The Foundation for Mental Wellness and Life Success

The HAERT Program teaches a toolbox of 50+ life enhancing skills & strategies in three critical areas: self-awareness, self-management and interpersonal effectiveness.

These skills give us a foundation to respond more effectively and to improve our success in any personal or professional context. They enable us to:

• Cope with and manage stress in a healthy and effective ways

• Process and support ourselves through life challenges

• Build and maintain healthy relationships and positive support networks

• Think flexibly and critically

• Engage in effective problem-solving and decision-making

• Overcome adversity

• Self-motivate to build a realistic future

Our successful response to emotional crises, coping with conflicting ideas, processing challenging information, turning difficult conversations into productive learning opportunities, confidence to take calculated risks and many more important abilities all arise from this foundation.

Self-Awareness

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Our ability to effectively manage ourselves is highly dependent on the accuracy of our self-awareness. How can we expect to reach our goals if our dashboard readings lead us in the wrong direction? We must learn to read what is happening in our bodies, emotions and thoughts and how these key factors are affecting each other.

We aren’t taught self-awareness skills explicitly or systematically anywhere in our lives so it’s no wonder it seems like a mystery to most of us. Yet, self-awareness isn’t rocket science. It just takes training and practice to master these skills.

Self-Management

The things that stress us out are usually the things that are important to us. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t be stressed. Stress is an indicator of how engaged we are in our lives. So we need to learn how to manage stress and challenge effectively.

This breaks down into effectively interpreting and managing:

• Our bodies and our physical experience of stress

• Our emotions and the information they provide

• Our thoughts and how they support or undermine our goals.

Interpersonal Effectiveness

Nearly everything we want in life is on the other side of someone else. Relationships, careers, even our own confidence can be linked to our effectiveness at interacting with other people. Our ability to achieve our goals is supported by our skills for working with others.

One of the values of other people is that they bring new ideas and experiences into our lives. The challenge we have in accessing this value is managing the inevitable disagreement and conflict that comes from differing opinions. Some of the skills we need to develop are the ability to:

• Cope with the discomfort we feel

• Manage our emotions and thoughts that come from these interactions

• Communicate in a way that supports successful interactions.