27th January 2017 - an opportunity to meet our team and find out more about Calm Schools at Total Fitness, Handforth (over breakfast at 8.00am).
Future in mind: promoting, protecting and improving our children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. A new discussion around children's mental health has been announced in 2015*. Education professionals need to feel confident to promote good mental health. Calm Schools can help train your staff to comply with this new initiative.

* UK Government source.

We still live in a world where old fashioned carrot and stick incentives are used to motivate people. Even top bankers and CEO's of top companies seemingly have to be motivated by bonuses. Are their jobs so unfulfilling and undesirable?

Yvonne Hale and myself have developed a workshop for people working with others on the Autistic Spectrum. This is a developmental and experiential course emanating from our experience as therapists who work with people on the spectrum and also my experience of being of Father of a son with Autism.

Chris Dawson & Jonathan Lloyd spent an hour working with 60 NQTs at Cranage Hall on the 23rd November during the Cheshire East Annual NQT conference. Well-being and stress-management were the focus during an engaging session.

What will help you to improve your performance as a leader? What will improve the well-being of your staff? What will increase the success of the children in your care? It is your ability to handle the effects of 'unwanted demand', commonly known as 'stress'.

We all have a sense of what stress is. We know that too much of it is harmful and undermining. Staff can be absent – often for a lengthy period of time – with 'work related stress'. So, what is it and how can we help ourselves to prevent and manage it more effectively? How can we help our staff to do the same?

"What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." Jane Goodall

First there were administrators, then managers and now leaders. From the Harvard Business School to the Cranfield School of Management and leading companies like Google, there has come a realisation that if leadership is about influencing others, then, as John C. Maxwell puts it, "Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flow charts. It is about one life influencing another."

Leading, like teaching, is done first and foremost by example, not by techniques, systems and theories. Influence comes from the inside. It comes as a result of who we are and how we are, what we say, how we say it and what we do. As Maya Angelou observes, " I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

1.Choose

Stress is our subjective response to unwanted demand – so if we choose to do something – like the washing up, shopping, or a job – it will be less stressful. Also, remember, staying where you are is also a choice.

Put simply, happiness is feeling good – enjoying life and and wanting the feeling to continue. Unhappiness is feeling bad and wishing things were different. Happy people tend to have more robust immune systems and lower levels of stress-causing cortisol.

Life is definitely challenging! However we can learn to increase our happiness by adopting certain approaches as opposed to others. Psychologists have studied what makes for a happy life:

Giving – Do things for others
Relating -- Connect with people
Exercising – Take care of your body
Appreciating – Notice the world around you
Trying out – Keep learning new things

One of the ways in which you can be kind to yourself is by setting boundaries: "If the sum of your daily stressors were a pie, how big would be the slice representing worries that are truly yours alone? Half? A quarter? A sliver? Your friend's pending divorce, your sister's overspent credit card, even your son's college application, are all cause for compassion – but recognising the difference between caring about someone else's problems and taking them on as your own can make the difference between stress and serenity."
From 52 Ways to Find Serenity, Chronicle Books, USA.

In the hurly burly of school life, turn to your breathing and slow it down. It works miracles. Use the index finger of one hand to trace slowly round the thumb and fingers of your other hand. Breathe in as you go up a finger and out as you go down.