A very dense conversation today with Nicole Gibson!
Nicole is an international Speaker and listed in the Financial Review’s Top 100 Most Influential Women.At 21 she was appointed the Australia’s Commissioner for Mental Health,and now she dedicates her time uniting communities, shifting corporate culture, and empowering individuals.She gives a language to the deeper things we feel as a collective and isfighting to unite humanity through understanding, love and empowerment.
This young lady is an embodiment of love, an unstoppable messenger of love and human potential. She is a fierce ambassador for mental health, innovation and connection after recovering from her own experience with anorexia nervosa through her teenage years.
In her own words: "Mental health is said to be the worlds leading health epidemic by 2020, and suicide is the leading killer in Australia.It’s more obvious than ever that our current approach to mental health is too rigid, and denies people space to account for their own unique quirks and uniqueness."
About mental health, depression, isolation, rite of passage, acknowledgement, and more than anything, love.
* [3:00] About the workshops Nicole facilitates: Rite of passage is about understanding that there's gonna be a perfect time and a space for someone to have a breakthrough, and maybe it's actually not about getting a breakthrough for every single person. Through flow and in that space some people will have a breakthrough. And we are all connected; so if you can have one person to have that breakthrough, what happens then is everyone sees himself in that person, and may simultaneously have that breakthrough as well. There is power in a community of people. By one person being vulnerable, it activates vulnerability in all the other persons. Vulnerability is: It is just being honest and speak to whatever you're feeling in that moment.* [6:15] Bridging the gap between traditional and modern societies, to find again the sense of who we are in the community, and know how to behave, find identity & belonging. We are interdependent. We can learn so much from each other and honor that each other's humanity has something to bring to the group. "In a world that put so much significance on individuality, there's actually so much conformity." The people who are "celebritized" are the most ok with speaking their truth, and they are the most unapologetic about who they are. But we are never gonna get to that level by copying them, we've got to find our own equivalent to that.* [9:30] "If 50% of the west is struggling with mental health, that's not biological. To me that just screams there is something going on with our culture and there's something that's actually hurting us on an emotional level. And it makes sense, right? If you're exposed to the level of stress and the level of anxiety (...), unless you feel a sense of anxiety, I would actually argue that you are desensitized."* [11:00] Awareness campaigns are a good start, yet just knowing that it is a problem doesn't give us solutions. When "you can be with someone in their vulnerability, then your friend saying he's suicidal or in a lot of pain, is not gonna make you retract. You can actually be with them in that, and that is the best community intervention that we can have. It doesn't mean you have to be a qualified therapist or a professional, but to not be afraid, to not let the fear of the situation actually rule, and to be present with people in that."* [12:33] How to break the cycle of feeling pain, feeling isolated, shame? "You're qualified [to help] just because you're a human being. But often you've spend so long rejecting and avoiding your own vulnerability, that you haven't shown yourself just how powerful you can be in someone else's own journey.
