I graduated from Flinders University in 2007 with my psychology degree.
I then went to work primarily as a ‘researcher for hire’ in the area of child and adolescent mental health.
I worked on a lot of cool projects but it wasn’t until I returned here to Flinders that I started working on a project that was genuinely all mine.
That project is my Mental Fitness Course.
The course is my attempt to provide useable guidance around the question of ‘what constitutes a satisfying and rewarding life and how do you achieve it?”
Central to the course are the following ideas:
- Despite our differences, there are common goals that connect us all – these are our psychological needs
- Meet your psychological needs and you are well on your way to building a satisfying and rewarding life
- Meeting your psychological needs isn’t always easy. The demands of everyday life can get in the way and the likelihood is you’ll need to develop new skills and competencies in order to cope with these demands and get your needs met.
- Mental fitness is how good you are at meeting the psychological demands of everyday life.
- Mental fitnes can be built by developing skills across key areas linked to psychological wellbeing/performance
I’ve been writing a new Mental Fitness Lesson every week for the past couple of months on the Student Health and Wellbeing Blog. At the time of writing there are 10 lessons up there. I’ll continue adding new lessons for the remainder of 2019. At the end of the year, I’ll pull those lessons together into a workbook or online course or something similar.
If you are interested in taking a more active role in developing your psychological capacity, consider tuning in to the course. You can also follow it on our Wellbeing for Academic Success FLO topic.
You might also find the Introduction to Mental Fitness handout on this page a good introduction to the topic – https://blogs.flinders.edu.au/student-health-and-well-being/2018/10/04/counsellinghandouts/