Octivo’s Suite of
Mental Health
Courses
Octivo is committed to mental health and has developed a range of courses to address this important area.
Our Passion for Mental Health
Octivo has a particular passion for mental health and related areas. This partly stems from our belief that it is just another part of overall wellbeing and development, but also because two of the senior management team have lost people to suicide and so have seen the impact of unidentified and unsupported mental health concerns on loved ones.
Our Courses
As part of this focus Octivo has been designing courses that tackle the topic from a range of perspectives, including a unique one. They can work as standalone courses or as integrated pathways that allow a progressive development of understanding in the area.
See Octivo’s suite of mental health courses below.
Your Mental Health
The Your Mental Health series focuses on the personal. They are about empowering you and providing the information you need to navigate an important part of your health that is often fraught with misinformation, myths and taboos. The focus is on practical learning that can be put immediately into practice.
Introduction to Mental Health
This introduction to mental health from a personal perspective aims to develop a proactive attitude to mental health in the learner, addresses common misconceptions and develops a framework the learner can use to monitor their mental health. The course also covers an introduction to the interventions that are available and how to work effectively with mental health professionals in your own care.
Personality Testing
This course explores the wide variety of personality tests that are in use, examines the advantages and disadvantages of the major ones and also looks at the potential abuses that personality testing can be involved with. The course ends with a look at the responsible use of them and how they can be a powerful tool for self reflection and personal growth.
Emotional Intelligence
Learn to recognise and understand emotions and the impact they have on everyday situations. Develop your emotional intelligence to improve your relationships (personal and professional) with others.
Resilience
Master strategies to boost your resilience and apply resilience interventions to manage everyday stressors. Utilise a range of tools and techniques to utilise your energisers and minimise your stressors.
Unconscious Bias
Create awareness of personal unconscious biases and typical unconscious biases you’ll encounter with others. Explore the impact of bias on others, and how you can manage your own biases.
Meditation and Spiritual Practice
This broad coverage of meditation examines it firstly from a psychological perspective and introduces a range of meditative practices so that the learner can start to focus on which ones work for them. The well documented benefits of meditation are then examined. The course then looks at how meditation forms a part of all spiritual traditions, which for some learners will be an important part of their engagement with meditation.
Workplace Mental Health
The Workplace Mental Health series steps from the personal to the team and organisational perspective. Here mental health is integrated into normal business operations by providing actionable learning for both workers and managers.
Teamwork
A harmonious team environment allows individuals to thrive in the workplace. Key to team harmony is understanding each others’ preferences (energisers) and stressors (de-energisers). This course explores ways in which team members can adapt their approach to get the most out of others’ energisers, and ways to minimise de-energisers.
Psychology in the workplace
Ever wondered what motivates one person, but not another? Curious about why some teams work better than others? Want to know why nobody wants to support your amazing new idea? This course explores a range of common psychological concepts that explain a range of common behaviours in the workplace. This knowledge will help you successfully navigate a range of everyday workplace situations.
Wellbeing in the workplace
Examine practices which influence wellbeing for individuals and teams. Discover tools, techniques and practices to utilise at an individual and team level to support wellbeing in the workplace.
Sexual harassment
Build a strong foundational awareness of sexual harassment, including relevant definitions and what actions and behaviours may be considered sexual harassment. This course also explores actions individuals and managers can take to call out and address sexual harassment.
Mental Health Leadership
Leaders play a crucial role in influencing organisational culture. Through this course participants will assess their role in facilitating a culture which acknowledges and supports mental health. Acquire key tools and techniques to prioritise mental wellbeing, support individuals with mental health issues, dispel mental health myths and role model best practice.
Psychological Safety and Change Management
Change can be a distressing time. This course takes a psychological safety approach to change management. The course explores psychological safety methods that can be applied to lead people through change
Workplace bullying: cyber and in-person
This course builds awareness of workplace bullying (cyber-bullying and in-person). Learn to recognise bullying and steps to take to address it. Create a range of prevention strategies to minimise the occurrence of bullying in the workplace.
Mindfulness in the workplace
Mindfulness at work supports people to be present in the moment, instead of being overwhelmed and lost. Mindful practices positively impact individual mental health and contribute to better performance at work. This course provides helpful tools, techniques and practices to apply mindfulness at work.
Introduction to Neurodiversity
This introductory course explores what neurodiversity is, the origins of the term and why it is becoming increasingly important in the workplace. The course also firmly explores that neurodiversity has benefits as well as potential issues for the neurodiverse themselves and explores how it is impossible to have an inclusive workplace without addressing neurodiversity.
Neurodiversity and Strong Teams
Since neurodiverse team members bring unique perspectives, life experience and ways of thinking to the table, teams that truly embrace neurodiversity benefit immensely. This course examines how that happens and explores ways to build inclusive teams that play to people’s strengths.
Mental Fitness
The Mental Fitness series steps away from the medical model of things mental and rather draws inspiration from the world of physical fitness. This approach reframes issues or illnesses as injuries, for which there can be a process of recovery and, if the person has a tendency to injuries of that sort, focuses on preventative and strengthening techniques. Mental Fitness removes the stigma and widens the relevance because we all know we can incur a physical injury, and the reality is this is also true of mental injury.
Introduction to Mental Fitness
This course takes a different slant from mental health and instead explores how an approach to mental fitness is empowering and life affirming. The course explores the injury model, frames the language to reduce or eliminate stigma and draws parallels from the world of physical fitness to the importance of have the right team of coaches and other practitioners on your side.
Mental Fitness for Students
After introducing the concepts of mental fitness for those who have not done the introductory course, we explore the particular issues that students face and particular practices aimed at students of all levels.
Mental Fitness in the Workplace
This course builds on the foundations of ‘Introduction to Mental Fitness’, exploring scenarios, tools and techniques specific to the workplace.
Mentoring Mental Fitness
This course explores the benefits of having mentors and/or coaches for mental fitness. Drawing from physical fitness models of mentoring and coaching, the course then examines useful models and processes. The course rounds out with checklists, cheatsheets and sample exercises.
Handling Mental Fitness Injuries
This course is aimed at the person with the mental fitness injury. The focus is on self management techniques, calming negative inner voices and a step by step focus on small wins.
Supporting Mental Fitness Injury Recovery
Learn how to support people with mental fitness injuries. Explore practical ways to help someone manage their mental fitness in a positive way while avoiding the stigma of the mental illness label.
Holistic Fitness
Our wellbeing is influenced by a range of fitness factors. This course explores those fitness areas: mental, emotional, creative, physical and spiritual.
Emotional Fitness as Part of Holistic Fitness
Emotional fitness steers the mind away from negative thoughts and towards creativity. Like all forms of fitness, emotional fitness can be built through building health habits. This course provides practical activities to build emotional fitness.
Creative Fitness as Part of Holistic Fitness
Creativity is often overlooked as a contributor to wellbeing, however, creativity builds our confidence, helps us to solve problems and encourages us to think outside the box. This course helps individuals tap into their creativity and build it into their everyday lives.
Spiritual Fitness as Part of Holistic Fitness
While conventional psychology often has trouble dealing with and integrating the spiritual, studies have consistently demonstrated the benefits of a spiritual perspective for those who are so inclined. This course looks at the range of spiritual approaches that can be used, how to integrate it with more normal psychological approaches and how to discuss it with the professionals you may be working with.
Physical Fitness as Part of Holistic Fitness
Study and study has shown the benefits of exercise and physical activity on mental fitness. This course examines how to integrate physical fitness with other approaches, even for those pretty new to exercise.
Imbalance in Holistic Fitness
Holistic fitness is the concept that, as complex and multidimensional beings, we benefit from a multidimensional approach to our fitness. The course then examines how imbalance can be really destructive, and so the course examines ways to identify and then correct imbalance.
