3 mental health mindsets: a short but useful guide

Although mental health issues are often unseen, hidden, and stigmatized, they are on par in importance with physical health challenges. An employee with a mental health issue can be just as significantly sidelined from being productive as one with an injured limb. The following insights aren’t designed to make the reader a therapist or fix an employee who is severely depressed and in need of expert help. Rather, they're intended to help employees (and you) avoid starting down the slippery slope of developing mental health issues in the first place. Think of them as a vaccine of sorts, an inoculation, a prophylactic measure if you will, up front to prevent a problem down the line.

Mindset 1: Be yourself; everyone else is taken

That’s from Oscar Wilde. I use it with my students, but it has general applicability, does it not? We waste so much time bemoaning that we aren’t someone else but ourselves. Think about that for a minute before you read on. Ask whether it's true of yourself and others.

Well, here is some news: Wherever you go, there you are! In my classes with a practical component, I draw (poorly) on a "docucam" (for those of you over 55, that’s the jazzed-up version of an overhead projector) two identical stick figures, except one is large and the other much smaller. I tell the class my job isn’t to make them into Mini-Mes but rather to help make them into the very best version of themselves. So, too, a supervisor with employees.

Mindset 2: ‘It’s me versus the course’