Continuing the Conversation with our MHFA Community…
For this year’s Time to Talk Day we hosted an “MHFA Meet-Up” to allow a space for our Mental Health First Aider community to come together to talk about their role, the power of human connections and practical ways to keep important conversations going…
We love hosting these regular MHFA Meet-Ups and reconnecting with our MHFAiders. It is the greatest privilege to train individuals to become a Mental Health First Aider – and an even greater privilege to remain on their journey in order to facilitate ongoing conversations and offer input where we can.
Read on to find out more about today’s MHFA Meet-Up which includes practical ways to keep mental health conversations going inside your organisations…
In today’s MHFA Meet-Up we explored topics including:
- How important is it to provide an “anonymous” route to contact a MHFAider? And what could this look like in practice?
- The power of remembering it’s OK to not have all of the answers – that an MHFAider’s role is to hold a safe space and actively listen to another person – and that there is so much value in this.
- Compassion Fatigue – the very real potential that burnout can occur with those who empathise often and hold a caring role. Along with ways to mitigate the risk of Compassion Fatigue.
We discussed Time to Talk Day itself – a nice opportunity to elevate the conversation around mental health and wellbeing – safe in the knowledge that we have 364 other days to do this too!
We also explored that whilst an MHFAider may well be there to support an individual at point of crisis – they also play a really important role in helping to promote mental wellbeing within their organisations – therefore mitigating the risk of mental health challenges.
So, whilst this Time to Talk Day provides a great opportunity to open up the mental health conversations, don’t underestimate the impact of every day connections too. If we are creating a workplace environment where individuals feel safe, comfortable, seen and heard on a day-to-day basis – we will already be doing so much to foster psychological wellbeing.
Some practical suggestions for creating opportunities for meaningful conversations within organisations include:
- Any conversation where two or more people connect, safely, in a supportive environment will contribute to psychological safety and therefore positive mental health:
- Remember that great conversations don’t have to be face to face – they can also occur virtually, over the phone, or via messaging
- The power of socials – consider a variety of activity in and out of working hours to appeal to as many people as possible
- Encourage regular 121s between managers + their line reports where a wellbeing check-in is standard practice
- Create peer-to-peer support groups
- Create a business-wide buddy-up scheme
- Consider colleague-run groups where “passion meets purpose” to create supportive communities e.g. “Parenting”, “Wellbeing”, “Diversity”, “Book Club”, “For the Love of Pizza” etc etc 🙂
- Host awareness events – panels, talks, workshops, drop-ins using external providers or curated internally
- Consider space/s for anonymous conversations too 🙂
Here’s to keeping all the important connective conversations going this Time to Talk Day!
Keep up-to-date with other wellbeing and mental health days by referring to our 2025 calendar here.
If you want to say hello, drop us a line here 🙂
