Psychoeducation

Cornerstone to all the support I provide is psychoeducation – the process of learning and understanding more about your condition/s – ASC, ADHD, Dyslexia and mental health, often these conditions are combined whereby the person has more than one diagnosis.

Psychoeducation helps you learn more about your condition, and how it affects you in relation to your health, wellbeing, academic and work related objectives. The more you understand, and are self-ware of how your conditions impact on you, both negatively and positively, the increased opportunity you have to better self-manage, both personally and professionally – to continue to grow and develop as a person. Being able to learn to identify your sensory triggers when in an academic environment, or the work place, is fundamental to self-awareness. Self-awareness is important for the growth of any individual.

I apply psychoeducation when working with clients to support their need to learn more about how their brain learns given the conditions, and this provides interesting insight into how you can learn to manage the self. Alongside this, metacognition is embedded – metacognition are skills that clients can learn to manage their own learning processes and involves self-awareness, self-monitoring and self-regulation – all of which are accomplished with bespoke psychoeducation techniques and interventions and strategies. Essentially, every person I work with has their own unique set of circumstances, life history and experiences.

Their conditions such as ASC, ADHD, dyslexia and or mental health conditions are experienced through their lens of how they view life, study and work. My support helps clients to achieve their short and long term goals to reach their overall educational and career aspirations.

Meditation – the Practice of Presence

Meditation being adopted in western society has been a slow process, with mindfulness becoming ever popular in the lives of people in UK society, and now entering into health and education systems. Whether you call it meditation or mindfulness it’s up to you, the practice of regular meditation practice (from a neuroscience perspective and in anecdotal research) has been proven to improve cognition, memory, self-regulation, peace, harmony and wellbeing in diverse individuals.

I have meditated for many years – yoga, and regular meditation practice, and have studied the neuroscience of meditation. I attended Eckhart Tolle’s – School of the Awakening – Intensive Virtual Retreat to practice being in the now, the stillness of everyday life – to practice both being a student and teacher of presence, to help others who may benefit from ‘coming out of their head’ of psychological past, present-pre-occupied digital world of today, and future time which absorbs our daily life.

The human mind fluctuates from past events, present pre-occupations and prospective future – whether this is regarding past regrets, guilt, negative experience/s, expectations, remorse, rumination, or future desires and aspirations, being caught in psychological time that is unhealthy, impacts negatively on the person, which affects their health and wellbeing.

The point is, people miss out on living in the present moment – the moments of daily life that go swiftly without much thought to them or attention, particularly if you are a busy person or have children, or life demands that call for your attention immediately. Learning how to live in the present moment whilst going about your daily life is liberating, and provides positive strides in everything you do on a daily basis.

Metacognition

Metacognition is a set of skills that can support learners to explicitly think about their own learning processes. It is split into three core areas: cognition (thinking processes in ‘knowing, understanding, and learning’, metacognition (‘learning how to learn’), and motivation (requiring the readiness) to participate in metacognition and cognitive skills development. Metacognition is fundamental in structuring ways learners/employees reflect and act on their learning experiences because it provides an ability to develop self-awareness, self-monitoring, self-regulation skills.

This supports an improved ability to plan, monitor, evaluate own learning, and to probe and ask internal questions about what one is doing, how and why, it aims to actively engage learners in the process of thinking.

Metacognition supports reflective thinking, and with suitable support the learner can engage and explore their own cognition to develop bespoke strategies that consider individual learning profile and ways of working. This promotes independence in learning, enhances thinking skills and improves the quality of individual writing ability.

However, metacognition requires the attitude, belief, and commitment of the learner to be able to fully benefit from the skills metacognition and cognition offers. I support clients to develop metacognition skills by helping them to develop metacognition through explicit teaching, modelling of metacognition strategies and how to use them.  

Improve Your Memory Coaching

To maintain memory of the things you want to remember, you need to encode information from the environment and or learning objectives. This is achieved through visual, auditory, and physical cues. There are three types of encoding – acoustic, visual and semantic encoding. These are explored with clients to create bespoke visual, innovative ways of remembering what you want to memorise.

I am qualified as an improve your memory coach and offer a range of memory techniques and strategies to support clients in remembering the things they need to – study, exam revision, lists, daily tasks, work objectives and even complex information and knowledge.

I can offer people the opportunity to develop frameworks that support improved memory. These draw upon associations, imagination and experimentation. These can be achieved through repetition techniques, exaggeration, visualisation, physical fitness, sleep and memory, and meditation practices.

There are a range of practical techniques and strategies that can be used to improve memory, such as,

• Songs and Rhymes
• Acronyms and Acrostics
• Similar Sounding
• Note taking Techniques
• Chunking
• The Method of Loci
• The Story Method
• The Numeric Peg System
• The Rhyming Peg Word System
• Shape Pegs
• Alphabet Pegs – Phonetics (The Major System)
• Alphabetic Pegs -Concrete
• The Number Rhyme System