If parenting feels like a struggle and joy a distant memory, I’ve been there too. Here’s something to play with… A powerful way to create a feeling of connection with children and young people (including teenagers) is by really listening to them. As the feeling of connection increases, the feeling of struggle decreases. If you want to give this a go, you could start by asking yourself these questions… When my child is talking to me, what am I listening to? A lot of the ti

Ever found yourself asking this sort of question? At work? In school? At home? With your children? (How many times before 8am on an average morning?!) I’ve seen time and time again that the number one thing we can do if we want others to listen to us more, is to get better at listening to them. If I’m getting triggered by people not listening to me, this is a great invitation to get curious about how I’m doing with listening to people. Not everyone is open to th

A while back, I saw a post going around with someone saying they didn’t want to be described as resilient because they wanted to be able to feel vulnerable and break down sometimes and not have to just keep going regardless. My definition of resilience definitely does NOT include not feeling feelings or not stopping when we need to rest or regroup. To me, that sounds like the very opposite of resilience. How about you? As I see it, feelings – all of them, including uncomforta

If you’ve been reading my posts this week, you’ll know that I see resilience as a natural capacity that we’re all born with – one that allows us to navigate the ups and downs of life, learn from it all and move forward. All very well you might say, but something must happen in the intervening time between the baby who shows limitless resilience while learning to walk and the older child or teenager who holds back from life due to lack of confidence, self-doubt and worries abo

WHAT DOES "RESILIENCE" MEAN TO YOU? “Resilience for All” empowers schools to connect both students and teachers with resilience. My definition is very simple, and it goes like this: "Resilience = a natural capacity that allows us to deal with and learn useful things from whatever happens in life." By the way, these are just words and they don’t even go halfway to conveying just how amazing humans actually are at handling whatever happens. One of my favourite examples that poi

Because it’s Mental Health Awareness Week, it feels like a good time to share the reason for my blog being very quiet over the last year or so. It’s that I’ve been working really hard on something that helps young people to reconnect with their resilience, confidence and wellbeing. Lots of young people in schools have tried it out now. Their feedback is helping to refine it into an even more useful resource for schools. And this is just the beginning. There’s so much talk abo