More than mental health.
Teach people the skills and strategies they need to manage stress and anxiety.
And to thrive in the chaos of life.
I love the HAERT Program because it’s relevant, easy to watch and extremely practical. As a parent and medical doctor, I find the “do this in this situation” instructions to be very effective and appealing.
— Kristin Welter, M.D. - Leigh High School parent and Home & School Club advisor
Social Emotional Learning starts with Mental Wellness.
Bullying, harassment, discrimination, substance dependency, self harm - these are all the results of emotional challenges.
After more than a decade of Social Emotional Learning (SEL), anti-bullying, anti-harassment and therapy programs, our Mental Wellness hasn’t improved. In fact, the situation has worsened.
Suicide prevention and SEL only talk at the symptom level. They will not be successful in making change because they don’t deeply address the root causes.
People may intellectually learn SEL concepts, but they will struggle to use them when they are challenged by stress and strong emotions. The SEL focus on developing empathy for others and establishing and maintaining positive relationships requires a strong foundation in self-awareness and self-management.
Teens and young adults, in particular, are at a unique time in their lives when they are more strongly influenced by their emotions and having to cope with more academic and relationship stress.
Clinical research has demonstrated that adolescents benefit from (re)learning skills and strategies to manage these new life changes.
How does HAERT compare to SEL programs.
You may be wondering how our curriculum stacks up against other Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs.
Watch this video to learn more.
Mental Wellness is about Prevention.
Prevention is better than cure.
Mental Wellness is more than just the absence of mental illness. Fostering Mental Wellness is no different than what we do for dental hygiene, health and wellness, and substance use education.
What has been missing is a systematic, explicit way to teach people the skills and strategies they need to cope with stress, manage their emotions, maintain healthy relationships and thrive.
Schools are the perfect place to teach, model and practice these skills and strategies.
Prevention means learning skills.
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A strong foundation.
Most SEL programs speed through the important foundational competencies of Self-Awareness and Self-Management. These programs often teach stress management by introducing mindfulness or breathing exercises and asking people to “brainstorm a list of ways you manage stress”.
That’s like giving people life jackets and telling them to “figure out how to swim in rough water”. Most people, adults included, don’t know all the ways they can manage themselves and can expand their portfolio with new skills and strategies.
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Supports complex learning.
Bullying, discrimination, sexual harassment, binge drinking. These are all complex behaviors that stem from emotional management challenges.
Teaching students about these behaviors and saying “don’t do it” will not have impact until the underlying emotional management concerns are addressed.
People of all ages need systematic skills training to support Self-Awareness and Self-Management, especially during hard times. So they can intentionally make better decisions when the going gets rough.
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Swimming lessons, not lifeguards
We cannot address our current mental health crisis just by making more therapists available (even if there were enough) to help people through crises.
To use a slightly graphic metaphor, drownings will happen until we teach people to swim. We can’t hire enough lifeguards to save everyone.
HAERT provides the extra support we all need to build a healthy repertoire of emotional awareness and management skills to empower our success in life.
HAERT teaches skills explicitly.
Explicit Knowledge = Knowledge that is easy to articulate, write down, and share.
Tacit Knowledge = Knowledge gained from personal experience that is more difficult to express.
When skills are taught explicitly, they are:
easier to teach, learn and apply
supportive of habit training through transparency
easier to transfer to new situations
Many of us have acquired a handful of tacit things we do to handle stress, for example, mostly out of habit and sometimes intentionally.
When our situations change, we often don’t realize that the things we’re doing have either gone away, stopped working or need to be modified. Think of the runner who uses physical activity to cope with stress, loses this outlet with an injury and spirals into depression.
HAERT Program breaks down a complex “skill” like stress management into a many explicit skills and strategies. By identifying and labeling these skills, the complex process becomes easy to learn, remember and apply to different situations throughout our lives.
Tried and tested.
“Prove it”.
Certainly, with ease. Decades of clinical research and practical use in business settings back up our lessons. These skills are used to manage challenging behaviors in ourselves and others, to get projects funded, and to accelerate team cohesion and performance. These skills make “impossible” projects happen, lubricate amazing divorces, and career freedom.
We live by the skills we teach.
Evidence-informed approach.
The HAERT Program curriculum incorporates evidence-based skills, strategies, concepts and interventions from:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & Dialectical Behavioral Therapy - the gold standards of mental health
Neuroscience and Health Psychology
Positive Psychology
Sensory Integration
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy & Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Maps to CASEL.
The HAERT Program curriculum maps to the CASEL (Collaboration for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning) core competency areas of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
Maps to the Emotional Intelligence model.
The HAERT Program curriculum also supports development of Daniel Goleman’s 12 competencies of Emotional Intelligence.
Mental Wellness success outcomes.
People who are emotionally resilient, happy, and regularly hack the challenges of life have developed a unique set of skills that are learnable by anyone, but practiced intentionally by very few.
These skills don’t magically appear in adulthood. In fact, most adults struggle daily without them.
People who have learned and use these skills across the many areas of their lives foster their own Mental Wellness.
They know the daily habits for maintenance, how to make things happen, and what to do when inevitable challenges arise.
The outcomes of these skills are drama-free relationships, career flexibility, the desire to embrace challenges, and adventures that many people consider impossible.
These people get stronger with struggles.