FROG RESILIENCE
BA Education (Major in Counselling);
Cert IV Training & Workplace Assessment;
(Youth Mental Health First Aid Certificate)
Further studies in Community Development,
Psychology, Visual Arts & Business;
Working with Children Check
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Jo Mason | Facilitator/Educator
The last nine years at Southern Cross University, have given me an extraordinary opportunity to pull together my experiences, and to design, implement and evaluate an incredible array of effective resilience strategies for 1000's of students.
BIO
FROGS, FROGS, FROGS
Why frogs?
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Frogs are an inspiring, creative and metaphorical way to help us understand the potential of resilience fluency in our own lives. Frogs are known as an indicator species and can give valuable insight into how an ecosystem is functioning.
In turn, resilience fluency gives us valuable insight into how the ecosystem of 'ourselves' is functioning.
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So here are three fascinating facts about frogs to stretch your thinking and reacquaint you with life's creativity.
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When Darwin's frog tadpoles hatch, a male frog swallows the tadpoles and keeps them in his vocal sac for about 60 days to allow them to grow. They stay there until they emerge as fully grown froglets.
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The Wood frog can live north of the Arctic Circle, surviving for weeks with 65 percent of its body frozen. When temperatures fall, the frog's body begins to shut down, and its breathing, heartbeat and muscle movements stop. The water in the frog's cells freezes and is replaced with glucose and urea to keep cells from collapsing.
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In recent years, a painkiller with 200 times the power of morphine has been found in the skin of an Ecuadorian frog.
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I hear you, you're not a frog!... but a frog is a potent metaphor, to awakening yourself to how even small acts of personal resilience lead to a wildly wondrous rewiring of your brain and giving you back 'the locus of control' you are wanting in your life.
Initially as the Equity and Diversity Coordinator and then as the Resilience and Wellness Coordinator , I learnt that Unversity students are five times more likely to experience mental illness than the rest of the population and less than a third of the most distressed seek assistance (Helen Stallman, University of Queensland)
The students did not need more wellness rhetoric, they knew a lot... they needed resilience growthshops to create fluency, awareness and empowerment in their own quests!
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As an educator for eighteen years in Australia and overseas, within schools, local communities and in Universities, I knew we had to shift the style of support they were being offered.
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After the great success of our response to the students, we discovered the staff were equally in need of Resilience growthshops!
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What was becoming clear in the education sector, was that we had not supported the research findings and it was now time for effective, creative, widespread IMPLEMENTATION! (Vincent Tinto, University of Syracuse)
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As I continued my research and engagement I saw how widely the health sector was straining under the same enormous pressures. The general public have low levels of knowledge regarding ways to improve their own resilience and contribute to community resilience. (Lindsay Oades, Director Australian Institute of Business Wellbeing, University of Wollongong)
And that is where I am at now, offering well researched, dynamically delivered resilience growthshops that can be delivered anywhere within the community!
(Government, non government agencies, schools, individuals, Universities, hospitals, accounting/legal firms... anywhere)