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Meet the team Peter loves cooking, going to the gym, kayaking and walking his dog Lyra! Peter Leonard Chief Executive Contact Peter Sally loves travelling, fruit and nut chocolate and her Jack Russell Fern. Sally Alden Director of Funding & External Relations Contact Sally Rowen loves music, football and is a keen cyclist. Rowen Smith Director of Training ​ Contact Rowen Pip enjoys paddleboarding, meals out and walks on Dartmoor. Pip Collyer Director of Operations ​ Contact Pip Rebecca loves gardening, growing vegetables, and collecting house plants (especially orchids!). She started working at The Centre for Emotional Health in 2016. Rebecca Carrott Management Accountant Contact Rebecca Thomas is a very keen cook, and enjoys reading (especially history and fantasy), rural hill walking, painting, and playing strategy board games. Thomas Carrott Training Operations Lead ​ Contact Thomas Luce loves live music (preferably at festivals!), good food, football, dog walking and her family & friends. Luce Carter Programme Implementation Lead ​ Contact Luce Alison loves building relationships with people in & out of the office. A self-confessed coffee snob, cat lover & proud mum of 2 grown-up boys, her happy place is the great outdoors. Alison Duffy Business Development Manager ​ Contact Alison Kitty enjoys trying different cuisines & travelling. Care taker of the office plants. Has a penchant for all things cats and fashion. Kitty Fong Digital Systems Manager ​ Contact Kitty Helen enjoys having friends over for themed dinner parties, playing games and having kitchen discos with her family. Helen Gamble Training Lead ​ Contact Helen Donna started at The Centre for Emotional Health in November 2003 in a broom cupboard for a stock room! 21 years later and Donna now has a small warehouse. Donna Gardner Warehouse Manager & Training Supplies Coordinator Contact Donna Lyndsay loves Jane Austen, reading food menus, wearing bright colours and Christmas. She also adores her rescue dog and travelling to remote Scottish islands with her husband and 2 children. Lyndsay Harrison Regional Trainer Contact Lyndsay Rosie loves all things Italian, especially pasta and ice cream and is always looking forward to visits to Venice and Birmingham to admire the canals. Rosie Hatton Regional Trainer Contact Rosie I am an animal lover, who enjoys walking, has a passion for travelling, new experiences and Food!! Maxine Hertlein Head of Finance ​ Contact Maxine Loves singing along to the musicals, countryside walks, learning about local history and is researching her family tree. Loves words games and enjoys the company of her husband and four grown up children. Penny Jenner Purchase Ledger Administrator Contact Penny Alan loves travelling (especially on a shoestring), music, and being the proud dad of his young son Alan Kennedy Online Training and Systems Administrator Contact Alan Hannah loves spending time outdoors and exploring new places - whether it’s abroad or close to home. She also enjoys baking, reading, theatre trips & dancing! Hannah Partis Partner Engagement Coordinator Contact Hannah Sylwia has been working for The Centre for Emotional Health for nearly 6 years. Sylwia enjoys walking, listening to music and watching Netflix. Sylwia Siadala Training & Events Administrator ​ Contact Sylwia Can be found listening to music, going to gigs, practicing calligraphy, spending time with friends and family and being a proud mum to her daughter. Amy Swapp Resources Coordinator ​ Contact Amy Mary loves sharing food around the table with family & friends, swimming in a warm sea, & music of almost all kinds. Mary Taylor Head of Parent Programmes Contact Mary Verity began working for The Centre for Emotional Health in 2017 and thoroughly enjoys working with such a fantastic team! Verity has a keen interest in sports and fitness and loves live music and theatre. Verity Watson Office Manager ​ Contact Verity ... Tom Yates Systems Review Coordinator Contact Tom Our Trainers We have a team of around 30 trainers based throughout the UK, who deliver our training. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds with many specialist areas of expertise.

Webinar: Managing Boundaries in our Family Support children and teenagers to grow into confident, independent, responsible and responsive people. ​ Wednesday 3 Feb 2021, 10:00 GMT Book now

At Home | At School | At Work Developing Emotional Resilience Training All-Through Schools This is a full day workshop which explores practical strategies for developing emotional resilience. Topics include an introduction to the Nurturing Programme, boundaries and consistency, praise and criticism, giving feedback, creating a healthy emotional climate in the school. Learning Outcomes ​ On completion of this workshop, staff will be able to: ​ understand the building blocks of the Nurturing Programme reflect on their role as adults setting the emotional climate in the classroom reflect on their role as adults modelling healthy relational habits provide boundaries clearly and kindly consider the power of specific, genuine praise reflect on the way which feelings drive behaviours consider the importance of their own emotional health ​ Workshop Overview ​ This practical and interactive workshop explores how schools can create an emotionally healthy learning environment. Strategies are explored and practised by working through examples from daily life in school. ​ Click here to download the Developing Emotional Resilience Training Overview ​ Resources ​ Included in the training cost: ​ The Teaching Puzzle (for each participant) Curriculum Handbooks of your choice (8 in total for the school) A set of resources - The Nurturing Game , Feeling Faces and Ask It Tell It (for the school) ​ Impact & Evidence ​ Click link for evidence to support the effectiveness of the Education Programmes . Book Team Training Contact our At School team to discuss or find out more. ​ 01865 401800 education@familylinks.org.uk Training Options​​ Face-to-face for groups of up to 25 people. Testimonials ​ "This has been the most useful, fun, rewarding, enjoyable training I have ever done!" ​ "Really useful session to take time together to reflect and discuss new strategies for supporting our pupils and ourselves." ​ "Inspiring! I feel more equipped as a TA to support emotional wellbeing." ​ "Great use of real-life examples." Other training available To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key.

Join Peter Leonard, Chief Executive of the Centre for Emotional Health, and his notable guests as they share their coping mechanisms for emotionally challenging experiences including anxiety, stage fright, loneliness, addiction and fatigue. Their challenges could be ongoing, or in the distant past, but each guest talks reflectively and with emotion about its impact. As the podcast grows, the emotional toolkit gets bigger with suggestions and tools that might work for you. Emotional health is related to but different from mental health. Good emotional health can help you manage periods of poor mental health as well as the ups and down of everyday life. So, if you’re interested in living a more emotionally healthy life or want to know more about coping in difficult times, Emotionally Speaking will help you understand your emotions, how you relate to your emotional self, and other people.

I was reflecting recently on the first proper job I had. During this period, I remember regularly trying to stay awake for as long as I could at night, because I knew that my next waking moment meant that I had to get ready to go to work. Put simply, I absolutely dreaded it. At the time, I didn’t really know why I dreaded it so much – I can just remember all the feelings around it. The one good thing to come out of this experience was that I vowed never to put myself in that situation again. At The Centre for Emotional Health, our vision is for everyone to live an emotionally healthy life. This includes creating and developing emotionally healthy workplaces. During Emotional Health Week, we are inviting people to think about their own workplaces and the people within them. For us, an emotionally healthy workplace is one where there is a culture of people feeling safe, supported and valued. Where there is a clear sense of purpose, people feel empowered and where there are clear expectations and boundaries. There will also be key features such as respect, kindness and an understanding of the value that differences can bring. Probably most importantly, the environment will be one where relationships really matter. Looking back on the experience of my first job, very little of this was in place and the impact was that I struggled, and the workplace got the worst of me! Nowadays it is not uncommon, for example, for staff to have free yoga sessions or wellbeing hours. However, it is often the more foundational habits and structures that create a genuine emotionally healthy environment: do team members hold each other in mind regularly? (How was that meeting yesterday? Good luck with your training tomorrow! How’s the house-buying going?… etc). Noticing and responding to how colleagues seem to be, interacting with each other in an adult and meaningful way is helpful to both individuals and the organisation. The challenge for us all is that it is far easier and less time-consuming to book in a pizza for staff meetings than it is to spend the time required to foster healthy relationships and to be tuned in to people’s needs and emotions – even when we know that it’s this that makes the difference. An approach based on good emotional health can ensure that both organisational and individual needs are recognised and valued, and crucially that workplaces and employees can be good for each other. We don’t want staff to do as I did and intentionally avoid trying to sleep at night! For more information about how our workplace trainings courses may be able to help, do get in touch: hello@emotionalhealth.org.uk Rowen Smith, Director of Training at The Centre for Emotional Health

Picture, if you will, a thirty year old divorced man with two children whom he has for part of every week. He is also holding down a demanding job and volunteers as a school governor. This man has all the pressures you would expect someone in this position to have, plus his own personal baggage from childhood and his own unique experiences which have shaped him to this point. The school he serves as governor decides to undertake some whole school emotional health training, using The Nurturing Programme by Family Links, now The Centre for Emotional Health. The man attends and realises two things; firstly, that this programme is beneficial for everyone not just parents and teachers and, secondly, that he already has the foundations of the course. He just needed support to identify and start using them. At The Centre for Emotional health we call these our Emotional health Assets and you can read more about them on our website. Fast forward twenty years and that same man (me!) is now Chief Executive of the Centre for Emotional health, and I consider it a privilege and a joy to be at the helm of such a significant organisation. Over the course of those intervening years I have used the tools collected in my emotional toolkit to great effect, as a parent, as a teacher, as a headteacher, in other work settings, as a family member, a husband and a friend. Most significantly, those skills and strategies have helped to steer me through some patches of challenging mental health as well. This is why I am so vocal about the importance of Emotional Health. It has beneficially impacted my life personally and professionally and also hearing the stories of change from people like PJ, a dad seeing the positive impact of the Nurturing Programme on both his life and that of his child. At The Centre for Emotional Health, we are passionate about our vision of everyone living an emotionally healthy life. Since 1997, we have reached over 1.4m parents and children by training over 40,000 professionals who go on to work across the community in local authority services including Family Hubs, in schools, the voluntary sector, health, prisons and in faith organisations. Our relationship-centred approach means we work in a collaborative way and in partnership wherever possible. At a national level, we raise awareness of what emotional health is and why it is important, influencing policy to create a more emotionally healthy society. We know that everyone needs good emotional health for themselves as individuals and also to enable them to contribute to creating an emotionally healthy culture wherever they are. We have recently partnered with the think tank Demos to produce a report highlighting the impact good emotional health could have on society as a whole. In this report we are calling on the Government to recommit to a standalone, cross-government mental health & wellbeing plan, to incorporate emotional health into its long-term plan to ensure that health is considered in all policies and to invest in evidence-based training and programmes on emotional health. We would like to see every adult experiencing positive relationships so that everyone can both contribute to and benefit from being in emotionally healthy families, communities, schools and workplaces. The benefits of good emotional health are significant and that is why we do what we do. Peter Leonard, Chief Executive at The Centre for Emotional Health