The Head of Service for the Student Counselling Service at the University of Aberdeen has written a book designed to help professionals who struggle to juggle the demands of life at work and home.
Rick Hughes has co-authored The Wellbeing Workout – how to manage stress and develop resilience which has already sold over 7,000 copies in the UK and USA.
The book offers coaching tips and gives readers advice and guidance on better ways to manage stress and develop an enhanced resilience to improve problem-management and coping skills, to reduce future stress.
Rick says he hopes the book will help people to de-stress in a challenging situation or use the techniques to find a solution to a problem in a structured way.
“My work as Head of Service at the University Counselling Service helped to shape the language and content into material that we know works,” he says.
“Working with students of all ages and cultures significantly informed the book, just as researching the book has fed back into my work with students. The University Counselling Service provides short-term counselling, so the work we do is focused and seeks results to improve functioning as quickly as possible.
“Writing the book encouraged me to reflect on this focused approach to resolving problems, effecting change and finding solutions. The book is equally applicable to Staff and has the potential to being integrated into a wider University Wellbeing strategy.
The Wellbeing Workout addresses 60 different issues, and for each one provides a short ‘spotlight’ to understand the issue, ‘top tips’ for dealing with it, and an ‘action plan’ to put those tips into practice.
Rick adds: “Unfortunately, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to stress. What’s stress for one person might be motivating pressure for another. It’s an individual thing. The first third of the book focusses on specific issues that can generate stress, with Tips and Action Plans to inspire the reader to do something about it. The second third covers Personal and Life Management issues which cover non-work stuff which can contribute to stress and feedback negatively into work. The final third offers a range of coping or managing tools to create the resilience to manage the stressors.”