0:00  
I think it's pretty clear to anybody who's paying attention at all, that there is a rising need for all of us to understand how we can manage the stress in our own lives. And all of those stressors that affect everyone affect students at the university level, for sure. Students are facing situations where they feel uncertainty about the future. They feel uncertainty about their own ability to adapt to the changes that are coming. They may have very real practical concerns, such as paying the rent and getting enough hours at their part time job. And let's also keep in mind that being between 18 and 25 isn't the easiest part of anybody's life ever, even at the best of times. And so the more information we can give them about that the better, I think. I was on this exploration on my own trying to address what I saw was the suffering of students. I see students suffering. I see them stressed out, and it It hurts me to see them struggling. So I started looking at meditation started investigating ways of teaching people new skills and that's when I sort of heard about but Diana I was doing. I approached her and I when I heard about her approach that it was Ryerson based that she has a solid years of experience working at counseling, that it was fact based. Everything she recommends has been demonstrated in a scholarly setting to work. The beauty of Thrive RU is that it focuses on building on people's strengths, strengths they already have. It isn't a system designed to diagnose people with mental illness or save people who are on the brink of collapse. It is designed to help students figure out how they bounce back and help them to draw on those talents and skills and personality traits so that they can bounce back.

2:10  
So my name is Diana Breacher. I'm a clinical psychologist and I've been working at Ryerson in the Counseling Center for many years. But in July, I started to work on the Thrive RU initiative, I developed a model of resilience that I call the five factor model of resilience and that's mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, self compassion, and grit. And the program is basically we focus mindfulness every week and then for the first four weeks, it's on gratitude, optimism, self compassion, and grit. And then the fifth session is how do you integrate all of this into your work. So the first four, I'm doing more teaching in the last session, people kind of bring in how they've been inspired by different ideas and how they'll bring that into their work. In a sense, the jury's out on a massive evaluation of the program. But what people are saying in their individual feedback sessions, when I get you know I collect the actual feedback forms, is, you know, very highly regarded very impactful, talking about how they want to incorporate this into their lives.

2:11  
My name is Jen Gonzalez and I'm the Director of Student Life at Ryerson University. And so thrive are you for me is conversation about how we can gain skills with each other, which I think is a very powerful tool. So in community in order for all of us to kind of thrive and be flourishing in our in our roles. I just lost my mom Unfortunately, this summer to this past summer to the cancer. Sumething I took personally was kind of the the optimism skills that I needed to kind of reengage in, as I was going through my grief process, it was the most challenging thing I've ever done or experienced. And certainly that optimism piece of cultivating optimism surrounding myself by optimistic people. And in being community I did my my training with people who work with me, with students who work in our area, because we all had the common language, the same language and the same experience. When they saw me having a bad day or a low time, they could ask me a question that could change me from not optimistic to optimistic. And I think that's super exciting.

4:21  
All of us want to feel happy. We all want to be our best. We want to feel that we're supported and acknowledged and that really is what thriving is all about. It's taking control over the aspects of our life over which we do have control. We set our happiness set point. So there's research done on life satisfaction, which suggests that about 50% of our life satisfaction or happiness is based on our genetics, we're born into it about 10% is circumstantial, and 40% is under our control. So the Thrive RU program is designed to address that 40%. How change in attitude and behavior that's consistent with kind of healthy living and thriving lifestyle will actually bring about a much higher sense of life satisfaction. Resilience, it's the capacity to bounce back in hard times. So there's always going to be challenges that we face, but the issue is how long do they stop us in our tracks? How long do they remain an obstacle to whatever our goals are? And the way to be resilient is to be mindful. It's being grateful for the good things that we have in our lives. It's being optimistic in good times and in bad times. It's being self compassionat, and also persevering despite obstacles. So if we can engage in those five activities, we're much better positioned to manage the challenges that are there. It's kind of an invitation for them to increase their life satisfaction through things that are under their control and I think that's an invitation that most people would want to kind of take you up on.