Lifestyle Change

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What You Need to Know About Mental Health and How to Protect It

Mental health is a topic that is now being recognized as a serious issue today. In this blog, Industry Scholar Intern, Efia Blair, explores the definition of mental health and the surprising things she learned exploring the topic. Efia believes the Coronavirus lockdown shed light on why mental health is so important. The lockdown brought a lot of awareness to mental health because people were stuck in their houses for such a long time that it was inevitable for them to begin to experience mental health issues and illness as they grappled with change, uncertainty, loneliness, and new stressors. 

"Be dedicated to change the way in which people see mental illness at all levels of society. If not for yourself, advocate for those who are struggling in silence.” — Germany Kent

So, What Is Mental Health?

Well, it is your overall emotional well-being, and it is critical for us because it controls our actions and reactions. Various things can impact your mental health. Still, your main concern should be taking precautions to improve or sustain your mental health.

One thing that was surprising to me, that widened my knowledge on mental health, is that not only can mental health affect your state of mind but also your physical health. Your body can stop functioning how it used to because of psychological effects, increasing your possibility of developing an illness. Did you know that? I had no idea the mental and physical health connection was that strong. I also learned that our mental health can affect our ability to make decisions if our mental health is compromised. One more thing, did you know mental health problems can be passed down through genes? I thought your mental health was only affected by one’s environment or if you’ve experienced some sort of trauma. 

How Can You Protect Your Mental Health?

Mental health struggles are sometimes inevitable, but many practices can help support good mental health. First, you can connect with a therapist to talk to someone and get the help you need. Sometimes it’s helpful to speak about your feelings out loud. You can also start new hobbies, join a new club, or connect to the people around you. Those two essential acts- asking for help and doing things you enjoy can help protect your mental health in more ways than you realize. 

What things are you doing to protect your mental health? What about using a journal like this one or taking the time to nurture your well-being with walks, meditation, or yoga? Please share your suggestions in the comments!

Self Care Planner for Black women. a ay to protect your mental health

Researched and Written by High School Student Efia Blair for Kensho Psychotherapy Services, where she is an intern through Industry Scholars. If you or someone you know in the NY area is in need of a therapist or counselor, please click here and submit your details for someone to get back to you. The practice offers individual, family, or couples therapy and accepts several insurances like Aetna, 1199, BCBS, UHC, and Optum.

Women thinking about her negative thoughts and overwhelmed

When Life Gives You Lemons – Reframe Your Thoughts

When bad things happen in life, it’s natural for our minds to go to the negative, but it’s important to remember that we can reframe our thinking and look at things in a way that supports momentum. The ability to reframe our thoughts and find optimism takes work, but it’s possible with a few simple steps.

Just Notice. The first step in reframing a situation that may trigger negative thoughts is noticing it’s happening in the first place.

What is the conversation you are having in your head? Especially to something you are anticipating. Is your self-talk helpful? Once you can capture the thoughts that are not, you can begin to capture those lemons and reframe them into something more practical and productive to you.

When life gives you lemons reframe the possibilities

Look for Unhelpful Thought Styles. We all have default thinking styles that show up occasionally, like seeing the worst in a situation or minimizing your success. When you know those unhelpful thinking patterns, you can notice them faster and challenge them. For example, if we find ourselves engaging in negative self-talk, we can reframe those thoughts and focus on more positive and realistic interpretations of the situation.

For example, in a relationship, if the thought pops up, “If my partner doesn’t agree with me on this, then they must not love me.” This type of thinking ignores the complexities often present in relationships and the things that are going well, quickly triggering frustration, disappointment, and resentment.

What if, instead, we considered the other possibilities and changed that thought to something like, “my partner may not see eye to eye on this with me, but I know they are willing to listen and engage with me, which is a sign of their love and commitment to our relationship.” How does that sound instead? How does it compare to the first thought? 

women journaling
Journaling at a recent Wellness Event hosted by Amanda Fludd, LCSW-R

Keep A Gratitude Journal. One powerful technique is gratitude. When we focus on what we are grateful for, we shift our attention away from negative thoughts and experiences and teach our brains to search for the positive. This can help us feel more optimistic about the future, even under challenging circumstances. 

Take a few moments daily to identify 2-3 things you’re grateful for. It could improve your overall happiness. 

Avoid Worst-Case Scenario Thinking. Everything isn’t going to have a horrible outcome. Instead of imagining what that can be, focus on the present moment and take things one step at a time. This can help you feel more in control and less overwhelmed by negative thoughts and emotions.

Cultivate your people! Surrounding yourself with the right people can make a big difference in staying optimistic and motivated. Having supportive friends and family members willing to listen and offer encouragement can help us feel less alone, seen, understood, and focused. If you can’t find positive people to draw from or feel like negative only follows you- reframe your thoughts! Don’t be afraid to look for the connections you need in your life in the form of mentors, joining associations, or partnering with like-minded groups. You can cultivate your people!

Let me know which approach you need to embrace more often in the comments below.

RSVP for the Renew Connect Restore info session on 5/20/23 at 4:30 PM EST here: https://bit.ly/Info2p3

Amanda Fludd, Psychotherapist

Amanda Fludd, LCSW-R, is a Licensed Psychotherapist and Mental Health consultant. She works in partnership with organizations and institutions like schools and corporations to assess an organization’s emotional health, designing customized mental health and wellness workshops to help teams navigate stress, burnout, and trauma so they can thrive well.

From Talk to Action: Making Safe Spaces a Reality for Black Women in the Workplace

Black women face a unique set of challenges that are often overlooked in mainstream conversations. From colorism and racism to health disparities and wage gaps to issues closer to their heart like identity and belonging, finding a blueprint for love, black women must navigate various issues that require space to discuss and address them.

Safe spaces allow a supportive and inclusive environment where women of color can share their experiences, gain insights and heal through the stories and solutions shared on issues that affect them. This blog will explore the importance of safe spaces for Black women and how to create them.


Why Safe Spaces Matter

First, safe spaces foster connection and access to information. For Black History Month, I hosted a fireside chat series called Confidence in Color for women of color because of my experiences as an Afro Caribbean Woman evolving at “work.” I didn’t have an abundance of mentorship and guidance to help navigate areas like entrepreneurship, financial planning, and leadership. Still, I always knew the value of the knowledge of my elders or those ahead of me and longed for it.

Our elders have historically provided wisdom, guidance, and sound judgments that provided direction and created a sense of emotional safety. As we progress in our professional or personal lives, it can become difficult to locate experienced individuals who can relate to our unique struggles, mainly due to systemic problems such as racism and glass ceilings, and a lack of understanding for the need for likeminded and cultural base mentorship, particularly for women of color. 

“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.” – Oprah Winfrey

While it’s beneficial to have supportive colleagues and allies, connecting with other Black women who have faced comparable challenges provides an additional level of psychological safety that should be appreciated in all settings. One of the women who attended the virtual chat series expressed how empowering it was for her to hear from other women in similar situations, which was why she decided to log on. There were over 50 women who felt the same.

I established the series precisely because of this desire for a shared experience and a need for mentorship by other women of color.

Secondly, safe spaces allow you to see that you are not alone. As a psychotherapist, one of the core issues I come across when high achievers come to therapy is the sense that they’re alone in their experiences, even in supposedly inclusive work environments where there’s a lack of diversity among executives and managers. This often results in black women’s accomplishments being undervalued or overlooked due to unrecognized biases. As a result, women may internalize these experiences, leading to anxiety, self-worth issues, acts of overcompensation that contribute to stress, and burnout.

On the flip side, safe spaces can also serve as an avenue for organizations to evaluate whether their initiatives are genuinely effecting change and meeting the needs of marginalized groups while establishing avenues for advancement and diversity – both essential factors in retaining a diverse and competent workforce and fostering balanced work cultures.


How to Create Safe Spaces

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a safe space is “a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm.” Creating a safe space for Black women requires intentional efforts. Here are some steps you can take to create a safe space:

  1. Encourage open and honest communication: Encourage Black women to freely share their experiences and perspectives. Create a supportive environment that allows for vulnerability and validation.
  2. Create formal or informal check-ins: It’s difficult, to be honest, when you don’t feel safe. Consider if there are ways to create systems to attain information without fear of retaliation so the lines of communication can remain open and effective. Can check-ins be built into regular practices like weekly meetings or monthly forums, not just black history or women’s history month? 
  3. Provide resources and information: Provide information and resources that address the unique challenges and stressors women of color face. This can include workshops, seminars, educational materials, retreats, or opportunities for affinity groups and access to mentors or coaches. 
  4. Invite allies: Invite allies willing to learn and support all women of color and commit to their own personal growth. This can include creative learning through book clubs, lunch and learns, and conversations that challenge personal bias and foster true diversity and inclusivity. 

Safe spaces are essential for Black women to discuss unique issues and find support.

Retreat for black leaders and entrepreneurs

By creating a safe space, we can foster people-first environments where Black women feel included and can see the value of their achievements, find validation and support, as well as connection, balance, and psychological safety.

Establishing safe spaces requires deliberate efforts. The onus is on organizations that endorse and facilitate these spaces to regularly evaluate their efficacy in assisting underrepresented groups to feel listened to, appreciated, and empowered. 

I would love to hear what resonated with you from this piece and what you think would be helpful in fostering safe spaces for black women or how you create safe spaces for black women.

Amanda Fludd, LCSW-R, is a Licensed Psychotherapist and Mental Health consultant. She works in partnership with organizations and institutions like schools and corporations to assess an organization’s emotional health, designing customized mental health and wellness workshops to help teams navigate stress, burnout, and trauma so they can thrive well.

frustrated female white collar worker in an office. Burnout worker. Stressed.

Imagine Feeling Happy At Work

Can you imagine feeling happy at work? Read our blog to find out how to make work a happier place for everyone beginning with how you manage stress. Workplace stress is a huge issue, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent as the rates of anxiety, depression and worker burnout continue to increase.

Approximately 80% of employees report that their jobs are stressful, and the stress takes a significant toll on their minds and bodies. According to a recent report by the American Psychological Association, “Workers who are not engaged at work or whose jobs are highly stressful are more than twice as likely to be chronically stressed compared to workers who are highly engaged at work.”

Being happy at work matters. We’ve found that people-first cultures are more innovative, and productive, with an easier time retaining staff.

Imagine feeling happy at work. Raise your hand if you want that.

Before we jump into ways to manage stress at work and feel happier at work, we must understand the causes of stress. The best way to learn more about the emotional health of your teams and the financial correlation, I encourage you to participate in a workplace mental health audit. An audit gives you the data to curate a roadmap for your employees that prioritizes the areas they may need support in to thrive reducing worker burnout, company costs, and the potential for a Mental Health Crisis at work.

For more information on that, visit us here and request additional information.

Typically, having an outside entity assess the quality of your workplace culture through a mental health lens is the most effective. Why? It addresses internal concerns like trust and retaliation, increasing the likelihood of effective interventions. Some things we explore: 

  1. Do leaders at our organization model a healthy balance between work and personal life?
  2. Does your organization dedicate resources for mental health programs, education, and resources beyond EAP? Do those events happen more than twice a year?
  3. Have you designated safe spaces to discuss issues impacting employees within or outside the organization? Do staff have time in their schedule to access those resources?
  4. Is emotional wellness integrated into routine experiences like team meetings or monthly events? When was the last time someone asked how are you? Or what do you need from us to effectively do your job? Empathy can be the key to unlocking happiness in your teams and improving retention rates, but that’s a skill that most have to learn.  
  5. Is this a space motivated to focus on workplace mental health to reduce employee stress? How is that conveyed to staff? Would staff agree? 

Now let’s get to the good stuff.


Staff working together in a low stress job. Managing their stress to feel happy at work.

Tips to Reduce Stress  

Tip #1: Think about where the work-life balance lines have blurred for you and what’s needed to reinforce limits and boundaries for your well-being. Setting boundaries can be as simple as having breakfast before logging on for remote work, delegating responsibilities, using vacation time, or implementing the word no. 

Tip #2: Before you respond to someone or a situation, take a breath and take the time to develop healthy responses. Instead of working relentlessly on tasks, take a breath, and prioritize your needs.

Your breath resets you from the inside out, calming your central nervous system and giving your brain time to better process details and make effective decisions under pressure. 

Tip #3: Learn to challenge and change your mindset. Your thoughts drive your actions, and we have over 60,000 thoughts daily- most negative. Typical strategies focus on exercise and mindfulness to reduce stress and anxiety, which is excellent, but it neglects the cognitive aspect of the experience- how you think. By identifying and challenging the thoughts that drive stress, anxiety, and overwhelm, you can create more control and ease in your daily life. 

Vision Board Experience hosted by two therapists to help reduce stress and set goals for 2023.
Have you RSVP’d to the Vision Board Experience yet? A space for women to relax, set intentions, and connect with other likeminded women. 1/21/23 Details here.

Want to become better at recognizing your thoughts? See tip #2. 

With tools like this in your toolbox, you get better at moving through work demands and can quickly shift into a space that allows you to invoke calm and move through crises and demands with ease. 

In a holistic workplace culture, longevity and managing stress in the workplace requires soft skills like empathy, systemic vulnerability, support, and continuous education. With a framework that supports those areas, you can prioritize happiness in the workplace giving employees the resources to thrive at their highest level while at work. Are you equipped for that?

Author: Amanda Fludd, LCSW-R, is a Licensed Psychotherapist and Mental Health consultant. She works in partnership with organizations and institutions like schools and corporations to assess an organization’s emotional health designing customized mental health and wellness workshops and high performance coaching to address underlying needs.

Build Your Confidence By Taking A Look At How Far You’ve Come

confidence is something we can work on by slowing down and tracking our progress with it

How often do you really take the time to celebrate the wins in your life? If you’re like many of us, you probably don’t do this nearly often enough.

I had come to learn pretty quickly that life has its highs and lows just like the ocean does and sometimes you just have to see how far they’ll carry you”. — C.A. Williams

How far has life carried you? Taking time to acknowledge how far I’ve come and how much I’ve accomplished is always a HUGE confidence booster for me when I take the time to do it. I’m sure it’s no different for you. To be honest, there’s a lot we’ve all done over the past few fears or even few days that we should be proud of, yet we often don’t see it or foget to be mindful of where we’ve been and its contributions to our present. There always seems to be so much left to do, or a focus on the things we failed at that seems to take the joy out of the room.

A crucial component of confidence and our general well-being is our ability to pause and notice our past with compassion, while celebrating even the smallest wins that shape how far we’ve already come.

Why Do We Struggle to Slow Down and Celebrate Ourselves?

  • There is an urgency to keep going, to get to the next thing, the next accomplishment. It’s probably a feeling that keeps you up at night with thoughts you just can’t seem to shut off, and it’s just physically and emotionally hard to do. 
  • You’ve set the bar so high that no matter how far you get, it never feels like enough. A feeling that can erode your confidence because it’s personalized to, “I’m not enough”.
  • It’s hard to see the things that went well, and you tend to focus on all the little things that didn’t go as planned. 
  • It’s a reflection of your upbringing. You were raised to be humble about your accomplishments, or no one was really available to celebrate you. 
  • There is a part of you that’s scared that if you pause to celebrate, you’ll somehow fall behind. 
  • You’re not there “yet,” so there isn’t a big enough reason to celebrate- leaving no room for small wins.
Build confidence by honoring where you came from. Coaching tips and life strategies, life hacks. Quote.

Which one resonates with you? 

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. The value of slowing down is you get to find your strengths and the realizations you need to validate your ability to navigate current challenges and achieve your goals with confidence. But where do you start? Let’s begin with gratitude. 

How to Slow Down to Achieve Your Goals and Boost Your Confidence

Reflection and Gratitude

The simplest way to ensure you notice what you’ve accomplished and how far you’ve come is to get into the habit of spending a few minutes in the morning or right before bed in reflection and gratitude.

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” 

William Arthur Ward

When you wake up in the morning, before you get out of bed, or while munching on that bagel or sipping on your coffee, think about what you’ve accomplished and what you’re grateful for. 

I like this morning habit because it sets a positive and confident tone for the day ahead. If that doesn’t work for you, try it at night before you fall asleep. Keep a journal next to your bed and don’t just dump out your worries; dump out what went well for the day. You can even add three accomplishments or things that made you feel proud in the week or the last few months. 

Make reflecting in gratitude a daily habit, and watch your confidence grow.

three unexpected tips to boost your confidence

Journaling And Habit Trackers

habit tracker, confidence tracker, mental health, journal to track wellbeing
Visit the Shop to View Our Wellness Planners and Trackers

Spending a few minutes daily writing down your wins is a great way to reconnect to your truths. To build a better routine and establish this as a habit. If you’re trying to develop better habits, try a habit tracker. Grid paper and excel spreadsheets work well for this too. Seeing a month’s worth of little checkmarks on your habit tracker can be very motivating.

With the journal, make it a point to review your wins regularly and of course, whenever you need a little boost of self-esteem and confidence. Look online for plenty of journaling and habit tracker ideas. Give the ones that look good a try and devise a system that works for you. 

Get Your Own Personal Cheerleader

Sometimes it helps to have your own personal cheerleader. No, I’m not suggesting you hire a person with pompoms to follow you around everywhere (although that might be fun for a day). Instead, find a good friend or family member who’s encouraging already and ask them to cheer you on. Who are your cheerleaders? Keep their numbers on speed dial so you can call them whenever you feel low or don’t want to do something and need some encouragement.  

You can also think about who has been a key support person in your life, even if they played a minor role. I can think of my 4th-grade teacher Ms. English and how loving and accepting she was, which meant the world to me as a migrant child in a new country and school system. Who is your person? In your journal, list 2-3 of those people you have had in your life and note their impact on you. That relationship might even be another reminder of how far you’ve come. 

You now have some great ways to slow down and notice the value in your life daily. Taking the time to recognize those wins and seeing how far you’ve come has a ripple effect of increasing how good you feel about yourself, improving your mood, and building your confidence and momentum so you can continue to tackle future goals with more ease and joy. 

Celebrate yourself. You work hard, and you deserve it. 

How are you planning on bringing more celebration into your life? Let us know in the comments below!

Other great reads: Actionable Steps to Overcome Anxiety

The Self Love Journal For Women

Amanda Fludd, LCSW-R is a Licensed Psychotherapist, speaker, and Mindset Coach for high-achieving women in business. Her joy is addressing mental health on multiple levels from the boardroom to your virtual office.

anxious, communication

What You Need to Know About Mental Health and How to Protect It

Improve your understanding of mental health. Is your mental health protected? How much do you really know?

Women thinking about her negative thoughts and overwhelmed

When Life Gives You Lemons – Reframe Your Thoughts

Discover the power of reframing negative thoughts and finding optimism with these simple steps. Learn how to challenge negative …

From Talk to Action: Making Safe Spaces a Reality for Black Women in the Workplace

Black women face a unique set of challenges that are often overlooked in mainstream conversations. From colorism and racism …