Resilience Unravelled

Welcome to 2022! This week Dr Russell Thackeray muses on the recent arrival of 2022 and suggests some ideas to make the most of the year. He focuses some thoughts on the nature of resolutions as opposed to goals and challenges us to think more creatively about where and why we are aiming as people often understate their long term ambitions. There will also some thoughts around choices and the natu...

Critical thinking is essential in helping teens work through a problem and realise what is going to move them forward so they get the result they want. Schools can’t be responsible for everything so parents need to be responsible for the provision of a parent model. A parent helping guide their child through making a decision is extremely powerful but Valerie often finds that although great stride...

Another chance to listen to last year's Christmas podcast from Dr. Russell Thackeray. In it he talks about why resilience is so important at this time of year and also explains the need to stop and rejuvanate ourselves and/or invest in ourselves to plan forward. Finally, he discusses how the narrative we use can help our mental state and how confirmation bias can help give us the things we believe...

Whatever the size of a dispute, the issue at hand is usually not the problem. People generally prefer peace so only involve conflict if they feel there is no other way to get resolution. As we are not generally trained in ways to resolve conflict it is difficult to know how to deal with anger or upset without being triggered yourself. One of the key foundational skills of life therefore is learnin...

MS is a life limiting illness but people can choose how to look at it, deal with it and live with it. It can be very easy to feel out of control and slip into a depressive zone but manipulating the way you use your brain can help deal not only with MS, but also other illnesses or situations.  As well as mindset, there are many other things that can interfere with how your body functions. What...

There are many types of yoga. Hatha, Vinyasa, Kundalini, Restorative and Laughter for example, and Paul Denniston uses elements from each in his Grief Yoga practice. Paul designed Grief Yoga to help with his challenging emotions of anxiety and grief by releasing pain to fund more empowerment and love. Paul feels that we can have physical pain in the body that is a manifestation of suppressed grief...

Derek Newborn had always had a vision of how his life would be. He achieved everything he thought he wanted but, on the inside, abandonment issues from his past meant he felt extremely empty. The only thing he was concerned about was filling the emptiness he felt. and he used self-sabotaging behaviours to try to find the peaceful feeling he felt he was missing. Derek's fear outweighed any love he...

When Clarke was diagnosed with Polymyositis he was depressed, angry, mad at the world but also helpless. Because the disease had progressed very quickly it was difficult to understand what was happening and as his body was declining, his mind was driving him downward as well. At the time Clarke didn't really know how much mindset can affect physical health but an experience he had when he thought...

Nicki feels that we don’t talk about grief and loss and what we go through in the early days enough. There is a lot of information about grief but lots of it is irrelevant. We need to have an idea of hope and a path towards it but we don't need to have someone telling us it'll all be great. Logically, we know we’ll come out the other side and that we’ll get back to what will be a new normality wit...

Jeff Martinovich has had many dark days but, when he looks back on the things that happened, he feels the key to getting through was perseverance and resilience. He thinks you have to dig deep to find strength you maybe don't know you have so you can find a way to keep fighting and grow so you can deal with even bigger challenges.  

Kathy Hagler partners with organsations through good times, crises, challenges, and obstacles, and helps to move their culture, climate, and character forward with clear vision, strategic intent, and success in an everchanging world. She says that organisations are similar to human beings - both have wounds and, like people, organisations can break and can heal.  We all carry wounds in our bo...

David’s Richman's career working for a Wall Street firm was incredibly stressful. He suffered from both external and self-inflicted stress, was overweight and a smoker, did no exercise and had four-year old twins, as well being in a relationship with an abusive alcoholic. He needed to make a change but it wasn’t until his only sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer that he started to change his...

Eating disorders cross gender, race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic groups and are among the deadliest of mental illnesses. Anyone caught in the downward spiral of continually obsessing about food, weight, and body image, needs support to free themselves. People not suffering from an eating disorder often believe that saying “No!” to self-destructive behaviors should be easy but it’s not. I...

The word 'sensitive' can be seen to have some negative correlations for men by being thought of a ‘weak’ characteristic. Frailty or vulnerability are things men cannot allow themselves to be and this may have led to the increase in suicide in men because they can’t recognise themselves as being vulnerable in any way. Cultural icons in films and books supersede all the emotions people have so there...

Studies have shown that love after 50 can be more satisfying than at any other stage in life. People are more emotionally stable, more focused on the present and know not only what they have to have, but also what they can live without. Partnering is no longer about building a family, career and fortune. It’s about sharing intimacy as grounded individuals.

There are many people trying deal with substance abuse and addiction who don't talk about it because of the stigma they feel surrounds it. Encouraging difficult conversations and honest education around these issues, can help break down the stigma and ensure that those who struggle receive the help they deserve.  

Sometimes it takes a catastrophic event to wake us up, something that upends life as we know it. These turning points can be terrifying but we all encounter them in our lives. The real question is, 'how will we face them'? Although we want to hang on to what’s 'normal', disruptive moments are exactly what’s needed to transform ourselves and the world around us. Radha Ruparell is a global cross-sec...

Claudia Tinnirello is originally from Sicily but has lived in England since 2005. Not being an English native speaker, Claudia understands the struggles of overcoming judgement and the fear of making mistakes when speaking a foreign language. She has however discovered ways of becoming a better and confident public speaker by sharing her voice in many different ways - an international bestselling...

Prior to her professional life as a coach and consultant, Jennifer or Jen Crowley thought she had life she was meant to have. Married with a son, she also had a high profile job as Vice President of a large wine distribution company. She then went through what she refers to as a six year character building period before deciding she needed to follow a completely different path and left her success...

Pat Moffett married his wife Carmen in 1976 and they raised five children together.  Then, in 1998 Carmen was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's. After years of struggling with the disease, she was finally admitted to a nursing home and Pat then wrote his book ‘Ice Cream in the Cupboard’ about their story post diagnosis. After Carmen's death in 2010, Pat continued to work with the Alzheim...

Wendy Tamis Robbins anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and panic disorders started when she was a young child growing up in a volatile household. Anxiety controlled her life well into adulthood, to the point of agoraphobia. Despite this, she worked her way through Dartmouth College and law school before, in her 30s, she set her mind to overcoming the anxiety and panic attacks that increasingly limited...

We all work towards a code, a pattern or belief system that we follow in life. This can be very difficult to change and to do so we need to deliberately step outside the code to find what is meaningful to us or to build the life we want to make for ourselves. If we create a picture beyond our current code, it becomes the motivation and the key to break it.

"There is no evidence to link the severity of pain with the amount of tissue damage. If the body heals and the pain persists it may be more about whether we are anxious, depressed or have negative beliefs about pain rather than the extent of the injury. Our attitude to pain can also affect the level of pain we feel as does our personality and behaviour."

Through counselling, Gam anon and researching addiction, Erica managed to separate the person from the addiction. The person she married was not the person who did those reckless things, but there was much anger and hurt. She couldn't throw the towel though because she knew it was his addiction that was causing his behaviour. When she first found out about the gambling she felt duped and angry but...

Camp Jabberwocky was one of the first sleep over camps for people with serious disabilities. In 1953, UK actress Helen Lamb was working in Massachusetts as a speech therapist. She worked with some children who were in wheelchairs and it made her angry that they were unable to enjoy the summer experiences other children had. In the summer of 1953 she took three kids and one helper away for the firs...