Rowan Spazzoli

Mental health has been receiving much more recognition and main stream attention over the last few years. I’ve noticed the general increase in the number of articles and social media posts about the issue.

More importantly though is the change in how we talk about it. Today I had 3 different conversations and a voice note on WhatsApp where mental health was discussed. In one conversation we spoke about how our psychologists/therapists have helped us unpack and deal with problems. The voice note was an honest and open message about how my friend had seen a psychiatrist and what their experience was of that.

This is an incredibly exciting trend because, despite it being about a complex and difficult issue, it shows that we’re making steps towards managing it properly. As a friend of mine said “one day we’ll look at maintaining mental health in the same way we currently view exercising or gyming as maintaining physical health”.

We’re finally starting to look after our mental states, and that’s awesome.

Image is from our end of year staff party at the Grand this afternoon 🙂

On my birthday I decided to start my #365of25 challenge, where I write a blog post every day for a year. I didn’t really know what I’d put in these posts, just that I needed to write them.

I’ve noticed that, despite it only being 4 days in, my mode of thinking has begun to change. Throughout the course of the day I am constantly looking for something to learn and something to write about.

As a result, I’m consistently consolidating my learning and trying to draw lessons from the day.

This means that at the end of this journey I will have 365 new lessons written for myself (and others) to read and reflect on.

4 down, 361 to go

Image is from our meeting at Nkomshish Laundry today. We’ve got an exciting venture planned in partnership with Mzee (pictured centre)

As a society we place a high value on learning.

We put ourselves through many years of (often expensive) schooling, we celebrate when friends and family get to to universities and we highly respect people with degrees.

Though most of the time we place value on formal learning. In school, university or through professional qualifications.

What’s more difficult to acknowledge and understand is the everyday learning; the learning outside of a structured system.

This learning can be scary and even painful. Because it takes admitting that often we don’t know. We have to challenge assumptions, habits and established thinking.

I experienced this first hand today when I was trying to design a new system in our startup and realized that I had no idea what I was doing. It took pushing past the fear and the uncomfortableness for the learning to take place.

Doing this is ultimately where growth happens. And if you don’t do this, you’ll stay in exactly the same place as you were before. As the quote in the picture above says:

“The success that comes with executing what we know and what we’ve historically done is exactly what prevents us from seeing what’s next”

-Lisa Kay Solomon

The cover picture is of a guest lecture given by Sharron McPhearson in my Strategic Thinking course