Dallas Fort Worth Youth Mental Health Awareness Speaker
Mental Health can be a hard topic to talk about. But it is vital that we discuss it to raise more awareness. And to effectively share how mental health works, I hope you guys don’t mind if I get a little personal here.
As a teenager, I hung out with the wrong crowd. The people I surrounded myself with were smoking, drinking, fighting, and not doing positive things in life, nor did they aspire to do so. I grew up in a two-parent home.
However, it was my grandparents who adopted me. When I was conceived, my mother was raped. So naturally, as a child, once I learned my story, I struggled with finding my worth and knowing who I was at the time. Today a lot of our youth struggle with those same things. Their parents are not around, they may live with relatives, or just have parents who aren’t available. They struggle with their identity, not knowing who they are.
They do not know what self-care is, what positive affirmations are, and they do not know how to be emotionally intelligent and aware of their own mental health awareness and surrounds them.
Hi! My name is Tashina Calhoun, founder of nonprofit One Belief Organization.
One Belief Organization is a Dallas-based organization that teaches mental health awareness and emotional intelligence. We focus on educating positive ways to engage and interact with others while embracing the differences of others and making good decisions not leaving others feeling left out and secluded but everyone being included; helping to create lasting positive healthy relationships and more safe school environments for all students. We do this education through our speaking segments when invited out to schools to speak!
I relate with children sharing from my past experiences and connecting and tying the dots for their current situations and encounters.
I am an entrepreneur, educator, and mentor. Most of all, I am an advocate of mental health awareness that leads to a positive lifestyle. My professional background includes over a decade of working with children in the classroom; working as an educator for the state of Texas. I am also a certified Mental Health First Aid USA responder and have certifications in bully prevention and conflict resolution. For me, it’s about more than just helping people feel better—it’s about making them feel like they are understood and heard. I relate with children sharing from my past experiences and connecting and tying the dots for their current situations and encounters.
I am certified and trained to provide initial help to people that experience mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety disorders, psychosis, and substance use disorders.
Mental health and mental illness have been used interchangeably for decades, but they aren’t the same thing. Mental health is a state of emotional, psychological, and social well-being that is largely influenced by an individual’s perception of themselves and the world around them – it’s a state of being.
Mental illness, on the other hand, is an umbrella term for a variety of mental health conditions that affect how we think, feel, act, and relate to others – it’s a presence or absence of something else. The two are closely related: our perception of ourselves and the world around us can influence our mental health status. With my talks, I focus on paradigm shift and educate on the changes needed to get better outcomes in their lives and relationships.
I have been cultivating the minds of today’s youth for a better tomorrow for years not and it is a joy to be able to continue to do so through my organization for the personal development of today’s youth!
My belief is that mental health affects us all and we all have experienced mental health and awareness of it at some point and we all can work with one another to be more emotionally intelligent. I focus on meeting people right where they are at.
I teach youth positive ways of resolving conflict, that do not result in violence, we educate on riding of negative self-talk, positive body image, self-care and awareness, and emotional intelligence.
At the end of every discussion, the end result of each event is primarily self-awareness and outcomes that will lead to better choices and live more productive, healthy lifestyles.
I believe that if we teach mental health awareness and destigmatize the shame associated with mental health, anxiety, and depression schools and our communities will be safer. One Belief Organization was birthed as a result of an altercation at my daughter’s school, where a child brought a gun to school, she was only in the first grade.
I know from that moment onward that our babies needed to know how to process feelings and emotions. Since 2018 it has become my mission to bring awareness and address the stigma’s and get others to help when needed.
Visit:
or www.mentalhealthisgreatwealth.com
to keep up with what we are doing in the community.
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.”
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