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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

Family Links the Centre for Emotional Health and the Reach Foundation came together in the recognition that, across all of our work, the position of the Home School Link Worker (an umbrella term that we will use hereafter to include other titles such as Home-School support worker, Family Support worker, In​clusion Lead, Learning Mentor, attendance officer) plays an essential role in developing and sustaining partnerships with families from within a school setting, with the children at the centre. However, despite its importance, it is not a statutory role and there is little understanding about either the skills needed for or the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) necessary to do the job well. As other Children’s social services become increasingly stretched and under resourced, and schools feel they are rapidly becoming the ‘fourth emergency service’ (ASCL 20232 ) it seems a particularly important and timely opportunity to raise the importance and profile of this role, with the hope that it can be better understood and resourced. We decided to do further research, to support existing Home School Links Workers, to raise awareness about how essential this work is, and to campaign for statutory resourcing. Following a series of focus groups nationally, we have produced this report of the main findings and recommendations for change (click on the image below to download a copy). A series of follow up workshops are being run in January, March and June 2024. Further information and the link to sign up can be found in the report. Please get in touch with education@emotionalhealth.org.uk if you would like to be involved in further work!

Values are everywhere. Companies have them on their website, schools have their own as well as teaching about ‘British Values’ and we talk about our own personal values. The core, foundational things we individually hold dear, qualities or attributes which come from our heart or guts rather than our heads. My personal values include honesty, integrity, loyalty, and relationships. All things which help me to feel confident about who I am and how I act, both alone and with others. They also feed into my decision making around where I put my boundaries and why. Values are important and they bring us together. In the context of an organisation such as The Centre for Emotional Health, they help give us our identity and confidence in who we are, what we do and how we go about our business. Values which are identified and developed well mean that those who are part of an organisation are on the same page, heading in the same direction, values bring us together around a consistent approach. You may have noticed I said, ‘values which are identified and developed well’ and this is key. Values which are simply pulled from a generic list or chosen from a list of current trendy words and delivered by a senior team mean nothing. Here are The Centre for Emotional Health’s top tips for developing a set of organisational values which can bring people together: Make sure everyone is involved in producing them and I mean everyone – it is worth the time and effort because then everyone owns them. Stick to no more than 4 or 5 – any more than that and they become confusing and meaningless – remember these are the core foundational values not a list of everything you’d like to be. Start by asking the question “What are we like when we are at our best?” – this is really the core of the endeavour. Our values should emerge from who and how we are, not necessarily what we would like to be. A value sometimes needs some explanation or context – don’t be afraid to state why you’ve chosen that value. Here are ours as an example: Nurturing - Nurturing ourselves and one another is key to good emotional health and is the foundation of all we do. We are aware of our own needs and feelings and take responsibility for them as well as being aware of the effect of our behaviour on others. Transformative - Our aim is that every interaction with us builds good emotional health. Our training, based on the Nurturing Programme, is instrumental in transforming lives for the better. Self-reflection and evidence help us to continue to learn and develop. Empathic - Empathy means tuning in to someone else’s feelings, understanding their emotional point of view and it is the cornerstone of our Nurturing Programme. We will always try to respond to others in an empathic way. Playful - We create inclusive, motivational working and learning environments through our collaborative, playful approach. This builds positive relationships and develops confidence and enthusiasm. All of our work is based on our Nurturing Programme which has four constructs as its foundation. These are Self-awareness, Appropriate Expectations, Positive Discipline and Empathy. It is no surprise therefore to see these constructs represented in these values, they are part of who we are, our organisational DNA. The power of these values is not in each one individually but rather in how each value interacts with one another – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts! Regular check ins with the whole staff team to explore how these values are lived out is also a useful exercise. In this way they don’t become meaningless and can be developed as your organisation develops. The Centre for Emotional Health produced these values a year ago now following a long process of conversation and deliberation. Today everyone in the organisation knows them and can identify how they are lived out in their role. Identifying what we are like at our best, reviewing and living this out means these values have value and are a useful means of being able to strengthen the existing relationships within our organisation. Peter Leonard, Chief Executive

The Centre for Emotional Health commissioned NJ Research to evaluate the funded work we’ve been carrying out in partnership with schools in Oxfordshire over a three year period between 2020 and 2023. Our Nurturing Programme Approach is a whole school approach to emotional health that is based on the Nurturing Programme. Using this approach, our partnership working with schools includes: Practical, interactive, Continuing Professional Development (CPD) workshops and resources for staff A social and emotional learning curriculum for pupils Training for staff to deliver our parent programmes with families This research project aimed to develop greater insight into how schools are engaging with our Nurturing Programme Approach and to explore the factors that influence how it is embedded; the benefits as well as the challenges and the impact of working in partnership over a sustained period of time.

Family Links the Centre for Emotional Health, with the generous support of The Tambour Foundation, have been working in partnership with schools across Oxfordshire over the last five years. We anchor our partnership work in the Nurturing Programme, developing the emotional health of both the education setting and environment itself and the individuals (parents, staff, and children) within the community. Thank you to Naomi Jones of NJ Research, who has worked with wisdom and patience to develop an approach to evaluation that was appropriate to our relational ways of working, gathering rich and detailed data from 18 depth interviews from across 12 education settings and carrying out three focus groups of parents who have taken part in our programmes. This evaluation both provides evidence of the impact of relationship building through the Nurturing Programme, as well as areas in which we, as an organisation, can further enhance and improve our support for education settings. We are immensely grateful to our colleagues in schools, and the parents who have been, and continue to be, on this journey with us, and who took part in this research.

We work in collaboration with a number of local authorities and service delivery organisations to evaluate the impact of our programmes through our Learning Partnership Scheme. This allows us to measure impact at the service or local authority level, providing both us and the service delivery organisation with evidence against agreed parent, child and service-level outcomes. If you're interested in joining our Learning Partnership Scheme, click here to find out more. This report outlines findings from evaluation data returned from 16 Family Links 10-week Nurturing Programme groups held across Manchester between January - December 2022. The impact of the groups was assessed using a pre/post/follow up design, measuring changes in three key outcomes: Parental mental wellbeing Children’s behavioural and emotional difficulties Children’s prosocial behaviour All three outcomes showed statistically significant improvements after caregivers completed the programme. Importantly, all three outcomes showed statistically significant improvements 3 months after completion of the course when compared to baseline. This suggests that improvements in parental mental wellbeing, children’s behavioural and emotional difficulties and prosocial behaviour were all sustained in the longer term after the programme finished. Please click on the image above to read the full report and find out more about the impact of our work with Manchester City Council's Early Help Parenting Team.

What is Emotional Health? Emotional health is the set of skills and beliefs that shape our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It is affected throughout our lives by our relationships and our experience of the relationships around us. What does good emotional health look like? Good emotional health is being aware of, understanding and managing our whole range of emotions. Positive relationships support us to build healthy beliefs about ourselves and others. Our evidence-based emotional health model There are seven components of emotional health, and while each is important within its own right, it’s how they work together that forms our emotional health. Having good emotional health supports us with how we feel, think, behave and interact with those around us. These skills and beliefs impact our quality of life as well as providing us with protective factors if we’re experiencing physical or mental health problems. Why is Emotional Health important? In order to build and sustain healthy relationships, we need to have responsive relationships with others. This is a key component of good emotional health. We also know that a stable, responsive environment is essential for children to develop the foundations of resilience and good, lifelong emotional, mental and physical health. Therefore, in order for the next generation to thrive, we need to support the adults in children’s lives to develop their own emotional health assets, so they can then provide responsive relationships to the children in their care. This creates healthy inter-generational patterns of relating, which benefit families, communities and ultimately society. ii Goodman, A., Joshi, H., Nasim, B., & Tyler, C. (2015). Social and emotional skills in childhood and their long-term effects on adult life. London: Institute of Education. iii Hughes, K., Ford, K., Davies, A., Homolova, L., & Bellis, M. (2018). Sources of resilience and their moderating relationships with harms from adverse childhood experiences: Welsh Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) and Resilience Study – Report 1: Mental Illness. Public Health Wales NHS Trust. iv Layard, R., Clark, A. E., Cornaglia, F., Powdthavee, N., & Vernoit, J. (2014). What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being. The Economic Journal, 124(580), F720-F738 v Feinstein, L. (2015). Social and emotional learning: Skills for life and work. Early Intervention Foundation. If you’d like to talk to us about our work, please contact us via hello@emotionalhealth.org.uk or call us on 01865 401800. To find out more about our training courses for professionals, email training@emotionalhealth.org.uk

We work in collaboration with a number of local authorities and service delivery organisations to evaluate the impact of our programmes through our Learning Partnership Scheme. This allows us to measure impact at the service or local authority level, providing both us and the service delivery organisation with evidence against agreed parent, child and service-level outcomes. If you're interested in joining our Learning Partnership Scheme, click here to find out more. This report outlines the findings from evaluation data returned from 28 10-week Nurturing Programme groups held across Manchester between January - December 2021. The impact of the groups was assessed using a pre/post/follow up design, measuring changes in three key outcomes: Parental mental wellbeing Children’s behavioural and emotional difficulties Children’s prosocial behaviour All three outcomes showed statistically significant improvements after parents completed the programme. Importantly, two of the three outcomes showed statistically significant improvements three months after completion of the course when compared to baseline. This suggests that improvements in parental mental wellbeing and children’s behavioural and emotional difficulties were sustained in the longer term after the programme had finished. Please click on the image above to read the full report and find out more about the impact of our work with Manchester City Council's Early Help Parenting Team.

Since the end of 2020, we have been working with Buckinghamshire Family Support Service to provide a consistent approach across their early help provision, training their staff in a range of our programmes. As part of this cross-service training provision, we gathered feedback from the team at various time points and looked at whether they felt the training was equipping them more strategies and approaches to work with their families effectively. Please click on the image below to find out more.

Click on the image to read our overview, or to find out more about the Learning Partnership process click here. To see an example of the kind of report we can produce, check out our 2021 report for the Manchester Early Help Team here.