SPEAKING ABOUT MENTAL RESILIENCE
Ian MacVicar is a frequent speaker on how to develop mental resilience. Ian relates his own story, as well as historical and contemporary cases of human beings overcoming the odds. Ian draws from the history of civil rights, exploration, independence struggles, inventions, medicine, military history, and sports. Ian includes cases of ordinary people who overcame extraordinary odds to succeed or to survive. He takes care to select anecdotes which reflect the wide variety of human experience.
Ian has spoken at numerous academic conferences, at a college for five plus years, at professional development seminars, churches, and at a military training unit.
Ian educates audiences on the challenges of living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as well as living with someone with PTSD. He describes temporary and longer-term harm reduction strategies for individual sufferers – and for their families. He has worked with people living with PTSD in his yoga and mindfulness classes, as a PTSD peer counsellor, and he has taught mindful yoga at a PTSD clinic.
Ian is a Trauma Informed Yoga Teacher (TIYT 1) and Trauma Informed Yoga Therapy Certified (TIYT 2) teacher. He is a Koru Mindfulness & Meditation Teacher-in-Training (In the Wild, i.e. non-institutional). Ian has also completed the Koru Trauma Informed Mindfulness workshop.
During his military career Ian completed numerous demanding courses in the field under all climatic conditions, with little sleep, and often under intense time pressure. He completed the Canadian Armed Forces Road to Mental Readiness (R2MR) program twice, Conduct After Capture training Levels 1 and 2, the United Nations Advanced Security in the Field course and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Conflict Resolution course. He has deployed overseas numerous times, and he is no stranger to discomfort, danger, disease, death, and seeing the worst – and the best -that humanity has to offer. His yoga “Warrior 2” stickman business logo reflects his background.
Ian lives with the physical and mental impact of several severe chronic health conditions and the after effects of several potentially deadly diseases. He has also been injured in several vehicle accidents and numerous athletic “mishaps.” Ian refers to himself as a “physiotherapist’s training aid.’ Ian knows how hard it can be to rebound from certain conditions, and he treats his students and “coachees” with compassion, non-judgement, and patience.
Ian complements his practical lived experience with a Doctorate (i.e. a theoretical/practical PhD) in intelligence analysis, specializing in the psychological aspects of intelligence collection and analysis, and counter-intelligence. He has a Master’s degree in International Affairs, specializing in Conflict Analysis. He speaks several languages other than his native English.
