a month reported “I don’t really understand why I would have thought like that anymore”
The vast majority of these changes were made through using the practices on the OYOP programme, a few of them were supported by individual OYOP coaching.
In the light of these results I am raising the question, ‘could most educational establishments be making a more significant contribution to achieving a better standard of mental health for both students and staff?’
The much-publicised deterioration in student mental health has sparked some responses in some but not all educational establishments. A popular solution is equipping lecturers and teachers with the skills to identify those students who may be struggling with, but not necessarily speaking up about, a downturn in their psychological condition.
With the current scale and intensity of the current mental health trends, could it be true to say that what often amounts to only a few hours input for educators is like trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted?
The paradigm predominantly accepted by many of our mental health contributors implies that we should wait until a mental health problem has occurred and then seek to provide some remedy. If you compare our approach to our mental health management with other healthcare paradigms it can seem relatively outdated.
A more modern approach to other aspects of our well-being has been to implement ‘preventative measures’. Everyone knows that if you want to be healthy it is wise to avoid alcohol and nicotine and eat a healthy diet. Many people also know that where necessary it is wise to supplement our diet to ensure a resilient immune system, and to nourish our internal organs to ensure that they function as well as possible. Everyone knows if you want to be fit and strong it is wise to engage in suitable forms of exercise, and that it is the repetition of the exercise which builds strength and fitness.
If you want to have a mind which is instinctively capable of dealing with life challenges then strengthening your mind will also require the repetition of mental strength exercises. Fortunately in order to build your mental strength it is only necessary to do OYOP practices for a few minutes every day.
If educational leadership decided to use a fresh approach then action could be taken to provide a far more pervasive and systemic solution for improving mental health of lecturers and teachers as well as students. Solution would focus on three key areas:
1. Enable lecturers and teachers to support their own mental health and so become excellent role models for students. It’s probably unhelpful to think of this as a one-dimensional solution because OYOP has a proven track record of improving employee engagement and reducing days off sick for psychological health reasons.
2. Provide students with the capability to develop their own mental strength, so enabling them to be less focused on distractions from their studies and more focused getting better academic grades. As well as providing mental health support during academic years, OYOP sets people up to maintain a healthy perspective for the remainder of their lives.
3. Develop internal OYOP coaching expertise which enables the coach to assist with paradigm changes which are helpful to students, so increasing the probability of them living more contented lives experiencing greater achievement.
If you are someone who is motivated to progress students’ mental wellbeing in the first instance you can contact Adoni on doni.mais@achieving-momentum.com.
If you’re interested to know more about a paradigm centric approach to developing mental strength feel free to join our next Power Your Mind Mental Fitness session.
