Blogs
Bridget Jelley
Winter Wellbeing 101

Keeping our minds resilient and strong is important no matter the time of year, but in the winter months, especially as our days grow shorter and the sun slants lower in the sky, we need to put in more effort.

Blogs
Bridget Jelley
Did you say 'feedback'?

I asked a group of individuals in a performance session recently, what comes to mind when they think about feedback.

Mental Health at Work

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How Can Leaders Create Connectedness at Work?

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How Can Leaders Create Connectedness at Work?

Workplaces can be the drivers of positive mental health outcomes.

We live in a world where a huge number of people suffer from mental ill health and access to help is poor. As employers, why not go a step further from just ‘not making things worse’ to actually making things better?

Creating social-connectedness at work is one opportunity for leaders to impact their people positively. Loneliness experienced at home can seep into the workplace and leaders have the power to not only prevent work-based loneliness, but combat loneliness overall.

Workplaces can be the engines that drive a socially connected world.

How can leaders create an environment that fosters social connection?

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How to Talk About Mental Health at Work

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How to Talk About Mental Health at Work

Mental Health - we all have it, and yet it can be difficult to talk about, especially at work.

October 10th 2023 is World Mental Health day and the theme this year is ‘Mental Health is a universal human right.’

How do you actually bring up the topic? Or, if someone else lets you know they’re struggling, how should you reply?

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How to Work through Worry

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How to Work through Worry

Worrying can impact our mental health at work significantly, and has been the subject of sage advice for centuries.

Inspirational quotes about improving your mental health by simply ‘not worrying’ are easy to find, but much more difficult to put into practise.

Can you control worrying by simply choosing not to worry? And if so, how?

In this blog we will explain in simple terms what worry is, how you can control worrying, and how you can work and live your life despite having things to worry about.

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How Can We Control Work-Related Stress?

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How Can We Control Work-Related Stress?

Stress: so ubiquitous, the idea of preventing it altogether might seem a bit like trying to hold back an incoming tide.

But stress doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of life, and it definitely doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of work.

How can employers control work-related stress?

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One Way to Manage Psychosocial Hazards for Women in the Workplace

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One Way to Manage Psychosocial Hazards for Women in the Workplace

International Women’s Day 2023 has been and gone but the challenges that women face to experiencing equity in the workplace remain.

What are those challenges, and what would an environment that successfully controls for psychosocial hazards at work that particularly impact women look like?

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Psychosocial Hazards and Community Trauma

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Psychosocial Hazards and Community Trauma

When Psychosocial Hazards are outside your control, but are impacting your people, what can you do?

What if everyone at work is dealing with the same trauma simultaneously? How can leaders equip themselves to support their people through traumatic events that are impacting entire communities?

Psychosocial Risk Assessment: Why Does It Matter?

Psychosocial Risk Assessment: Why Does It Matter?

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come about entirely by accident.

Penicillin was born when Sir Alexander Fleming took a two week holiday and returned to his lab to find that a mould had grown over elements of his research, and that the unexpected mould deterred the growth of bacteria.

It took another 12 years and the work of two chemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to isolate, test and turn the compound that Fleming had discovered into a useable product, and the urgency of the World War 2 effort to stimulate mass production. Penicillin saved many lives and changed the course of medicine globally.

Fleming, Florey and Chain were each awarded the Nobel prize in 1945 in Physiology or Medicine. From their efforts, we have antibiotics, and also a recipe for turning data into a useable, scaleable positive intervention.

How can we apply this to mental health in the workplace by way of Psychosocial Risk Management?

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Cane Toads and Wicked Problems: Seven Golden Rules for Successful Psychosocial Risk Management

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Cane Toads and Wicked Problems: Seven Golden Rules for Successful Psychosocial Risk Management

Psychosocial Risk Management and the Cane Toads of Australia are both what we call ‘Wicked Problems'.’ That is, a problem which is difficult to solve because of complex and changing requirements that interact with each other, to the point that there is no single solution.

Think about your Psychosocial Risk Management process (or any other process that has been implemented by your organisation as a way to solve a problem). Did it solve the problem? Or did it create other problems?

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IS THIS IT FOR GRIT and RESILIENCE?

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IS THIS IT FOR GRIT and RESILIENCE?

I love survival stories. Whilst often harrowing, they demonstrate the incredible power of the human mind and spirit in the most inhospitable conditions.

Laura Dekker, New-Zealand born Dutch sailor, pursuing her dream to be the youngest person to sail single-handedly around the world in the face of repeated opposition from Dutch authorities - grit.

Getting up and continuing to sail after being whacked on the head by a flying fish - resilience.

Yet, resilience and grit are perhaps now more readily associated with corporate wellness schemes, positive psychology, and psychometric testing in recruitment.

And yet, I began to wonder, is developing the ability to withstand trauma really what we want at work?

Wouldn’t it be preferable to create an environment where the capacity to avoid PTSD wasn’t a necessary quality?

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Let's Make Some Noise about Quiet Quitting

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Let's Make Some Noise about Quiet Quitting

What is Quiet Quitting?

In a nutshell, Quiet Quitting is simply doing what you are paid to do, and no more.

Oh the horror! Merely fulfilling your contract, as agreed at the outset with your employer? How entitled! How lazy! What is the younger generation coming to?

How can leaders manage Quiet Quitters?

Read on for more..

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How to Avoid Burnout When You Love Your Job

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How to Avoid Burnout When You Love Your Job

“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” or so the old saying goes.

Anyone who runs their own business, or whose art is also their work, will tell you that if you do what you love, you will work every hour that God gives and then try to squeeze in a few more.

It is easy to assume that if you enjoy your work, you will be safe from burnout. But in fact, paradoxically, burn-out is associated with purpose-driven work.

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Play, Fun and Flow: What does Mental Fitness look like in 2022?

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Play, Fun and Flow: What does Mental Fitness look like in 2022?

For 2022 I have a new proposition.

Forget ‘getting the hard stuff’ done. Postpone your frogs, or just chuck them straight into your out tray and let them croak. Grasp joy wherever you can get it, grab it as soon as you can, and hold onto it for as long as possible.