Over on the Student Health and Wellbeing Blog, and also in the Wellbeing for Academic Success FLO topic, I have started posting Lessons from my ‘Introduction to Mental Fitness Course’.
At the time of writing, Lessons 1 and 2 are live.
The ‘Introduction to Mental Fitness Course’ delves into the topic of self-improvement. Like a personal trainer helps you make the right choices and decisions regarding the health of your body, I am interested in helping you make the right choices for you, regarding the health of your mind.
This is somewhat of an ambitious project. I am aiming to release a lesson per week for the remainder of 2019, which on the service seems pretty crazy, but I think is doable. Lessons range from being quite short (1000 words) to mini articles (e.g. 3000 words).
In the early lessons I’ll be focusing on introducing you to a range of concepts that are relevant to understanding the process of self-improvement. For example, we will be talking about psychological needs, values, goals, knowledge, skills and habits.
In later lessons, I’ll be applying these concepts to explore very specific examples of self-improvement. We’ll be looking at how you get better at your studies, how you develop strong social support networks, how you get on top of difficult thoughts and feelings, and lots lots more.
In the course I am drawing on knowledge gained from my psychology degree, from the research literature, from understanding common models of therapy and also lessons from my own life. I am actively trying to make improvements in my own life and as such am interacting with the course content, from both the perspective of the teacher, but also a student.
I don’t believe there is anything controversial in the course. I won’t be delving into bizarre self-help or wacky concepts. I think there is already an incredible body of sensible wisdom and knowledge to draw on in this space, especially when you consider we have a couple of thousand years of philosophy, psychology and medicine to draw on.
You can interact with the course in one of two ways: via the blog or via our FLO topic. Subscribing to the blog will mean you get updates every fortnight of new content we’ve added (not just the course). If you join the FLO topic, you will similarly get notified when I post new content.
The course is not intended to be onerous and only requires 20 minutes a week to read the Lesson and contemplate the reflection questions. I will be inviting you to make some changes in your own life as self experiments but these are obviously optional. Basically, you can interact with the Lessons as much, or as little as you want.
So if you are a little bit curious about the process of building a better you, join me, and we’ll try to work it out together.