THSC and Me
Rhys Ward - Founder
Firstly I would like to thank you for taking the time to visit this website. A lot of planning has gone into the creation of TheHeadStrongClub and I am very proud of what we have thus far. If you are interested in the thought process and development behind this brand, keep reading this blog.
My name is Rhys Ward and I am the founder of TheHeadStrongClub.
I am originally from Athlone, Co. Westmeath, but I am currently attending Maynooth University (NUIM); studying History and English.
Since my time in the Leaving Cert, I have always felt that speech and communication were crucial in your personal development but it wasn’t until I started college that I discovered the importance of reading and writing; studying English helped me foster this interest.
I steadily increased my reading and writing skills and my speaking skills followed suit. Once I enrolled into my second year of college (where I am now as of writing this), my literacy interests had surpassed a mere intrigue into poetry and non-fiction; and formed into an engrossment in journaling, journalism and blogging.
Although I had this newfound interest, I wasn’t sure if I had anything valuable to share with people. For the most part I only specialised (if you could even use that word) in a very select few areas. I was interested in sport, I loved the gym and exercising and eating healthy. However, those markets were well and truly flooded with world-renowned Instagram Influencers and Internet personalities with their fitness courses and cookbooks. At this point, I realised that I would probably have to wait until after my degree before I could begin any sort of Writing as a hobby let alone a job.
The months went on in my second year of college and I soon began journaling and documenting the events of each day (this is what I would classify as the conception of THSC). After about 2-3 months of journaling, I decided to read back over what I had recorded; and something struck me… Each day that I had been documenting seemed to get increasingly worse as I read through the journal; something I never noticed until right then. Quite suddenly I decided to make a change in my life and I started reading not only non-fiction but Self-Help books. These books detailed WHY people feel certain ways and HOW to control emotions and situations. So far, my personal favourite is Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; what a read!
To cut a long story short, these books helped me a lot and made me realise things about myself and other people. I became much more tolerant and open-minded. This lead to me being able to accept things that were thrown at me that I typically would have lashed out against.
However, the increased reading did not quell my aspirations of writing. I began plotting possible avenues I could take that would lead to reality where I could write about something that A) I was passionate about, B) I had some level of knowledge and understanding on, and C) Something that wasn’t too mainstream and that was niche.
After a bit of research, I realised that there was a lack of popular and influential Wellbeing Blogs based in Ireland. I came across the odd few but none that seemed to have any sort of monopoly. That’s when TheHeadStrongClub was born. I knew I wanted to integrate the motivation and inspiration the books gave me while teaching me to clean up my mental health.
I began looking online on how to create a blog while in the meantime I set up an Instagram page to help gain a bit of a following for the launch… and here we are barely two days old.
So now you know!
I hope you enjoy the content to come!
Finally, another huge Thank You for contributing to TheHeadStrongClub.