With the death of a friend followed by a diagnosis of familial hypercholesterolemia, my mental health was perhaps not the greatest. During this period my diploma was not my number one priority but knowing I was wanting to do a design around ways to improve my mental health but with no clear aim other than the immediate problem of needing to improve my mental health I began researching. That was 2017, five years further on, all the research I’ve done now fits perfectly well into this design, or did the research lead me to this design?

Without knowing it at the time, having no clear aim other than to improve my mental health would eventually become the aim of this design. To find ways to improve my mental health that can be incorporated into my life.

 

 

Books are my go-to resource when I want to understand a topic, so true to form with the death of Justin I hit the books in search of answers.

The greatest thing about books is that once you allow them into your life, they will guide you in a multitude of directions that you could have never imagined. I always start with a chosen few books that I want to read but as soon as starting the first the journey begins and book after book will flow into my life. Very often I may never get to that second book that I thought I needed to read, instead, I find myself learning exactly what I think I need to know for the place my mind is currently at.

This journey began with a book by Stephen Jenkinson “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul”

Book overview: Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the centre of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty.  Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever.

This may sound a little dark, but Stephen is a storyteller, an elder sharing his wisdom through experience. I find storytelling a very helpful way of learning, an author that can engage the reader in the first few pages of a book and keep them engaged throughout holds a great learned skill.

My book journey continued in the proceeding years, I’m not going to catalogue and review each book here to prevent this design from becoming book-length but I have listed the books I read relating to this design in the appendix section.

   

 

A good starting point with any research is to go to the root of something and poke around in the soil to see what can be learned. The root in this case is me. How to understand what's going on in your mind is not a straightforward exercise, if it was, I’m sure people would be much more content with their lives than they currently are. Books aside, another option to help understand my mental health would be to go and see a counsellor, psychiatrist, or psychologist, there are many names for people who like to take your money to tell you a way to improve your life. The option I chose was to do a crash course on several subjects to see if any of them would help me to get a better grip on my life.

The crash courses I selected started with EFT, more commonly known as Tapping, I thought this would be a good starting point to help calm my mind down to allow me to learn better. It did, this is a very simple yet very effective technique to learn. 

What better place to go next with my research than with Neuro-linguistic programming. A topic I’ve had an interest in and read a few books on the subject so a course on NLP would be interesting if nothing else.

Moving on now with a slightly calmer mind, I then thought about Life Coaching. I found this course very enjoyable and very helpful in getting my mind focused.

From here I went back to do another Neuro-linguistic programming course. NLP is a very large subject, and this course was very different from the first one. I also gained so much more out of this course due to having a fair amount of background knowledge from the first NLP course.

Hypnotherapy is a subject you hear plenty about but what is it. Taking a crash course on this topic was helpful.

Where to go next? I’ve been meditating for years so I might as well take a mindfulness course. Very enjoyable.

From mindfulness, the obvious place to go next was a course on CBT. Cognitive-behavioural therapy once again was another very interesting course.

After all these courses I felt I needed an advanced life coaching course under my belt. This was even more helpful than the first, probably due to all the other courses I had been taking. This advanced life coaching course helped me put things into perspective and removed the need to keep on doing even more courses.

Inevitably as with any addiction I just had to sneak in one more quick course, this time it was one on the skilled helper model that was developed by Gerard Egan. Gerard also taught on the course which gave it an extra level of authenticity learning through his own words.

At this point, I drew a line under doing courses. I now had a much better understanding of many different topics but the question that needed to be asked was, were all these courses helpful? In a word, yes.

 

   

 

Taking several online courses was not only of great benefit to my mental outlook on life, but they also introduced me to an ever-growing pile of books waiting to be read. As the years of this diploma moved forward, I was also researching my other designs. The thing I find is that despite the subject matter when you are in full research mode everything is connected. Each of my designs carried with them an underlying need to improve my mental health.

Researching is not only about learning material external to yourself, but time also needs to be spent going inside and listening to the inner voice. Fortunately, my inner voice is very vocal and it’s always ready for a conversation.

As mentioned, in the appendix section of this design, I’ve listed quite a few of the books I have consumed whilst researching this design which I feel have had an impact on the direction of the design. Just to look at how these books have changed in subject matter is very interesting to me and I’m now able to understand much better where I need to take this design.   

I’ve journeyed through the health, self-help, and spiritual, sections of the library and have ended up in the natural history section. Here surrounded by books on nature I feel most at home. Has my journey gone full circle to reading books on wildlife as I did as a child? I’m using the word “read” here very broadly. I didn’t read a book until I was eighteen, I found it very hard to read. Back in the 1980s and early 90s, dyslexia didn’t exist you just ended up in the “special class” at school, I was very special.  When I was younger, I would look at the pictures in books. Wildlife and bird books were always full of pictures, so these always made me happy. The natural history books I now read have no pictures other than those painted in my mind using words, and what joy these books bring me. To answer the question, yes, I have gone full circle to find my joy once more.    

 

 

This research section has been of great importance to the design, without its depth and ultimately the length of time spent absorbed in it I would be playing a guessing game as to what I need to be doing to improve my mental health. Just like an episode of Scooby-Doo, I needed this time to go into all those darker places in my mind and to have a look at what was hiding in there and play detective in solving mysteries involving supposedly supernatural creatures only to unmask them to find out it was myself all along.