The Emotional Health Coach

  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...

It’s Monday morning and I have just arrived in the office. This is the last day where I can have a more leisurely commute from my home in Hampshire to my offices in Oxford. Schools start back properly tomorrow for the autumn term after the long holidays and various inset days. For me that means the flexibility of leaving home pretty much anytime is gone and in order to avoid the worst traffic delays I need to have left the house by 6am or not even attempt it until gone 9am. In the great scheme of things it isn’t the worst problem in the world but I am stuck by how my year is now marked by journey times to and from work. Of course, when I was a teacher, it was very much marked by school terms for different reasons. I wonder what the school holidays and terms mean to you? For some reading this it will be all about spending time with the children, either as parents and carers or as aunties, uncles, grandparents and friends, both quality time and keeping them occupied! For others it might ...