As you might have gathered already from looking at other parts of this website, I am trying to write a book on Mental Fitness.
Originally, this page was an index of book chapters and links to chapters that had been completed. It was based on the idea that I would write the book sequentially, chapter-by-chapter.
However, that isn’t actually how my ideas about Mental Fitness have developed.
Instead, my conceptualisation of Mental Fitness and the resultant narrative of how I describe it, tends to undergo some fairly radical and frequent shifts. For example, I used to discuss self-improvement as the pathway to mental fitness, whereas now I consider it just one type of mental fitness training.
Driving those frequent radical shifts is that I am, at the same time as trying to put this book together, also teaching mental fitness concepts to students as part of my day job at Flinders University. When you are teaching a topic, you quickly learn where the gaps or inconsistencies lie. It is a valuable, if not sometimes brutal, way to accelerate one’s development of ideas.
With that in mind, instead of sharing individual chapters as they are completed, I am simply sharing the Google Doc in which I am writing the book.
You can simply check in at any point in time and see what is happening with the book. For example, today I am adding an outline at the beginning of the book to help me better navigate what chapter structure I will use. I will also start adding in references and comments and editing old sections.
I don’t expect that many people will spend their valuable time reading a chaotic book draft, but I share it publicly because of a few reasons.
First, I feel these ideas and concepts should be freely available.
Second, I want people to see (if they wish) the thought processes and stages and agonies and frustrations that go into developing something like this. If I wear my writing struggles publicly, perhaps others will feel better about setting off on their own writing challenge.
Third, people may read something I’ve written and have thoughts on how to improve it. That ultimately helps build a better product.
So please, feel free to have a look every now and then and see how the book is progressing. I’ll also provide updates on book progress via the blog part of this site
If you’d like to stay up-to-date with my efforts to write a book on Mental Fitness, subscribe below.
