Mental Health & Resilience Workshop for Climate Professionals & Activists

If you’re anything like me, you care. And sometimes caring means stress, especially when the things you care about don’t go as you hoped. A few years ago, I hit a wall. I’d been working in the environmental space for 25+ years, and been a solo entrepreneur 4 times. I didn’t know what to do — normally if you hit a wall, you take a vacation, get away for a bit, and it helps clear your head so you can get back to work. Entrepreneurs don’t really have that much leeway to take breaks like that, and even though I knew I needed mental rest, it simply wasn’t in the cards.

I also have been a student of psychology my entire adult life. I have a minor in it from college, and I regularly listen to some great psych podcasts. I knew the things I needed to do to get my head on straight and balance my emotions: meditate, exercise, practice gratitude, get out into nature … we know these things work to rewire our mind for better mental health. And we also know that these things don’t necessarily just come naturally and regularly, especially during times of stress, which is ironically exactly when we need them.

So I created myself a program. I’m practical and a list person, so I created a program that integrated many of these practices we all know are healthy for us into daily and weekly lists, so as to build habits out of them. Knowing myself, I made sure not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and build in some way to forgive myself if I didn’t get to everything every day. When it comes to things like doing a daily meditation, the more the merrier, but if you force it, it can be detrimental and make you pull away, feel bad about yourself, or give up entirely.

In addition to the lists, I built out a set of mantras that would help remind me to think about things in a different way, and added it to my daily checklist to read these mantras to myself.

The program has worked wonders for me, helping me stave off burnout and keep my focus, while also helping me have greater compassion, intuition, and growth.

It’s felt amazing. I’ve taught workshops on this at several festivals, including Burning Man, and the results have been terrific.

To be clear, it’s a free program — there’s no cost, and if you watch the video below, you can create your own program and run with it for as long as you want, without ever paying a dime. I truly created this to help my brethren in the climate space to avoid burnout and improve our mental health, so that we can continue to show up and do the work that’s so needed.

Enjoy the video, and let me know any thoughts!