Hi, thanks for checking out this course. My name is Steve Joordens. I'm a psychology professor from University of Toronto, Scarborough, and I put this course together with a lot of help and prompting from Sergeant David Haynes, a wellness officer from 31 Division in Toronto, Ontario. David had seen a general course I had given on managing stress, that's also available here on Coursera, but he felt that there was need for a targeted version that was really focused on the stresses of police work. That's what this course is intended to be, it's a course for police officers to help them with all the anxiety and stress that comes with their job quite potentially, the most stressful job in the world. Give you a sense, I'm a cognitive psychologist. I've done a lot of research on memory, attention, consciousness, and more recently on educational psychology, and I'm especially interested in the development of skills. That's what this course is ultimately going to focus on, is teaching you a set of skills that can really help you get control of your anxiety response before it gets control of you. Again, I mentioned Dave, I just want to highlight Dave is a wellness officer in 31 Division. He does a lot of work building trust in marginalized communities, assisting his fellow officers in managing anxiety, and creating resources like this one to support officer mental health, and I have to say that Dave is so devoted to helping his fellow officers in what is a ridiculously challenging career. He is the heart and soul of this course, I'll say that, his emails have kept me focused on how important this course is, and how stressful your job is. You'll hear from me throughout this course, but a lot of what you're hearing from me is being fueled by Dave. What is the course about? Well, really again, it's focused on understanding the stresses of police work, and we have three modules. The first module really is focused on understanding. Take you back to class a little bit, make you understand the biology underlying everything, and why this is such a challenge in the context of police work, so a couple of videos in that module. The next module will focus on actually managing the stress now that you understand it, and I'll refer to this approach we're doing as the NaRLy approach, mostly for the N, the R and the L. That is, we will talk about three skills that can be used in combination to really effectively manage your stress and the stress of others. The first skill is learning how to notice when you are anxious, so actually becoming mindful of your state and noticing at times when, oh, my anxiety is maybe starting to build up right now, and then once you get good at noticing, you're then going to learn the skill of formal relaxation, being able to summon relaxation over your body to take control back and titrate where you want to be on that relaxation stress continuum. Because sometimes you do want to be a little on the stress side when you need energy and quickness and we'll talk about all that. Then finally, in this section we'll talk about the power of active listening and how active listening, once you're in control of yourself, how you can use that to calm other people down as well and get their stress to a point where you can all have a rational interaction rather than an emotional one. Then with all this as groundwork, in the last video, everything I'm going to teach you here are skills and when. As is true of every skill in the world, the usefulness of what you learn will depend more on you than on me, it will depend on whether and how you practice these skills. I'm just going to emphasize that at the end. Now, once you know all these skills and just trying to encourage you to put in that time to practice, to get fluent and to really get these skills as second nature. Our sincere hope, and this comes from both Dave and I, we really do believe that policing maybe, and in fact, probably is the most stressful job that exists, so aside from being on the front lines of a war or something like that. After completing this course, you're going to have a much deeper understanding of why your body and mind react to stress the way they do, so you're going to really understand what's going on inside of you when you're in those stressful situations, and then of course, most importantly, you're going to learn about skills you can use to control that machinery within yourself and within others. Our sincere hope again is that these skills will enable you to manage your stress in a better ways, thereby enhancing your confidence, your mental well-being, and just your overall mental health. That is the goal of this course. I look forward to teaching you in this course. It's quite honestly a privilege, and I hope I'll see you in video one. Bye, bye.
