The Mental Wellness and Empathy Lab

Short description:

A combination of experiential learning, creative problem solving, play, storytelling and co-creation toward building workshops, talks, events and conversations that help bring about mental wellness and empathy in the workplace and home.

My story:

As a person who has lived with PTSD and mental illness, I feel it is my obligation to bring awareness and education to employee health and mental wellness at work and home. I don’t believe we can have workplaces of mental wellness without actively practicing empathy for self and others. I want to challenge every company to make mental wellness not only a priority, but a core value taught through applied empathy skill-building. Through my storytelling and training, it is my mission to cultivate global cultures of business leaders and employees who work with empathy to create workplaces of mental wellness. I believe through applied empathy education, we can improve relationships and create happier, more productive workplaces grounded in true mental wellness.

Q. What is the future you want to create?

To make mental wellness a core value of every company and organization.

Q. How do you track progress?

Using some suggestions from the book Essentialism, I have a kind of ‘visual thermometer’ on the wall of my office where I can track completion of tasks and projects. I also use Trello as a Kanban board adding a max of 3 ‘to dos’ at any given time to the ‘Doing’ column.

I’m also trying to figure out how to measure increased mental wellness in the workplace so that I eventually have some data around the work I do to help ‘prove’ the value and impact.

Alongside my in-person workshops and consulting, I aim to co-create a chatbot initially targeted to first responders that will help them build habits of self-care into their routine to help alleviate the negative effects of trauma experienced on the job. As it is a digital, mobile tool, the plan is to include a way to track and measure improvement over time of the users and use that data to help the users even more with subsequent iterations of the bot, and to use that data to help inform the content and approaches of the workshops and consulting work I’ll do.

Q. How are you doing so far?

Not amazing, but not terrible either. I’m working on a Working with Empathy program with a colleague and we have been engaging in ‘mini-sprints’ together over Skype 3x a week to move the needle forward on the program, so our MVP is ready.

We are both high Ideators and low implementers, so the implementation of the great ideas is a tough struggle for me, thus I’ve hired a virtual assistant (VA) to help me move things along. As this is new, I’m not doing well with delegating and organizing myself enough to make our working together as efficient and effective as it could be.

I’m in the initial stages of trying to get funding for the self-care chatbot with the help of my VA. I’m currently writing my Case for Support as I would like to make the chatbot free of charge to users, but I do not intend to build it ‘free of charge’.

Q. What are you NOT doing?

• I’m not good at selling and generating leads, so although I’m working on this great project and program, not enough people -especially leaders/decision-makers- know I’m even doing this yet.
• I’m not building the chatbot yet but have a prototype that was tested a few years ago that I will build on.
• I’m not building the program I’d like to do with first responders yet as the current empathy-skills based workshop is geared toward ‘general business/organizations’.
• I’m not out in public speaking about this work enough to generate leads.
• I’m not creating content that could help generate interest in the work but just received research from my VA to help me do so.

Q. What have you learned so far?

• That the stigma toward mental illness is very, very real.
• That I must co-create the solutions (like the chatbot) with the help of the users/workshop participants they’re meant to help.
• That this will eventually be bigger than the initial target groups because of

1. the growing number of mental health issues in the workplace and increased leaves of absences
2. the number of people experiencing secondary and vicarious trauma from my initial target group (spouses and children of first responders, for example)
3. the continued instances of trauma and mental health struggles showing up in all parts of society like university/schools, sports, the media etc

• I have learned how to use habits of self-care to help me not just survive my PTSD and depression but rather thrive despite it.
• I have learned it will be very challenging to do this alone.
• I have learned the Creative Problem Solving process at the CPSI conference.
• I have learned how to facilitate with the Empathy Toy.
• I have learned the I2I (innovation to implementation) process with the Mental Health Commission of Canada to take existing research and knowledge and apply it to solutions.

Q. How can you help others?

• I am quite good at editing
• As a high Ideator, Ican help come up with good ideas to help solve problems, challenges etc
• I have quite an extensive tribe that I’ve built around me over the years, mostly in L&D and HR that I connect people to
• I can help people better understand what it’s like to live with mental illness and how to work alongside someone struggling
• I believe I’ve stayed ahead of the curve in terms of applying new models and technology to learning and development so that it’s engaging and sticky
• I can take teams through the Creative Problem Solving process to solve business issues
• I’m an experienced speaker and have given talks from Belgium to Vegas
• I can facilitate workshops and sessions

Q. What help do you need?

• How to sell this. How to convince decision makers of it’s value.
• Access to decision makers. Ability to build relationships with them.
• Opportunities to continue my storytelling from the stage
• Funding to build the self-care chatbot
• Devs to help build the chatbot
• First responders, veterans, prison guards to help co-create the chatbot and workshops that will be relevant and engaging to their culture, language, reality
• Feedback on content and an empathy journal I’m writing with my colleague
• Moral support and encouragement for the times when this vulnerable, uncomfortable message results in push-back, uphill climbing and despair

Thanks for reading!

Please follow my progress, and reach out here (LinkedIn) and here (Twitter).