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Services

Business

Wellbeing is essential within organisations and is a strategic issue – Boards take it seriously because it helps them to achieve the business level outcomes they value. For that reason the issue is now owned at HR Director level and the best organisations are making efforts to manage it in an integrated and measurable way.

Why as a business, are you investing in wellbeing: is it to reduce sickness absence, to improve productivity and performance, just for the outcome of improved wellbeing in itself, or for another reason?

Coaching Direct will help you determine what you’re already doing that contributes to your wellbeing goals. You and your employees may be surprised by how much you already do!

We help businesses to build their specific business case for investing in wellbeing – this includes defining the goals, establishing a baseline measure of wellbeing, designing interventions that can be ‘mainstreamed’ into existing business and HR processes and, of course, evaluating success. We also support your efforts to co-ordinate wellbeing activity under a single wellbeing brand, from measurement through training and development to health promotion schemes.

With experience across a broad range of sectors and organisations, we can help you fully integrate the work you have already done and unlock the full value of your wellbeing investment. Working with a stakeholder group or individual client we offer a step-by-step, action orientated approach that will enable you to manage wellbeing.

Individuals 

Coaching Direct can also work with individuals to help identify reasons for being stuck in a cycle life’s challenges. Firstly identifying the problem with analysis and the formulation of a plan are the first steps. Do you have a dream a desire an aspiration? Have you realised these, if not, then why? These are some of the questions that you may have asked yourself. If you have never really given this much thought, then you may have lost sight of your dream. How do you get back on track? How do you start to achieve your dream if you’ve never started? Your psycho-social environment may not be support you achieving your goals. Coaching Direct will assist you in putting measures in place to address your needs.

Schools

Coaching Direct offers a bespoke program for schools whom have children that demonstrate challenging behaviour and who do not engage. Coaching direct over a 10-week program that aims to;

  • Identify with the child why they feel the way they do
  • Listen to their story
  • Explore strengths and areas of difficulties
  • Identify their aspirations, dreams and desires
  • Formulate a plan strategy to achieve their goals.
  • Target setting
  • Help them understand the value of learning
  • Reduce dysfunctional/disruptive behaviour
  • Help them understand the nature and value of relationships.
  • Strategies for improving motivation.

We at coaching direct understand that no matter what age you are the recognition of your inner most passions desires dreams aspirations are key to the experience you encounter throughout your life journey.

Will you end up having a job or a career.?

We also understand the organic and psychological difficulties of the teenage mind. We have partnered with author of my teen brain to be able to better understand the challenges experienced by young adults.

Overview of The Coaching Direct Program

Self-Awareness, Realisation and actualisation 

  • Understanding individual responsibilities and the ability to process the realisation/actualisation and its pertinence in the young adults world.

Conflict and behaviour management 

  • Young people can experience internal conflict due to perceived insurmountable difficulties. This permeates into every aspect of their lives that they struggle to manage. Coaching direct will assist young adults in their understanding and aim to empower constructive self-management.

Perceptional Awareness to achieve self-efficacy 

  • We are all beholden to our perception that shapes the world we live in. Helping young people to understand the connectivity of Perceptional awareness help move towards Self efficacy(Albert Bandura social cognitive theory)  which is the strength in one’s belief driving the  ability to complete tasks and achieve goals.

Autonomic Behavioural and Cognitive functioning 

  • How we think affects our feelings and behaviour…change the thought and you change your world!  

What is Mindfulness?

There are a number of definitions for mindfulness. Please note our description and examples to help you understand its nature.

First of all, mindfulness involves paying attention “on purpose”. Mindfulness involves a conscious direction of our awareness. We sometimes talk about “mindfulness” and “awareness” as if they were interchangeable terms, but that’s not a good habit to get into. A person maybe aware they are irritable, but that wouldn’t mean that they were being mindful of their irritability. In order to be mindful they have to be purposefully aware of themselves not just vaguely and habitually aware.

Mindfulness is an emotionally non-reactive state. We don’t judge that this experience is good and that one is bad. Or if we do make those judgment’s we simply notice them and let go of them. We don’t get upset because we’re experiencing something we don’t want to be experiencing or because we’re not experiencing what we would rather be experiencing. We simply accept whatever arises. We observe it mindfully. We notice it arising, passing through us, and ceasing to exist.

Whether it’s a pleasant experience or a painful experience we treat it the same way.

Cognitively, mindfulness is aware that certain experiences are pleasant and some are unpleasant, but on an emotional level we simply don’t react. We call this “equanimity” — stillness and balance of mind.

The simplest way to practice mindfulness is to sit in a straight- backed chair, close your eyes, and focus on the sensations that your breath makes as it flows into and out of your body. As your mind begins to chase after different thoughts, bring your awareness back to the sensations of the breath.

We at coaching Direct will teach you this essential tool for self mastery to help you with the stress and pressure of everyday life weather your at school college University or working Mindfulness is a valuable and necessary skill to have to enhance all aspects of your life. The great thing is its so easy to apply and you can practice it anywhere anytime.

Personal resilience

It is essential to have build and maintain personal resilience to successfully maintain high performance and wellbeing.  It’s fundamental to understand what influences personal resilience and how to build it.

At Coaching Direct we will explore with your employee as to what provides this understanding and empowers individuals to take control of their own health and wellbeing. We will personalise employee support, helping you hit the business’ wellbeing goals.

Resilience is a precious quality that can be developed and its development can take a variety of forms: enabling employees to create a resilient culture helping managers to create an environment that stimulates and nurtures resilience in their teams or empowering employees to take responsibility for their own resilience. Drawing upon the latest thinking and research in the field, teams and individuals.

Children and young adults can develop this skill that will support them throughout their life. With you we will develop a resilience program that will ensure that your empowered to work towards reaching your true potential.

Pressure Vs. Stress

Unrealistic stress or manageable pressure?

Stress and Pressure – two words that are often used interchangeably, yet they have very different meanings and consequently need to be dealt with in different ways.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) take the lead in the UK on workplace stress and treat it as a health, safety and welfare at work issue. They produce management Standards for tackling workplace stress and monitor the statistics nationally. Their latest report for the 2011/12 year reported the number of cases of work related stress as 428,000 almost 40% of the total number of work related illnesses. The levels of stress from the health and social care sector were among the top four highest with nurses and teachers featuring very highly.

The main causes of work related pressure and stress were identified as being the same as when the Management Standards were introduced in 2008 including:

  • Lack of management support
  • Work related violence and bullying

This is a worrying trend for two main reasons:

  • Employees will leave resulting in skills gaps and problems with continuity of service delivery.
  • Practices thrive best when they have a stable, well motivated team who know what they are doing.
  • If employees continue to work under increasing levels of stress, they become less efficient and less effective. Team members often leave due to the problems of working for inconsistent and panic prone managers

Tackling stress at work makes very good business sense – especially for practices that value their staff as their main asset and want to ensure that they can work to their maximum capacity.

PRESSURE OR STRESS

The first step to managing the situation effectively is to identify the problem. Stress and pressure do have significant meanings in this context.

Pressure is a positive aspect of life and work for most people. Many of us need to have standards, targets and deadlines to push us towards good performance. Pressure is what I feel as the need to perform – and everyone has an optimum level of pressure that brings about their best performance. It can be seen as pressure when I feel that it is achievable. I might have to work hard, take some risks, challenge myself, change or accept new things – but it is manageable. I feel a level of control over the situation.

Stress, on the other hand, occurs when I no longer feel in control. That what is being demanded of me is not management no matter how organised, effective or efficient I become.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE MANAGER

Good management is the key to an effectively business. The HSE cite the following among their main causes of workplace stress:

  • Unrealistic work demands
  • Lack of control over aspects of work
  • Poor working relationships
  • Unclear roles
  • Lack of managerial support
  • In effective communication over change

So a lot rests with the ability of the manager, to recognise, their own levels of pressure and take action when it begins to get out of control. There are some important yet simple strategies managers can adopt to reduce the negative impact of stress on themselves and their team:

  • Positive thinking – a key tip is to listen to what your mind talks about. If you are constantly hearing negative thoughts such as “I can’t” “it’s too much” “there just isn’t enough “. Too many negative thoughts can start to lead to believing these things. They need to be replaced by more positive yet realistic thoughts. When you reach the end of a very tough day – always take time to think of at least one positive thing that has happened and make that your final work thought of the day.
  • Keep things in perspective. No one can completely control their surroundings or their circumstances. But you can control how you respond to them. Traffic that is surely going to delay you getting to a meeting on time is out of your control. Keep your response in perspective. Think about what you can do  – “pull over and ring the organiser to let them know; spend the time preparing what you want to say at the meeting; if you are going to miss it plan how you will communicate what you need to in an email”
  • Try not to keep asking yourself “what if …” because this often leads to negative thoughts. If you do start doing this make sure you balance “what’s the worst that can happen?” with “and what’s the best that can happen?” If you like the second option more, work out what you might do to make that the more likely outcome.

Many people say that they work better under pressure – which is probably true for most people. Yet we all need to be aware of where positive aspects of pressure tip over into stress and start to reduce your capability as a manager. Teams need a positive manager who is in control and performing well. Stress is one thing that will hamper your ability to perform, so make sure you watch out for signs of stress in yourself as well as in the team members.