Growing up I learnt to be tough. I learnt to survive a schoolyard which eerily resembled Lord of the Flies. I learnt to play footy and push past all sorts of pain. I learnt to work non-stop 12 hour days and follow them up with marathon after work drinking sessions. I also learnt to stay well clear of any touchy-feely, hippy-trippy, mumbo-jumbo like mindfulness.
Of course, I had no idea what mindfulness actually was. All I knew was that my emotions should be put away safely in a box, tightly secured, then buried as deeply as possible. It was the classic Aussie male approach to wellbeing – hard as nails, heroically misguided and doomed for failure.
Across Australia millions of people will have grown up much like me. While we may have learnt to be tough, we certainly didn’t learn to be resilient. Now, when our deeply buried emotions find their way out, most of us remain pretty poor at dealing with them. Our amazing array of unhelpful coping strategies includes everything from binge drinking to angry vacuuming.
One of the big goals of Mindarma is to reach people who have spent their whole lives being tough and allow them to be far less tough on themselves. We want to provide a very practical path to building resilience, by creating a program which is extremely relatable, easily understood and based on real evidence.
Everyone is capable of change. For many of us change involves ‘unlearning’ how to be tough. Stoic, shut off and silently suffering, the typical tough Aussie approach to life does us few favours when it comes to mental health.
Thankfully old attitudes are changing. Many employers now realise asking workers to “toughen up” is a real problem and not a solution. As a society we are becoming more aware of mental health, more open to discussing issues and more willing to engage with programs which offer help.
With the launch of Mindarma in October, we hope to make valuable skills accessible to all sorts of people, prevent unnecessary suffering and create real change in the workplace. If you’d like to help your workmates become a little less tough and a whole lot more resilient, we encourage you to register your interest at www.mindarma.com.