Our innovative approach to transforming relationships has evolved since 2002 using a heart to heart connection. It has been co-created with 1,000’s of children, young people, parents and professionals working in homes, schools and Children’s Centres, to achieve the transformational changes from our approach. An open mind is the fundamental requirement.
Our purpose is to help participants create self-realisation and personal empowerment, to connect them to their innate abilities and wisdom, in order to trust their instincts/intuition/gut feelings and love themselves.
The theoretical approach is a rich mixture of personal life coaching, mindfulness and emotional literacy techniques, underpinned by neuroscience and founded in the work of Perls, Kolb, Jung and Rogers.
- Fritz Perls (1893-1970) developed Gestalt Therapy, which focused on raising self-awareness in order to distinguish between a person’s true nature and the personality they have developed in order to adapt to their environment. By becoming aware of their true nature, a person can then identify ways to achieve what makes them happy.
- David Kolb (1939) has developed a theory (experiential learning) on the ways in which adults more successfully learn by doing. He believes that we learn best by having hands-on experience of whatever it is we are learning and by then reflecting on our experiences, which then leads to greater absorption of the subject matter.
- Carl Jung (1875-1961) made a huge contribution to the way in which we view the nature of human development and existence. One of these contributions was the idea of the Collective Unconscious, which is the linking of all people in the deepest part of our minds.
- Carl Rogers (1902-1987) developed the person-centred psychotherapy approach in which he believed that if a person was provided with a totally accepting, non-judgemental relationship they would then be able to resolve their difficulties and find ways to successfully restructure their lives.
Our Theory of Change for Local Authorities.
Our Learning Framework enables a profound learning experience of your neurobiological potential, to intuitively take what you need from the program to make systemic transformational changes.
Independent Research
Our unique approach has been independently evaluated by Canterbury Christ Church University that proves the effectiveness of our Parent Champion program in the most challenging environments of disadvantaged families.
The Education Policy Institute, in it’s Annual Report 2018 on the Key Drivers of the Disadvantage Gap Literature Review, acknowledges the value of our approach with our whole school program. Working with teachers, students and parents in a collaborative partnership is exactly what’s called for in the Conclusion of the report, a holistic life-course approach.
Our unique personal development approach a whole school culture change approach.
Our core offering is a powerful combination of:
- Personal life coaching to empower one to step out of their comfort zone, identify and achieve their goals.
- Tailored mindfulness to calm the mind and experience living in the moment.
- Emotional literacy techniques to understand how thoughts, feelings, emotions and actions can be changed and managed.
Personal Life Coaching
I discovered the power of life coaching in 2002 and what I loved about it, is that the 2 main doctrines are self-realisation and self-responsibility. It starts with building self-esteem and confidence and builds into personal empowerment and self responsibility.
We started using coaching techniques with children and young people with wonderful results. We also discovered that they weren’t emotionally mature enough to stay resourceful in a challenging environment, so logically we focussed on changing the 2 groups most influential, families and schools.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is that you have to want a different result badly enough to step out of your comfort zone, I believe that 95% of people won’t take that step? It’s not an intervention that’s done to you, it’s a collaboration where we work together experientially, and it will fundamentally transform your life, if you choose!
Energetic connection (Mindfulness)
Jon Kabat-Zinn created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and he says “It’s a way of being” which is the foundation for all our programs.
Our Unique Selling Point is a concept called the ‘energetic connection’.
You are connected to everybody (and the Universe) by the energy that surrounds your body. When you have a relationship with others, that energy interacts with them both on a physical and a subtle level. If you feel good emotions – love, happiness, joy, contentment – that energy flows out from your heart; it has an effect on your physiology and on those around you. When you concentrate on fostering this heartfelt emotion and direct it towards others, you connect more deeply with them on every level.
How can we help you deepen your connection?
- We use a guided meditation to connect your higher self (superconscious mind) to the higher self of the person you have chosen to work with. This bypasses your conscious mind and any feelings of emotional negativity and helps you connect to each other at a deeper level. As a result of this, you may find yourself becoming increasingly aware of a wider worldview.
- You realise YOU are in control of your thoughts, feelings and emotions – YOU are enough and you will feel inspired to change your life!
- With practice, you can expand your level of consciousness beyond your conscious mind/ego-self and experience your true spiritual nature, that is a more profound connection to your higher self.
- During the programme you will learn to trust yourself and will have the experience, capacity and desire to make different and long-lasting life changes.
The better you feel about yourself the more positive energy you give out and the deeper your connection to those around you. Children are sensitive and are drawn to adults emitting positive energy and integrity. They have innate gifts, ability and wisdom, all of which need to be nurtured.
These steps release oxytocin, which in turn stimulates the production of serotonin and dopamine. Oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine together create feelings of wellbeing, contentment and trust. Feelings of wellbeing, contentment and trust are the optimal criteria for learning and neuroplastic change, creating new neural pathways (Kosfeld et al., 2005).
We first started talking about the energetic connection in 2004 and now we find neuroscience has discovered that we have complex, adaptive and functional brains in both our heart and gut, called the cardiac and enteric brains respectively. Science is finally catching up with deep insights from esoteric and spiritual traditions informing us for thousands of years about these three powerful intelligences of head, heart and gut.
Neuroscience
An enormous and rapidly evolving methodology. Here’s a very straightforward explanation for a complex science from Daniel Goleman’s ‘Social Intelligence’:
“Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us affect the brain – and so the body – of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.”
Positive connections with others, causes a release of oxytocin. Oxytocin stimulates serotonin and dopamine production creating experiences of contentment and ideal states for learning and neuroplastic change, where facilitative coaching is the mode of change.
In “Why Love Matters” by Sue Gerhardt where she is talking about the development of brains in babies, she says the ‘Orbitofrontal cortex is found behind the eyes and is a big part of our story as it plays a key role in our emotional life’. So it struck me that there may be a link between the Orbitofrontal cortex and the third eye? Research at the University of Leipzig shows that the human OFC is activated during intuitive coherence judgements. And the third eye is said to be located around the middle of the forehead, slightly above the junction of the eyebrows.
Emotional literacy
Emotional literacy enables us to communicate and understand our emotions appropriately and effectively with others and lead happier, more satisfying lives. We believe that the recognition and ability to use the ‘energetic connection’ in relationships with others, whether they are part of our immediate family, friends, colleagues or any of the others we come into contact with is the foundation of emotional literacy.
Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is created by a combination of the above methodologies
