Where does it come from?

Sources of personal well-being

This Wellbeing Index is based on the psychological theory of homeostasis – that

wellbeing is maintained by an internal system that enables people to keep feeling

positive, even when things go wrong. while happiness and wellbeing have their own

unique definitions, in this work the term ‘wellbeing’ has been used interchangeably

with ‘happiness’, as happiness is a term that people can relate to and conceptualise

easily.

Indicators of personal wellbeing

Connection with family and friends, spending time with your loved ones will make

you happier, healthier and more productive. They’re your best source of support when

you need it – so communicate effectively with them. If you have a partner, it’s

especially important to invest quality time with them, as they have the strongest

influence on your happiness.

Spiritual Wellbeing
Spirituality means many different things to many different people. Sometimes it is

association with religions or religious belief; sometimes it is seen as quite independent

of any religious understanding. We see Spirituality as an individual's exploration of

things of ultimate value, and their relationship with these issues. Personal spirituality

has powerful effect on his or her life understandings. It impact on the relationships

one forms with other people.

An individual's spirituality, however, is not formed in isolation - it can be profoundly

influenced by the communities in which you take part. Some of these may be

religious communities, but many other communities also relate to questions of

spirituality. An individual's spirituality can have either positive or negative impacts on

their lives.

Personal wellbeing: The study for personal wellbeing is a schools intended major

responsibility in developing coherent whole-school approaches to personal, social,

health and economic wellbeing. It provides a context for schools to fulfill their legal

responsibilities to promote the wellbeing of students and provide sex and relationships

and drugs education. It also provides schools with an opportunity to focus on delivery

of the skills identified in the framework for Social and Emotional Aspects of

Learning.

Personal identities: Understanding the factors that contribute to personal identities is

essential if students are to accept and value themselves and develop confidence and

self-esteem, maintain their mental/emotional health, make the most of their attributes

and abilities, and celebrate achievements. Having a positive sense of personal identity

helps an individual feel confident about roles and responsibilities and about making a

positive contribution to society.

Healthy lifestyles: A person’s ability to stay healthy is affected by physical, mental,

emotional, social, environmental and economic circumstances. Students should learn

that they need to make informed decisions about behaviours and consider the short-

and long-term consequences of their actions on themselves and others. When young

people have increasing autonomy and often have more challenging decisions to make

about their lifestyles. Links with the concept of risk continue to be important. For

example, students should understand the dangers of dependency or addiction, in

relation to substances and gambling through schooling.

Relationships: Understanding relationships and the skills associated with forming,

maintaining and ending them is fundamental to personal wellbeing. At key stage 4

students explore this concept in more depth and consider how to exercise

responsibility as they deal with the pressures and emotional challenges involved in a

wider range of relationships that are becoming more complex.

Diversity: This concept links with both personal identities and relationships. When an

individual consider his attitude and behaviour towards diversity, he or she should

identify similarities as well as differences between people. Learning to with others

helps individuals accommodate difference in their lives and accept their responsibility

to challenge prejudice and discrimination wherever it is encountered.

Organisation as stakeholder in personal wellbeing

Clear organisation structures and practice, employees should be provided with clear

information about the structure, purposes and practices of the organisation.

Appropriate selection, training and staff development, each employee’s skills,

knowledge and ability should be matched as much as possible to needs of each job.

Persons or candidates for each job should be assed against those jobs requirements

and where necessary a suitable training should be provided.

Effective supervision and guidance is important and can help to protect staff from

stress.

Job description must depend on the understanding of the policy objectives and

strategy of organisation and how performance will be measured.

Communication of work expectation should be comprehensive, consistent with job

description and complete.

Social environment, a reasonable level of socializing and team work is often

productive as it can help to increase commitment to work among members.

Recommendations;

Individual problems which are complex can be dealt with by counseling

psychologists, councilors or an organisational physician. It’s not only important to

identify stress problems and deal with them but to promote healthy work and reduce

harmful aspects of work. Work in its self can be self-promoting activity as long as it

takes place in a safe, development and health-promoting environment

(Possible interventions, both individual for example training, medical treatment,

counseling and job re-design, all these should be planed, implemented and evaluated

to promote the wellbeing of individual employees).

Community as stakeholder

Community coalition, this approach involves bringing together representatives from

local communities to address issues such as preventing drug abuse or promoting

health or youth development. An effective community brings together citizens from

many walks of life to discuss community issues and work towards a common goal of

well-being.

Community also builds collaboration among multiple agencies which bring

community services new to the residents. For example community collaboration have
increased rate of immunization of children, community change in drug abuse and

domestic violence and helped to decrease levels of gang violence. All those if dealt

with can help to promote well being.

Conclusion
It is usual for several stakeholders to be involved in programmes. Different

stakeholders bring different perspectives, skills, understanding, and resources to the

relationship and this must be recognised as strength. In working together, stakeholders

should utilize these differences in the building of strong and effective interventions in

the efforts to ensure well-being in community.

7
How to promote it? Strategies for personal well-being

How to promote it

As the overview implies, there is a continuous debate about where emphasis of time

and resources is best placed in Promotion of well-being of an individual or

community. In general, debates are framed between proponents of wellness and social

competences should be emphasized.

Advocates for promotion of well-being note that many people are not in a state of

sound psychological well-being despite not having special mental disorders. Well

know a great deal on how to promote sound health and social competences, drawing

in point from intervention in public health. We need to have stake holders like

communities, schools, families and media.

Schools

Schools must adjust their curriculum to meet the demands of the new age where

learners are eager to learn new skills to enable them fit in the changing world. From

school settings in areas such as social and emotional skills building

However, many schools have not been able to include in their curriculum the concept

well-being. The failure is attributed to government failure to train teachers the new

skills relevant in the changing and this has made students to face challenges with the

changing world.

Organizations

There is increasing need for work places to increase organizational effectiveness. So

efforts should be directed to identifying and understanding the factors that promote

health, wellness, and competences in daily living.

For individual employees exhibiting more extreme counter-productive personality

styles a more clinical approach is required. In this respect, the use of targeted and

structured clinical psychological interventions is likely to be more effective than

supportive counseling and generic employee assistance services.

Some employee support functions (employee assistance counseling and debriefing

programs) may actually be more effective as morale support interventions rather than

as clinical interventions. That is to say they may have limited value in terms of

improving clinical outcomes, but are nevertheless useful because they constitute a

gesture of employer support that contributes towards maintaining morale and

standards of well-being.

Families
Sound diet are valuable in the promotion of wellbeing so parents and other care takers

need to be trained with modern skills of promoting well-being of their children and

other family members, as these diet may serve to prevent diseases.

Parents may be their children’s first and most important teachers, but as children grow

older they are able to vote with their feet on an expanding universe of decisions about

selecting friends, joining organizations, using leisure time, and making a host of other

day-to-day choices. The growing independence of adolescence itself is nothing new.

But starting roughly in the 1950s, television and radio added a new dimension to

children’s choices and parents’ inability to shape those choices to their satisfaction as

a way to promote their well-being.

Community

Communities are needed to try to keep a perspective on promotion that is best

understood as an umbrella providing a common cover to link all strategies in the

promotion of wellness. Psychologists should be used as they provide knowledge

needed in the prevention of specific disorders, at other times to promote overall

wellness. The outcomes of these promotion and intervention are evaluated in terms of

lowered incidence of specific disorder or in terms of increased competences for

coping, as appropriate.

Stages of change
As humans, we are dynamic, constantly changing, and in most cases, looking for

ways to improve our well being. There are two types of change which include chosen

change and imposed change. Imposed change is significantly more challenging in

comparison choosing to change, because those that are forced to change may not think

they have a problem, or they may have no desire to change for their well-being.

Preventive and educational programs reduce the future likelihood of problems for

instance by strengthening personal skills for emotional coping, school achievement or

other goals ; by promoting parenting of family resilience or by acting to reduce future

community levels of drug abuse.

The following methods can be used to promote well-being of either an individual or

community and organisations respectively.

Organizations
Consultations with organisations, such as work places focus on roles, decision

making, communication and conflicts in the organisation to promote employee job

satisfaction or effectiveness of human services or schools.

Community development, at grassroots level help citizens organises to identify local

issues and decide on how to address them.

Community coalition, this bring together residents and organisations for example

religious institutions, schools, police and government to address community problems

together.

Participatory research, here community researchers and citizens collaborate, provide

useful information for action on community issues. Program evaluation this helps to

determine whether community programs effectively attain their goals and how they

can be improved.

Policy research and advocacy, these includes research on community and social

issues, efforts to inform decision makers (government officials, local leaders, mass

media about the course of action and evaluation of effects of social policies intended

to improve the well-being in the community.

Using the Media to Promote Well-Being

Media use has exploded. Parents are worried that teens are drowning in messages

about sex, smoking, drinking, consumer goods, and a host of other behaviors and

products that threaten their health and well-being.

This brief advocates fighting fire with fire by creative use of media can provide youth

with positive messages that counteract the negative and potentially damaging

messages to which they are exposed.

Not surprisingly, many parents have argued that government policymakers should

impose restrictions, backed by penalties, on the types of messages that media can

broadcast. Although l do not intend in this brief to enter the debate over the

Amendment and whether government should and can regulate content, l do assume

that the nation’s longstanding guarantee of free speech will limit—for at least the

immediate future and perhaps much longer— serious regulation of media content.

And the increasing portability of new media platforms means that youth can access

most media outside the supervision of parents or other responsible adults. The fact is

that even the most vigilant parents cannot supervise their teenagers at every moment.

The result is that teens are exposed to a vast array of unfiltered negative messages that

encourage unhealthful choices: smoking, early sexual initiation, eating junk food,

underage drinking—just to name a few.

However, with parent’s inability to control the negative media on their own and with

government regulation of media content problematic at best, advocacy groups,

foundations, and community organizations have stepped into the breach to create and

run social marketing campaigns, many of which make use of the same electronic

media that so worry parents.

Conclusion and recommendation

The strategies for promoting well-being show the idea of change from below or

bottom up practice for community development. The idea of value local skills,

knowledge resources and process is important.

Promoting well-being represents a direct challenge, and acceptance of top down

approach shows a great challenge for community workers. Psychologists must

overcome his/her socialisation with in institutions that accept top-down approach,

including family, the education system, and the work place and helping professionals.

It requires a radical thinking by many people in order to become effective community

development. This is why the various steps outlined are as important as they provide

frame work with in which community workers are able to reformulate their ideas.

Thinking bottom up may be a radical position to take, but a community worker

promoting well-being is not alone in taking position; its linked to various traditions

ranging from individuals, organisations and communities. The other related challenge

for community workers is that top-down perspective is likely to be effective where the

community is involved.

What is required for community worker to promote well-being is the capacity to

understand the insights of these various theoretical traditions and to reframe those

insights in such a way that they relate to the lived experience of the people in the

community, and are grounded in their reality rather than in the reality of academics

and professionals. Thus community worker from promoting well-being can become

genuine dialogue about power, knowledge, about change. And can seek to empower

local community members to validate and use their own experience, knowledge,

expertise and skills to work towards the community well-being.