Hello, my name is Heather Gordon, I'm the workplace Wellness Manager for University Health Network and I'm pleased to be a part of this process, to provide useful and tangible tools to help you cope during these challenging times. Though you may be seeing this video when the pandemic subsides, but I imagine the aftermath will have its own issues. You'll be hearing about some of the things that we're doing for staff at University Health Network as well as some of my own personal resources that I use for my own well-being. I'll let you take over, Doctor. Cool. My name is Professor Steve Joordens. I teach a lot of psychology courses at U of T and also in Coursera, which is an online platform. Well, you know what, you're here. This is one of those courses, and I do have the real pleasure of working here with Dr. Heather Gordon. As she suggested, this is a lessons learned from COVID because as we all went through COVID, first of all, I need to say to all of you, thank you. On behalf of all of us non-medical professionals, you guys were the heroes, are the heroes of the pandemic. You went through stress at a level you've probably never experienced before and certainly, the system hasn't experienced before. As Heather suggested, our goal in creating this course was to take some of those lessons learned. What was tried during the pandemic, what seemed to be an effective practice? We want to translate those so that they can become useful even when it's not a pandemic because your job is stressful all the time, pandemic or not. We've laid out this course in a certain way where I'm the psychology guy, I know the theory. Heather's on the ground. She lives what you guys are experiencing. Each module will begin a little bit with her describing her experience and then maybe you could just give them an example. I don't know, maybe with the first module, the kind of thing. That's what to expect. Yes, we do have activities to help stop and becoming small increments. You'll see that my videos are 10-30 minutes long because our activities are generally short for staff. You just take a break from their regular duties and just be refreshed with an activity. For example, the first one is refreshment stress, and within that activity, you'll do mini activities to uplift your spirit like I have move with music and I do have laughter yoga as well as gratitude practice. I hope you will enjoy. Fantastic. That'll be the idea. Heather will talk about something that she does with people to help them manage their stress. What I'm going to do is I'm going to then follow up her videos. She's the star. Yes, you are. Every module we'll start with something that Heather has been doing actively to help the staff at UHN. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to give you a little bit of psychology behind some of those practices, a little bit more of the academic theory as it were. Because sometimes, those practices are instances of a more general rule. If you understand that more general rule, you can maybe think of other things you could do that would probably work as well. You'll get this mix of concrete. These are things that are being done with a little bit of abstract. Here's how it works, here's why it works. That's our goal. The hope is, after you go through this, you will be armed either at a personal level, if you just want to get a better control of managing your own anxiety, but also potentially at an institutional level, if you are someone like Heather, charged with managing the wellness of so many people. What are things you might do institutionally to help? That's our goal. I hope you'll find it really enjoyable as you go through. There are little quizzes throughout. Just to be explicit, you do not have to pay anything for access to this course. You can go through it and learn everything you want. You will get prompted from Coursera every now and then to see if you want to purchase a certificate. You do not have to purchase a certificate. If you wish to, I think there's a charge of $60-$100 or something like that. Then at the end of the course, if you've passed the quizzes, you get a certificate you can proudly show off. For some people, that's very valuable, for other people, it's the learning. Whatever works for you is great with us. For me, it's just been a pleasure to work with Heather throughout all of this. I really hope you enjoy the course. Any last words before we send them to the course, Heather? Yes. I really enjoy this activity with you, Dr. Joorden, and I hope you enjoy and just have fun. Even for the laughter activity, get your props out. Put on your costume and just emerge yourself in it. Fantastic, Great. Good luck, everybody. We'll be on the other end is what will be all through the course, but will be on the other end as well. We'll see you there. Thank you for choosing the course. I really hope you find it valuable.
