Patch Notes 5/13

It's the most wonderful time of year! 🎶

No, not Christmas–MENTAL HEALTH MAY! :aooooe:

We've already kicked off with some really awesome content and events, and we've got tons more in store. Check out the schedule for this month here!

As a special treat, the HG team will also be sharing some of the things we do for our mental health. So, you'll get the chance to hear updates from different team members every week this month, and learn a little more about us in the process! Hope you'll join us :) 

But let's get to the good stuff! We're going to switch things up and start off with some words from the boss herself.

Kruti’s Korner

May is always extra special at Healthy Gamer.

It’s our month to celebrate our community, our coaches, and our clients.

This year is a milestone year:

100K+ coaching sessions

100K+ community members

100M+ content views

As we grow, we are layering in more governance to keep the quality high and solicit more feedback from the mental health community. I’m extremely pleased to announce an absolute powerhouse of leading minds in mental health joining Healthy Gamer through our Scientific Advisory Board. This board includes leading ethicists, clinicians, academics and coaches who are tasked with helping us define and deliver a full-range of subclinical mental health resources. They’re awesome.

Meet them here.

Speaking of awesome collaborations, we teamed up with Ethan Evans - former VP of Twitch Prime at Amazon - to design a best-in-class coaching experience for modern careers. This coaching experience is about enabling early and mid-career professionals to design the career that fits your life. Sometimes this means going after that promotion, sometimes it means switching it up, sometimes it means starting your own thing. We took coaches who demonstrated success working with professionals and added an additional 10-day training written by Ethan and Dr. K on how to navigate sticky situations at work, define your career goals, and effectively pursue them to help you build the life you want. It’s the most affordable career coaching solution on the market, and the only mental health coaching service accountable to no one but our clients - not their employers, insurers, parents. Spots are limited for this service, so don’t sleep on booking your career coach!

Research

Hey, I'm Jake, the Research Manager at HG!

Research update:

We are presenting preliminary results of our coaching program for video gaming addiction at the American Psychiatry Association Annual Meeting this month! More info to come.

What I do for my mental health:

I perform comedy to take care of my mental health.  It supports a few important pillars of my mental health. It’s a creative outlet, my social life, and a place to challenge myself.

I started performing seven years ago because I was very shy and needed to push myself outside my comfort zone and I needed a way to make friends in person.  I was terrible, had no natural talent but what I discovered through performing and learning stage craft was that having a creative outlet was wonderful.  One of my favorite quotes about creativity came from the writer Dan Harmon, “creativity is doing something without letting your ego get in the way”.  Learning that lesson changed me and opened up many door.  I utilize comedy as a way to learn how to express myself and show the world the most authentic versions of myself.

One of the biggest boons to my mental health is that performing keeps me social.  I have meet some of my best friends through comedy and am constantly meeting new people.  I have always loved that performing has introduced me to people from all walks of life.  I have met some of the most interesting, brave, intelligent, creative, and of course funny people.  It is something I am constantly grateful for.

Learning how to be funny and perform in front of audiences has been the biggest challenge of my life.  It has tested me in so many different ways from mastering an art form to pushing myself to socialize, and most importantly learning how to tolerate being out of my comfort zone.  Being on stage is thrilling because it’s so scary.  It taught me a valuable lesson that you can feel terrified and also still do something.  Having a space to constantly push myself has helped me in a variety of ways outside the stage.  I take the lessons from the wins and losses on stage to help me feel confident.  I can handle failure because I have bombed sets in front of hundreds of people and I am grateful for that.

Through the years of doing comedy if taught me some of the most important lessons on how to take care of myself and live a life I’m passionate about.  I realized that self care isn’t just one thing I do to make myself feel better but a concert of many factors that support the wide spectrum of needs I have.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Coaching

Wazzup? It’s ya boy, Dragon. Jokes aside, I’m back with some more updates on the coach certification process.

Cohorts 6 and 7 have just a couple weeks left before they become fully certified coaches and it’s been really awesome seeing them learn and grow. Cohort 8 just started working with their first free clients, and cohort 9 and 10 are almost ready to start their curriculum. With the introduction of cohorts 9 and 10, we'll have taken on around 50 new coaches this year, but we’re not stopping here! We’re hoping to bring on several more cohorts before the end of the year, so if you’re interested, please apply before the end of July!

For those who have been waiting for coaching, I wanted to thank you for your patience! If you’re interested in working with one of these stellar individuals, make sure to keep an eye out for new personal and group spots opening!

I’d also love to share a little bit about myself and what I do for self-care. I like to celebrate my successes by treating myself to some #goodeats (one of my life goals is to get banned from an AYCE restaurant for eating too much). To burn off those calories, I love to weight-lift and play volleyball (hey hey hey! - Bokuto from Haikyuu) and to relax I like spending time with friends or my two cats (Bilbao and Córdoba).

If you can, treat yourself to something nice this month or give yourself a big pat on the back. Y’all are amazing - keep it up :)

Cheers,

Dragon 🐉

Product: Dev Team

Hey! PM Brandon here with some updates on, well, Product! To start, I’d love for everyone to meet our newest member of our development team, Samara! She’ll have her own bit later down below so I’ll let her do her own introductions. Honestly having another person on our dev team has been great and really allowed us to scale up the amount of things we can get done each week along with gaining valuable perspective from the mind of another dev.

As for updates to what we’re doing at HG recently: One is our career coaching program that has launched. We’re hoping that we’re able to serve this new demographic of our userbase on something that we’re meant to understand so much of and yet there are so few resources around around it. Another project that’s been teased is the next addition to Dr. K’s Guide 👀 If you’ve been following our socials, you’d know that Dr. K and Ryan have been working tirelessly to script, film, and edit this highly requested topic / module and I’m making sure that it’ll be presented to all of you in a way that’s more interactable and digestible.

Alongside the updates for products for our you guys, we’re also hard at work this month with improving the UI / UX for our coaches on their Dashboard on the platform. They’re definitely an integral part to HG and we want to make sure they have a streamlined and convenient experience using our platform to navigate managing their availabilities, schedules, and clients! It’s our first step in really polishing up the platform, and don’t worry - an update for all users is on the horizon soon too 🙂

Finally, in light of Mental Health May I wanted to share just a few of the things recently that I’ve been doing to help with my day to day. While I do love gaming, I also try to set aside some time every week to hang out with friends maybe catch a movie (recently watched Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness which was super hype) or grab a meal. I also really enjoy cooking and try to make a new recipe every couple weeks, trying out new cooking methods if I can too. Finally, I recently got a new ragdoll kitten named Prince! He’s only just turned 12 weeks old and despite the  numerous scratch and bite marks on my hand and legs, I love him very much and he makes me smile every day 😄 He’s very curious and growing quickly so I’m trying to take as many pictures as I can of his kitten days while it lasts (shameless plug to follow his Instagram!!).

Well, that’s all for for now - hope y’all are doing well and catch you around maybe on Discord or in Twitch chat! o7

/ Brandon

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

—

Heyoo! I'm Samara, the new backend developer at HG. Some of you may know me as PerfectlyPanda, community lead for the career and coding communities on Discord. It’s been quite an adjustment to move to Ruby after spending my entire career so far in the Microsoft tech stack, but the team here has been wonderful helping me get up to speed on the new code base.

Personally, as both a dev and a gamer, I spend most of my day in front of a screen. To balance that, I've made sure to keep some non-tech hobbies, and Sundays, especially, are no dev or gaming days. (Maybe a little bit of gaming ;) ). I spend the day doing crafts like knitting, crochet, or embroidery, and it's also my day to maintain my air plant collection. If it's nice outside, I'll take my two minions, Lulu and Rikku, and work on my project at the dog park.

See ya'll on Discord!

Samara