Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Motivational Interviewing can be described as the science of helping people change. Inspiring change in others is not about adding information (“here is what you should do”) but rather understanding that people have good reasons for doing what they do and helping them determine if there is a better course of action.

Let’s take an example of someone who is trying to spend less so they can buy a house. Anyone can go up to them and say “why not spend less money?” That’s obvious. In reality, they have good reason for spending money: perhaps they want to travel while they are young and able bodied. Perhaps buying beer at the pub is an important part of their social life. Perhaps they pend money on their niece because they want them to have a better childhood than they had. Perhaps the cost of living crisis offers a choice between saving or eating. These are all very valid reasons.

Instead of lecturing, Motivational Interviewing helps people work through these decisions, working out what is truly important to them and building motivation to follow a path that is aligned with their values.

In my new course, you will learn what Motivational Interviewing is and how its techniques are used to help people resolve ambivalence and inspire positive change. Preview the course on Holbeck College or watch the trailer below.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of my new course, Boost Resilience with Mindfulness. It is the first course I have developed in collaboration with the Udemy Business team and is aimed at a professional environment, but with transferable skills to everyday life.

Preview the course here or watch the trailer below.

It’s been a very busy year so far and a lot of 2023 has been taken up with a complete audit of all of my courses. Even since I posted about it in February, the work has continued and there are now over 200 new lessons. All of these are available to both old and new students.

With the audit finally complete, I am now back to writing new material and am pleased to announce the launch of my new course, Positive Psychology Coaching.

Positive psychology focuses on what is going right, rather than what is going on. It looks at an individuals character strengths and works out how we can use them to build more resilience, wellbeing, positive emotions, and help people achieve their valued goals.

You can preview the course on the Holbeck website or watch the trailer below.

Last year, Holbeck College launched its first diploma pathway for CBT, and later its mindfulness diploma path. Today, it is launching its counselling diploma path. These pathways enable students to combine the courses they are studying with an exam to work towards a higher level qualification.

Learn more about it on the Holbeck College website.

This week sees the release of my new course on Gestalt Therapy. The idea of Gestalt Therapy is to raise a client’s awareness of their body, sensations and experience, and use this greater awareness to help them solve emotional problems in their lives. It is one of the oldest modalities in psychotherapy and is still popular today.

Learn more about the course on the Holbeck College website or watch the trailer below.

My new course is out, teaching Scrum agile project management framework. Inside the course, you will earn:

• Artefacts: product backlogs, sprint backlogs and definition of done documents
• Ceremonies: Daily Scrum (stand-up), backlog refinement, sprint planning, retrospectives, ways of working meetings, wash-ups and sprint reviews
• Estimating points, velocity and agile poker
• Team roles including product owners, scrum masters and stakeholders
• Team psychology including psychological safety, coaching and best practice
• Agile requirement gathering, user stories, tech debt, prototyping and user labs
• Agile release management, continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Scaling scrum beyond a single team with product splitting and Scrum of Scrums

You can preview the course on Udemy.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is the original mindfulness programme developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. While there are many forms of mindfulness today, back in the late 70s, mindfulness was just being born and this was the eight-week intensive programme that took a previously spiritual practice and turned it into a medical one.

This new course takes you step-by-step through the programme with additional modules for teachers and mental health professionals.

You can preview the course here or watch the trailer below.

Last week, I launched my first course looking at psychodynamics. It focuses on Transactional Analysis, a form of psychotherapy that uses our interactions with ourselves and others to gain insight into ourselves and our relationships.

You can preview the course here or watch the trailer below.

I’ve got some time for The Queen.

I’m no Monarchist. I’m a paid-up member of Republic and demand my right, under both the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, to elect my leaders. Those same declarations also grant us the freedom of expression to share the many anti-monarchy memes that have been floating around and if you are offended by them, maybe you should stop being such a snowflake.

But all of that aside, it also seems reasonable to celebrate the life of Elizabeth II. The strongest criticism that anybody has been able to muster so far is that she didn’t personally dismantle the monarchy. And to be fair to her, neither did any of us. And no, I don’t think it was any easier for her than it would be for us.

She did provide a lifetime of service to her country. 70 years of service: she worked up until the day she died (having to invite Lizz Truss to form a government would probably push me over the edge, too). She showed true leadership, most recently when sitting alone at the funeral of her husband while the prime minister was partying in Downing Street.

She gave us a glimpse into what leadership could be, one of the contributing factors to her surviving 15 British prime ministers.

And her life was remarkable. She was internationally loved. In fact, given the length of her reign and the exponential growth of the population, it seems likely that she was the most loved human being ever in human history. Part of that comes with the title. But some of that comes with the relentless ambassadorship that she provided.

My new course, Professional Ethics for Helping Professions, launched today. It is designed for therapists, coaches, teachers and other helping professionals who want to know how to keep their clients safe: we’ll cover safeguarding, contracting, professional bodies, insurance, data protection, equality and diversity, and much more.

You can preview the course here or watch the trailer below.