Maureen Healy’s career began in the c-suite of major companies in the early 2000s.
A psychologist, she was there to help executives with leadership development, to essentially be the “moral compass in the boardroom.”
“I realized pretty early on that these were just big kids acting like children in the playground,” Healy said.
That realization sparked a pivot that defines her work into the present.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, why don’t I work with kids who I can help early on in their life make better choices and then I wouldn’t have to be in a boardroom trying to help people do basic common decency things,’” Healy said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday.
Now a three-time published author based out of the San Francisco area, Healy has lived and traveled around the world teaching and counseling children in strategies to become emotionally healthy — tactics she’s bringing to the Campus Center at the University of Maine at Presque Isle on Thursday.
Healy is the first speaker this academic year in the university’s Libra Distinguished Lecture Series, which first began in 1999. Her lecture, which begins at 6 p.m., will cover the basics of what emotional health is and how to build it, both for parents raising children and in classrooms.
The lecture will lean into a question and answer format, where “no question is off limits,” Healy said.
The following day, she will serve as the keynote speaker for the Central Aroostook Council on Education’s CACE Day at Presque Isle High School.
Healy’s 2018 book — “The Emotionally Healthy Child: Helping Children Calm, Center, and Make Smarter Choices” — earned the Nautilus Book Award in Parenting & Family. Prefaced by the Dalai Lama, its goal is to give parents tools they can use to help their children better emotionally regulate themselves.
“For example, If I said to a child, ‘Hey, I saw that you got really angry, did you feel like that anger was bigger than you or you were bigger than the anger?’” Healy said. “100 times out of 100, they say, ‘Oh my God, the anger was bigger than me.’ So I say, ‘OK, well, that’s not true. You’re actually bigger than the anger.’”
Her strategies are designed to give children the wherewithal to direct their “big” emotions in a constructive direction, rather than a destructive one.
“Because we’re humans, we start out being very reactive,” Healy said. “But learning how to slow down and make better choices takes some training.”
Healy taught Tibetan refugees in India and has spoken across Europe, Asia and the Americas. The foundations of emotional health she preaches have resonated everywhere she’s been, she said.
“Whether you have chai tea or you have milk in the morning, that’s just superficial,” Healy said. “We’re all having feelings … the idea of resilience is so important because there are places on the planet that have a lot of conflict, that have a lot of struggling and pain.”
And in a polarized nation on a divided planet, Healy is impressing the idea of reflection, rather than reaction, on the next generation. If widespread, she believes that could make a profound impact.
“I think if we could be kinder to each other, it would be a different world,” Healy said. “That’s one of the reasons why I love working with younger people. You’re just not born a bully. That’s learned behavior. We can help kids learn how to be kind, even when it’s hard.”
