This month's way to wellbeing spotlight is on Learn and Discover

Every second week in July, the focus will be on a different element of Learn and Discover and we'll be producing material to support and promote this. Please visit the other items in this menu for more details.

Don't forget, if you want to plan your own activity and need inspiration, examples of previous events can be found here. As face to face activities aren't possible during the current situation, we'd love to hear from you with alternative suggestions. Please send these to studentsupport@manchester.ac.uk.

Resources

You can find ready-made resources here or, if you want to create your own, visit the University's brandsite for the assets you'll need (you'll need to scroll down a little to get to them!).

If creating your own, you’ll need to buy InDesign (in Adobe Creative Cloud) from the University's Electronic Software Delivery system.

You should also ask IT to install the University fonts, they can do this simply for you here.

Social media

Don't forget to follow us on instagram: @uomwellbeing.

Every Wednesday the Wellbeing Team will be promoting positive wellbeing to encourage students to take care of themselves during these uncertain times. 

We'll be handpicking different events and activities students can take part in throughout the day at home - from mindfulness sessions to live gigs.

This will be promoted through our instagram page @uomwellbeing and on our student support website. You can find a clickable PDF schedule for the day here, this will be updated every Tuesday. Further assets for social media can be found below.

If you'd like to run your own activities to promote positive wellbeing and need some inspiration, take a look at this event ideas page. Due to the current situation, we know that face to face activities won't be possible so if you have any suggestions for alternative events, we'd love to hear from you: studentsupport@manchester.ac.uk

Remember to use the hashtag #uomwellbeingwednesdays in any social media posts!

Suggested copy for newsletters etc:

Looking for a wellbeing boost? Every Wednesday your Wellbeing Team will be running ‘Wellbeing Wednesdays!'. These Wednesdays will include wellbeing events and activities that you can take part in from home throughout the day - from mindfulness sessions to live gigs. Follow @uomwellbeing to get involved!

Assets:

(Right-click to save images- social media and instagram story assets will be updated every Tuesday)

July brings a new way to wellbeing, Learn and Discover. This is all about discovering something new about yourself, learning a new skill or trying a different hobby. The act of learning itself has been shown to improve our self-esteem and resilience. For our undergraduates, summer can be a great time to try this out. With this in mind, we have produced a few resources to support learning and discovering and overall wellbeing during this time.

Why learn and discover? – This resource outlines the benefits of learning and why it is important for our wellbeing. A PDF version can be found here, and a social media version here.

Ways to learn and discover – There are so many ways to learn and discover, big and small. This resource will spark ideas for getting started. A PDF version can be found here, and a social media version here. 

Learn and discover planner – We have produced a specific learn and discover planner that students can use over summer. By writing our plans down, we are more likely to commit to them and have a sense of achievement when we have completed them. Find it here.

We recognise that even though it is now the university summer break, our postgraduate students are still hard at work completing dissertations and continuing research. This may lead to students struggling to maintain motivation and focus, with many working from home and contending with the current situation. As a result, we have decided to highlight our motivation and focus resources once again this month.

You can direct students to our motivation and focus webpage where they will find lots of tips and resources to help maintain motivation and focus during this time.

Our motivation and focus videos can also be shared using the YouTube links below or they can be downloaded here: motivation / focus

We’ve also reworked our motivation infographic so it can now be easily shared using Instagram or Facebook stories. You can download it here.

Academic resilience and the ability to learn from mistakes and failures are key skills which students can use to come out of challenges stronger. Evidence shows that those who are resilient are able to cope with and learn from negative experiences and are, therefore, better able to cope in the future. Hence, students should value mistakes and view them as learning experiences.

We recognise that this can be a challenge for some students, especially for our PGT and PGR students over summer when motivation can be low, and setbacks can have a much larger effect. For our undergraduates, summer can be a good time to learn these skills in preparation for the next academic year. We have collated together some resources which can be used to support students with their academic resilience and their ability to ‘fail well’.

Our myth busting sheet aims to resolve some of the misconceptions around academic resilience and is a useful tool we can use to remind ourselves that mistakes are inevitable, but it’s what we do in response to those mistakes that counts. An Instagram ready version is also available to download.

You can direct your students to our updated our existing resilience page, where we have included some content surrounding academic resilience.

Our Instagram ready infographic can also be shared through your social media channels and focuses on the 4 C’s of academic resilience – confidence, control, commitment and composure (an A4 version is available here). Students high in self-belief, control, persistence and low in anxiety have been shown to be the most academically resilient. 

You can also reshare our resilience journal, where students can work through the four elements of resilience for a particular academic situation to help them rethink and reframe a perceived negative experience.

We have also produced a video which discusses the evidence behind academic resilience and learning to fail, and tips to help students build these skills. It can be downloaded to share on your social media channels here or a YouTube link can be accessed here.

As part of Learn and Discover, this week we are encouraging students to learn and discover more about themselves, by focusing on their character strengths. Character strengths are the positive parts of our personality that impact how we think, feel and behave. A knowledge of character strengths promotes self-awareness and acceptance of oneself.

The benefit for students knowing what their signature strengths are is that they can exercise these in their personal and academic lives, allowing them to feel an increased sense of wellbeing. By knowing their lesser strengths, they can understand their past experiences better and learn how to further develop these strengths for the future.

We have created this new page on our Student Support microsite that is all about character strengths that you can direct students to. The page contains links to a number of tests that students can take to find out their character strengths, as well as tips on how they can build on their character strengths.  

We have also produced this character strengths worksheet, where students can record their top 5 character strengths and are encouraged to think about the ways that they can use these character strengths in their day-to-day lives.

We have also produced a series of Instagram posts that we would encourage you to share across your channels over a 6 day period. The Instagram posts are in sets of 3, with each set relating to one of the Six Ways to Wellbeing and how exercising that way can strengthen particular character strengths. The idea is that by incorporating each way, students will feel an increased sense of wellbeing with the added bonus of developing various character strengths.

Due to the current situation, we've asked the student Wellbeing Champions for feedback and suggestions of activities they'd like to run. We'll add content here as soon as we know more.