Personal Growth and Well-Being Courses
ST DEV 140 Life Planning and Decision Making
Focuses on issues of personal maturity, goal setting, and decision making abilities in areas of common concern to young adults.
ST DEV 141R Individual Development
ST DEV 141R courses focus on mental health topics relevant to students. Faculty members from BYU Counseling and Psychological Services have developed and offer courses designed to help students improve their mental health. These offerings can change semester to semester and year to year. Please review the descriptions below as each section and course can be significantly different. Currently we offer courses in the following topics:
Relationships 101: Building Health and Lasting Connections
This course will familiarize students with the intricacies and problems of close, committed, interpersonal relationships—primarily dating, but also marriage, friendships, and family—and promote self-development in the context of relationships. This course will increase students’ formal knowledge about close relationships, while also improving their chances for success in such relationships. After taking the course, students should be better prepared to work on themselves, build and maintain friendships, choose compatible partners, face inevitable relationship challenges, and experience greater relationship satisfaction.
Compassionate Living: Theory and Practice
Developing compassion for self and others has been shown to reduce perfectionism and self-criticism and improve performance, motivation, and relationships. This course will teach theory and skills aimed at increasing assertiveness, decreasing shame, and developing self-efficacy, contributing to the balanced development of the total person.
Mental Health and Well-Being
Understanding mental health as an important aspect of overall wellness, this course helps individuals to identify common mental health challenges in themselves or others. This course helps to explain stress, anxiety, and depression and gives students tools for managing mental health. Psychological flexibility, including openness, awareness, and engagement, is discussed and practiced by students in this course as tools for living one’s values in the face of challenges.
Intuitive Eating, Culture and Body Image
The aim of this course is to actively engage its students in both learning the research and practical application of intuitive eating, body image, and dismantling diet culture. This course uses evidence to dispel myths and harmful misinformation about dieting and food fear mongering to help students navigate a value based, sustainable, thriving and flexible relationship with food. Mainstream narratives regarding fat bias, fat shame, and weight- based oppression will be debunked and examined as a social justice issue. This course also navigates how gender, media, and culture intersect (and interfere with) having a healthy and values-based relationship with your body.
ST DEV 143 The Science and Practice of Positive Living
The aim of this course is to actively engage students in the learning and application of current, research-backed approaches to positive human growth and psychological well-being. For each topic students will engage in application, through the use of various exercises, outside of class. Students will also share with each other what they have learned in small discussion groups. Active engagement with the course material will increase psychological well-being over the course of the semester. Topics include happiness, gratitude, savoring, mindfulness, character strengths, and more.
ST DEV 214R Special Topics
Understanding Self and Others: Diversity and Intersectionality
This course is designed as a general introduction to issues related to diversity and intersectionality and will equip students with tools to continue learning. Students will gain a broader understanding of themselves and their intersecting identities. Topics covered in this course include race and racism, nationality and immigration, gender and sexism, LGBTQ, class and inequality, and differences of belief.