Posts

I need to talk about social media...

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Dog Selfie from Instagram  I need to talk about social media. I am old enough to remember when it didn’t exist (heck, I am old enough to remember when mobile phones didn’t exist but that’s another post) but bizarrely I don’t remember what that time was like? Is that because my memory is poor (anyone who knows me is screaming yes at their screen right now) or is it because social media has become so all pervasive that very few of us can imagine our lives without it. Even those who are not part of the social media circus will know that it exists and feeds into (controls?) so much of our everyday life. Everything from Governments announcing policy decisions on it to people spending an entire day watching cat videos. I have a mixed and complicated relationship with social media, at times spending vast amounts of time looking at stuff of no real relevance, other times using it for valid work purposes and sometimes seeking validation through the ubiquitous selfie. However, recently I t...
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The Power of Normalising Everyday Emotions

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  “It’s good to talk” or “a problem shared is a problem halved” will be familiar phrases to many of us and have been used as throw away lines, well-meant clichés or indeed as part of mental health campaigns. There has been much debate in the media recently over whether or not mental health is over diagnosed and we may well know people who talk about struggling from anxiety when in actual fact they are simply feeling anxious – a perfectly normal and reasonable feeling which is not a problem if named and managed well. We will also know people at the other end of the scale who suffer from crippling anxiety which stop them leaving the house or working or engaging with others in a meaningful way and require professional help to tackle it. Both are real, both are valid and both need support of different kinds and levels. A better understanding of what emotional health is and why it is important might be the answer to this polarised debate. In the Demos report Strong Foundations Why ...
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Finding Hope

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  “You find hope the way you find happiness — you give it to someone else and borrow a little of it back.” Robert Brault As many in the Civil Society Sector will know, times are hard at the moment and despite the sense of purpose and joy we often feel from the work we do there is an additional heaviness right now. This is exacerbated by what else is going on in the world and it can be tough to find the happiness and hope we need. That’s why I’m writing this, because last week I unexpectedly found both hope and happiness in abundance from a range of different places. Firstly, our friends at The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood published their Shaping Us Framework . A fantastic piece of research which pulls together and helps us understand the social and emotional skills that matter the most. Here at The Centre for Emotional Health we know how important these skills are and this great document pulls together a range of thinking to help give people a common language ...
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We want to be together...

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 Last week was National Work Life Week organised by our friends at Working Families and it also coincided with a Team Emotional Health day for us at The Centre for Emotional Health. We hold three of these a year when the whole staff team, both hybrid and remote workers gather together to think, collaborate and have fun. We spent time revisiting our strategic plan, checking in with our strategic goals and seeing what actions we had completed to achieve these goals and what had changed a year into our plan. We also considered some impact data and were reminded about why we do what we do by watching a video of some parents discussing how attending The Nurturing Programme had positively impacted their lives. Later in the day we spent time together trying Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by using lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum making a feature of the cracks. As well as being a fun activity to do together it also reminded us tha...
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How do you stay so positive?

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  As anyone who follows me on Instagram (@peterleonard200) can tell you – I love a good meme. I only post those that either make me chuckle or which resonate with me in some way. One I reposted yesterday resonated massively with me.  As Chief Executive of The Centre for Emotional Health I spend a great deal of my time talking about the importance of emotional health. I’m passionate about it because I have seen how it has benefitted me. I have written elsewhere about my experiences of so-called conversion therapy and anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric at the hands of the Church of England and the damaging impact it has had on me throughout my life. Years of therapy and support from friends and family mean that although this can never be undone and the scars remain, I have moved on from allowing it to hold me back. That said there are days when something happens which triggers the memories and the symptoms arise again. When it does occur these days there is one dominant emotion which rises...
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So, can you tell me why you want this job?

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  We are interviewing for a new Impact and Research Coordinator at The Centre for Emotional Health this week. Those of us in the office have done our best to help relax candidates as they arrive early to avoid the infamous Oxford traffic and await their interviews. We have also been sharing our previous interview experiences with each other, both good and bad. I remember arriving for one interview a whole day early! I’m sure it was them who got the date wrong and not me and I got the job anyway even if I did leave three months later! Every single time a new person joins a team the team changes as that person brings their unique skills, gifts and presence with them and as the existing team responds and adapts accordingly. Every single role in an organisation is significant and it is important to appoint the right person for the role and for the team. It got me reflecting on the whole interview process. As a student, then as a teacher, I was always an advocate of continual assess...
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Where do you get your energy from?

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  I have been working over the summer while everyone else had their break. That was my choice and I am shortly heading off for a week so no sympathy needed ! As so many of the meetings and events I would normally take part in didn’t happen over the summer the vast majority of what I was doing was the less fun part of being a charity CEO. Lots of administration and budgets and finance and governance. All extremely valuable and necessary but not something which necessarily fires me up! This week meetings and events have started up again and on Tuesday I had the delight of attending the autumn meeting of the Emotional Health Alliance. A group of about 40 or so organisations that we at The Centre for Emotional Health convene, people who understand emotional health as the important thread which runs through the work of all the member organisations. We spent time sharing what had been going on for us recently, any big events coming up and considering some new research around empathy, t...
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