The corona epidemic has not only increased the figures of infected and deaths, but it has also left a deep impact on the mental health in the country, which the corporate world is facing the most. These are not patients but people trapped in lockdown, work from home or at home. It has had an impact on the mental health of men as well as women. Today at Delhi Magazine, we are introducing you to one such warrior who prepares you to fight with these prolems, the founder of Mindful Heart Consultancy and Emotional Intelligence & Mental Health practitioner Dr. Arati Suryawanshi. Here are some excerpts from Dr. Arati Suryawanshi’s interview with Delhi Magazine:
1. Tell us something about Mindful Heart consultancy?
Mindful Heart Consultancy is a consulting firm, providing psychological and Emotional Intelligence consultancy to corporate, education and families. From 25 years. Mindful Heart Consultancy provides tailor-made and result oriented programs to many establishments.
In this difficult time of second wave of the pandemic COVID-19, we have decided to help people completely free who are even unable to pay our subsidized fees and suffering from grief, pain, fear, emotional wellbeing, family issues, stress and other problems with the initiative “MHC-COVID19- ACTION”.
With this initiative we have helped more than 3000 human beings individually and with zoom meetings and google meets to frontline worriers such as doctors, nurses, ward-boys, and homemakers whom we call “covid warrior home front.” With the support of more than 20 establishments such as NGOs, Vishwas Community Radio along with social media networks of establishments such as She Inspires India, Advocates Associations of Western India, Zee 24 Taas and many others we were able to reach out to more than 10,000 people to build awareness on our initiative.
2. What Sort of Impact are you Looking to Make Here and How Will you Make it?
I think the impact can only be achieved through scale, but the scale is completely pointless if there is no quality. Therefore, I always tow the thin line between scale and quality, and make sure that I can achieve both! With keeping hope that every person in India will understand the importance of Positive Mental Health and Psychological and Emotional Wellbeing, me and my team try our best to Inspire minds to awaken the meaning of their life through our YouTube channel, training and workshops, therapy sessions, talks, interviews, write ups and blogs.
3. What are your Biggest Strengths and Weaknesses?
My biggest strength is Resilience, Empathy, Optimistic perspective and Intrinsic motivation which helps me keep going in any kind of challenges and difficult times. From 25 years of the journey in this space, I have faced many challenges, many issues, facing lots of barriers of growth within my own career. My husband has a transferable job, and being a woman & mother of two, with a big family I have always taken care of all the elderly and young members of the family. During this time, in a span of two to three years, members in my family underwent no less than 10 serious surgeries. However, I was always able to balance my personal life along with my profession primarily due to my afford mentioned strengths. Infact I was able to increase my clientele during this period.
With regards weaknesses; when I think about it, I feel If I ever have one then that be being worried for others, and feeling anxious for self and others. Which is not always good for our own health and growth. I have learned various creative ways to handle such situations in a better way when I started focusing upon my own skills of emotional intelligence. This led me to pursue and complete my certifications in Emotional Intelligence and attaining my PhD too. Having built my foundation through my personal experience, I took up initiatives to transform myself through learning EQ skills as Navigating Emotions, Empathy for Self, and becoming more and more visionary. This process led me to finding answers to my own issues and work on them scientifically. My journey has remarkably helped me reduce worrying and becoming anxious and today rather using them as my strengths. It took time but it helped me a lot. Emotional Intelligence Rocks! When I try to add that in my training programs and workshops participants share amazing feedback as they are able to take away many important facets from my workshops. Having gone through this myself it really becomes a powerful tool when bring alive this change for my clients during my sessions.
4. What are your Long-Term Plans?
With the 3rd wave like to hit soon, our plan is to reach out to more and more people and spread joy and help people during these tough times. Our outreach to people is with various zoom call therapy sessions such as trauma therapy, art/colour therapy, humming therapy, stress releasing therapy with hands-on tools, relaxation therapy etc. with eminent personalities from our field joining us in our team from India and overseas.
I recently authored the book “The Mindful Heart”, which is presently available on smash words, published by 6 seconds an NGO having their main office in San Francisco, USA. We will now be publishing a hard copy as well which will be available in different regional languages across India. I am also working on another book titled “MINDFUL HEART SKILLS” that will be launched soon for my readers in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and a few more languages.
5. What is your biggest achievement according to you?
In the psychology career it becomes very rare that we get an opportunity to be recognised since it’s a thankless job and demands tremendous confidentiality; until you receive dozens of boxes of sweet from clients. Our clients speaking about us and our work silently to those who require therapy is our biggest achievement. I also feel our biggest achievement is reaching out and working with a huge number of people across age groups from 5 years to 85 years with our goals of helping them increase their Emotional Intelligence Skills along with life skills.
We have conducted sessions for SAP Engineers to Marine Engineers. We have worked for every industry professionals available. Our strength has always been starting work with just one or two employees in an organization and leaping to connecting and holding sessions for people across the organization. This I have been able to achieve by taking various initiatives while working as a Certified Professional Coach (ICF) and Emotional Intelligence Practitioner.
Before the pandemic Mindful Heart Consulting had taken initiatives of “Bringing Emotional Intelligence to children and their families”. We have till now conducted 4 two day course seasons specially designed for children; we call it, “Kaleidoscope, The Festival of Uniqueness”. We have also undertaken an initiative to know “Why Happiness Quotient of Indian people is going down”. Post our research we published a Calendar called “Happiness Planner”. We have distributed this Calendar to almost 5000 individuals and companies till date.
You would also love to read about Mandeep Kaur Sandhu.
6. Please give a message to the readers on how to be strong-headed in this pandemic?
In this pandemic remember always that we are not alone. We are all suffering from stress and hampered a lot psychologically, emotionally, socially, financially and physically. We all should remember that the stressor is in the environment and not within us. So feeling stressful due to COVID-19 pandemic is natural. “Acknowledge” what is going on, Become “Aware” about it, “Accept” it, and give your one minute 100 % and think what is that one thing can bring joy into your own life? And start taking an “Action.” That is how you bring positivity alive in your own life. It’s a four ‘A’ model which I have extensively used for my PhD program to help adults, teachers, parents and children.
Remember you are not alone, if ever you are feeling stressful then go to those whom you feel safe with.
Try to break the pattern of stress. Stress is a reaction mostly attained on autopilot mode and therefore on most case not correct. It is advisable to always use your smart heart than your default mode. Six seconds Pause is very useful here.
How to Contact Dr. Arati Suryawanshi
You can also visit Dr. Arati Suryawanshi’s Insta page (Link: https://instagram.com/dr.aratisuryawanshi?utm_medium=copy_link / https://linktr.ee/dr_arati_suryawanshi) and fill up the form should you wish to reach us;
Along with her YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/varadaable/videos
We too will connect back with you as soon as possible. Thank you.
Very good