Bringing your Heart to Work: A Seven-Step Journey to Mental Health and Wellbeing

Bringing your Heart to Work: A Seven-Step Journey to Mental Health and Wellbeing is based on Hazel Hyslop’s experience of working as a mental health specialist locally and globally. It gives an account of her personal experience of burnout and her witnessing of burnout among her colleagues and clients.

In her own journey to self-care, Hazel kept journals of her experiences and noticed a pattern in what worked. She started using some of these principles in her work as she began to see a parallel process with many of her clients and colleagues. For example, most of her clients were women, most high achievers, had great careers, but secretly harboured passions that they were not pursuing. The drive to succeed led to increased stress and burnout, as well as questioning their identity and purpose in life.

What was becoming clearer with each client was that their story was mirroring her own story. Hazel too had been on the hamster wheel for many years trying to achieve success. She reached a point in her life where she no longer knew who she was. She had become lost, confused, scared.

Hazel had no professionals to emulate in her family. Her parents, their parents, and the generations before had completed only basic elementary schooling. Her determination to do well coupled with expectations from others, led her to push herself to get to the top as quickly as she could. She had to beat all odds to become the first one in her family to go to secondary school, to university, to become a professional. 

As newborns we come into the world as pure beings. However, by the age of seven years, we are influenced by those around us and our beliefs systems are formed. We are programmed for success based on who we are, what we have or what we do, and what others think of us. However, over time, we start to recognise that this is not enough. The more we strive, the more we become dissatisfied. 

A familiar story from clients is: “I feel lost, I have no purpose, or I feel stuck. I don’t know who I am anymore.” With the help of Hazel’s Seven-Step model, clients are able to facilitate a transformation to help regain purpose and a sense of self. The model uses the metaphor of a journey: the book asks the reader to take a voyage through their lives, offering tools to gain clarity and find better solutions. This journey is illustrated with client stories to demonstrate how the model helped them to transform and to give hope to the reader for their own metamorphosis.

At a time when so many are experiencing overwork, overwhelm, and overthinking, Bringing your Heart to Work: A Seven-Step Journey to Mental Health and Wellbeing is the ideal book to quieten the noise and recapture you are and who you want to be.