Do you feel happiness and sadness? Excitement and fear? Compassion and resentment? Generosity and scarcity? Well welcome to the human race. I can guarantee that every single person feels every single one of those emotions, or more, no matter how stoic they may seem on the outside.
The life blood of any organisation is its employees. And the driving force of every single employee is made up of their emotions.
When we talk about mental health in the workplace, words like stress, anxiety, burnout, overwhelm, litter the conversations. Solutions focus on ‘treatment’, reducing stress, reducing the stigma, talk zones, effective signposting, recognising the symptoms…
Social media is full of ‘survivors’ talking openly and honestly about their battles with mental health. Even Royalty are lending their voices to many campaigns and initiatives that are tackling the stigma.
Yet still we are at record high levels of cases of mental health. As a nation we are being prescribed close to 80 million antidepressants (a number that has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years). Suicide is one of the biggest killers of men of prime working age.
Here’s what I believe – the will of the people wants to be mentally well, resilient and happy. But the systems we work within are keeping us trapped in a cycle of dependency and (disguised) distress.
We are being taught at an early age to be frightened of negative emotions, to run away from them.
Mental distress is being overly-medicalised, and too easily and quickly ‘treated’ with pharmaceuticals, which themselves trap people within a vicious cycle of dependency.
Good mental health is a learning experience – acquiring knowledge and skills that you can adapt and use in every day life.
Knowledge and skills that you really should be taught in schools (alongside good financial management and sense), but which gets lost among the theorems and glaciers of more traditional subjects.
KAN presents an affordable and accessible mental wellbeing platform for all – an environment in which every single employee within an organisation can learn that knowledge and those skills, and build good emotional wellbeing – becoming more aware of their own emotions (good & bad), understanding them in context, managing them, and leveraging the energy they create to their own benefit, and ultimately the benefit of their workplace as well.