Viewing blogs by tag: mental-wellbeing
The struggle is real
Kieran Murphy | 18th February 2022
A recent BBC News article reported a huge rise in severe mental health difficulties in children and young people in the past year, sadly this is a statistic that is very true and close to home.Over the past year we have seen an increase in the number of children and young people needing support through mentoring. Thankfully for many this has provid
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Learning to be vulnerable
Elizabeth Feltoe | 11th February 2022
In this guest blog friend of Phase, Rebekah Bacon, talks to us about vulnerability - what it is, when we notice it and how we can benefit from being more vulnerable with people.A little while ago, I sat down with Kieran (the director of Phase) to talk about vulnerability. When working with young people to build resilience and promote wellbeing, it’
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Step back to move forward
Elizabeth Feltoe | 17th September 2021
Earlier this week the Phase team went on retreat. We took two days out to spend time learning together, reflecting and thinking, and hanging out together as a group of friends and colleagues. It’s different from your standard team away day in that we didn’t once talk about KPIs, our vision for work, improvements we could make to our services, or wh
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Happy New Year Hitchin
Elizabeth Feltoe | 9th January 2021
Where do we start then, friends?! There’s so much to say but we’ll keep this brief.Phase knows that the start of 2021 has been difficult and upsetting, to put it mildly. You may be experiencing anxiety, stress and worry for many people in Hitchin (and of course further afield wherever you are). Schools are closed to most pupils, exams have been can
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World Mental Health Day
Elizabeth Feltoe | 9th October 2020
Tomorrow (10th October) it’s World Mental Health Day.This is the day that the World Health Organisation uses to highlight mental health issues, and this year’s theme is ‘mental health for all’.Now, perhaps more than ever, we are talking more about how we feel inside our heads. We are all aware that for some people the consequence of lockdown was in
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"The beautiful thing about learning is no one can take it away from you." B.B. King
Hannah Dengate | 20th July 2020
I wonder what comes to mind when you hear the word learning? Maybe it’s education, reading or exams! Does learning bring you enjoyment?Learning can take many different forms, from education, to developing a new skill, to challenging yourself to step out of your comfort zone. As a Phase team we have recently completed the Gallup Strengths Finder te
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Time to replenish
Elizabeth Feltoe | 5th July 2020
In the second of her series for Phase looking at finding and using our strengths, Sarah Crittenden makes some suggestions for finding space for R&R... we like the sound of that!Someone said to me the other day that they thought their current lifestyle wasn't so much 'working from home' as 'living at work'. Can anyone else relate to this?! Now w
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Brain Twister!
Amanda Maylin | 25th May 2020
Do you find that sometimes you have rigid thoughts in your head that you can’t seem to change, even if you really want to? I’ve been wondering about that recently…Whilst on holiday in February this year I found an interesting article by Lee Griggs about riding a Backwards Brain Bike (ie where turning the handles has the opposite effect on the steer
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Coping with Change
Hannah Dengate | 8th May 2020
We are in a time where we are all having to adapt, find new routines and rhythms, as what we previously knew and understood has changed. As I was reflecting on how we cope with change, and what I have personally found helpful during this time, three things came to mind, they were Recognise, Routine and Resilience. So let's explore these a little bi
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Virtual Mentoring
Kieran Murphy | 2nd April 2020
As we all go through this incredibly difficult season of isolation where routines, rhythms and everyday normality has been removed, it can make us feel lost, fearful and uncertain about what the future holds.At Phase we are passionate about equipping children and young people to journeying through adolescence, whereby they don't just survive but th
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Random Acts of Kindness
Emily Croucher | 14th February 2020
Have you ever carried out a random act of kindness? Or been on the receiving end of one? There are some amazing stories I have heard of incredible acts of generosity. A friend recently told me of a time when he was making the huge and difficult choice to quit his job and pursue something completely different. He was unsure and doubting his decision
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Blue Monday...
Hannah Dengate | 17th January 2020
This coming Monday (20th January) has gained the name Blue Monday. The third Monday in January is supposedly the day when due to a number of factors including the weather, failure to stick to new year’s resolutions, debt level, Christmas seeming a long time ago, people are feeling at their lowest. A formula for calculating this day has even been d
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How have you got on?
Amanda Maylin | 28th September 2019
At a recent On Your Mark’s workshop run by Phase with Year 6 students we asked students to show, on a spectrum of extremely excited to extremely worried, how they were feeling about starting at Secondary school next year. I was talking to the students who were extremely excited. Asking one girl why she was so excited, she replied “I always see the
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Start how you mean to go on
Kieran Murphy | 6th September 2019
New school year, new start. A new start to me often feels like starting a new exercise book when I was at school, where I would promise to myself to keep this one neat, clean and tidy. Sadly it was something that I rarely managed. But I’m old and wiser (or at least I like to think so!). So how do we start the way we mean to go? How do we move from
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Top tips to build resilience
Kieran Murphy | 27th June 2019
Resilience is a bit of a buzz word right now, but what is it, why is it needed and most importantly, how do we build it? In this blog post I want to answer these questions and give you 10 great tips on how to build your resilience whether your a teenager or a have few more years on the clock. What is resilience? Resilience is our abilty to cope wi
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