Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my blog. In truth I've written that a few times over my life. I've started and abandoned a number of blogs in my time. I'm probably not alone in that fact. Will this time be different? I don't know. All I know is that this time I have a project that I suspect …

People can be awesome

I’m not prone to noticing or being affected by touching human interactions. It is because I have blackened charred heart. But I noticed one this week. We were running an online wellbeing session for students. As part of the session, participants were asked to identify someone in their social network that could help them make …

Pathways to wellbeing

Over the past month I’ve been lucky to have been involved in the delivery and refinement of the Be Well Plan - https://www.bewellplan.com/, a facilitated mental health and wellbeing program developed by the Wellbeing and Resilience Centre at SAHMRI, in collaboration with Flinders University and the Orama Institute. The program teaches participants how to develop …

Impermanence

This week I have been contemplating the concept of impermanence. To be honest it has been on my mental radar for a couple of years now. I think it started when I commenced thinking and writing about self-improvement. The more I explored the topic, the more confident I got that we could improve upon ourselves …

Slowing down

Hey everyone! Happy Easter! Or if you don't celebrate Easter, then Happy Apocalypse. My desire to make little chocolate Jesuses has again gone unachieved, but there is always next year – it is good to have goals. What I have been able to do this Easter is slow down. When the Coronavirus hit and the …

Keeping a Coronavirus diary

A week or so back I started keeping a Coronavirus diary. I am posting it on the Student Health and Wellbeing Blog that I manage as part of my day job. You can access the entries so far here: https://blogs.flinders.edu.au/student-health-and-well-being/category/coronavirus/ As with many things I do nowadays there is a dual purpose to the diary. …

Chapter 7 of my book is up

The first draft of Chapter 7 - Principles of self-improvement has been posted and is now ready to read. When I was writing the chapter I had the mental image of a coach giving a team a pep-talk before the big final. The pep-talk isn't about tactics. It is about reminding the team of their …

What art has taught me about incremental change

I like drawing. I am not very good at it. The best I can do are modestly complicated doodles. Abstract 2-dimensional representations of something going on in my brain. I tend to turn to art during times of high emotional arousal. It might be because I am very happy and I want to celebrate the …

Let’s talk about distress

A repost of a blog I wrote for my job. A week or so back my GP got me to fill out the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS). It is a common instrument used by GP’s and psychologists to get a measure of a person’s level of distress.  I showed high levels of stress …

How much can you change your own happiness?

A repost from a blog post I wrote for the Student Health and Wellbeing Blog. So I read this article on the bus home the other day. It is called “Revisiting the Sustainable Happiness Model and Pie Chart: Can Happiness Be Successfully Pursued?” It is by Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky. In essence, the article …

Try writing your life philosophy

For some strange reason, whilst I was in the shower the other day, I started wondering what my current answer to the question 'what is a good life?' would be. I imagined having only a minute on prime-time TV to trying to explain it, so I sat down over two separate occasions and tried to …