An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Setting boundaries — In a busy world with many demands upon our time, we can fall into the trap of not taking care our boundaries. For example, answering work queries outside of working hour and not having any down time. Feeling unable to say no to people even though exhaustion is already taking its toll on your physical and mental health. Not speaking your truth and expressing yourself fully so becoming anxious, stressed, or resentful. This can lead to a feeling of disempowerment and lack of choice in how you live your life, feeling at the mercy of others. Starting your day with some breathing and journaling can help you to decide consciously how you want your day to be. How do you want to feel? How do you want to spend your time? What do you want to prioritize? How are you going to take care of your own needs as well as attending to your daily activities? Consciously designing your life every day can help you to decide what feels right for you and how you want to navigate your life.
As a part of my series about the “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Fletcher
Sarah is an NLP and Multiple Brain Coach and Trainer. She is on a mission to help leaders, educators, coaches, and people who help people to unlock the Psychology of Neuroscience and Positive Psychology to optimize themselves, so they can be a role model for others and lead with compassion, creativity and courage.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
I have always been interested in human potential and what makes us tick. My father had severe Depression and struggled throughout his life to overcome his suffering. After my own struggles with teenage turbulence and post-natal transition in my twenty’s I wanted to learn more and help others who were struggling. My teaching qualification took me into young people’s services and Further Education where I worked mainly with vulnerable young people helping them with their confidence, self-esteem, self-belief, relationships and creating a mindset for a positive future. I also loved helping my colleagues to optimize themselves in the classroom. This led me to setting up my coaching and training business in 2017 to help more people learn the tools and techniques of NLP and mBraining, so they can lead with authenticity, compassion and courage and model this for others.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
When I was teaching one of my students was sadly and devastatingly murdered. For the first time in her life, she was succeeding in Education because we not only taught curriculum, but we also nurtured and cared deeply about our students. I was programme leader for many students who had often ‘failed’ at school so my teacher role was much more than just teaching. Her murder hit me hard, and I felt that I had let her down. I was the last to see her when she left that day and wished her luck in her new job that she was going to. This was where her life ended. One of the reasons I am so passionate about sharing the tools of Neuro Linguistic programing with people in helping professions and leadership roles, is that I know that without these tools I would have probably been off work with stress and found it much more difficult to support myself and my students. Because I was able to care for myself, manage my mind and allow myself to grieve, I was able to continue supporting others even on my own difficult days.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
When I first started teaching young people, I assumed that they would love what I had to teach and that they would appreciate the hours I had spent preparing the lessons for them by engaging in the lesson and doing as they were told! It makes me laugh thinking about this as one of the first lessons I taught was a disaster! Things were being thrown across the classroom, people were arguing, hardly any of the activities that I had prepared were delivered and I was totally stunned! What a learning curve that was about what being a teacher meant. From that day on I made it my mission to get the ‘naughty’ ones on board first, as they were my biggest leverage for engaging the class and creating a harmonious and successful learning environment for all. I realised that who I was as a teacher created the conditions for learning to happen. What I believed about myself, and my students impacted my teaching ability and their belief in themselves. It was a journey of discovery that I loved for many years and I am truly grateful to every one of my students who taught me so much about life.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Sue Washington trained me in Psychotherapy back in 2002 and was my supervisor for 15 years. She helped me through many difficult times and always believed in my capabilities. When I trained as a Psychotherapist, I was struggling with post-natal transition and my mental health. She taught me to appreciate and accept myself and this was the beginnings of my own personal development journey. I will always be truly grateful to her for her support, wisdom, and love.
What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?
To have supervision/coaching to maintain their own wellbeing. As a leader, coach, educator or helping professional it is so important to take care of themselves so that they don’t burn out. A person who thrives from the inside out and shows compassion for self first, will have more to give to others and more people will benefit. Role modelling excellence is about showing others that we all matter.
What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?
Creating a fantastic work culture begins by leading from the heart. In Tommy Spalding’s book the Heart led Leader he says that we should all aspire to live and lead our lives as a true expression and reflection of who we are. Leadership is building success from the heart. Work cultures that place the people at the heart of the organization and deeply care about their passions and strengths become successful work cultures where everyone is valued and can thrive.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. Mental health is often looked at in binary terms; those who are healthy and those who have mental illness. The truth, however, is that mental wellness is a huge spectrum. Even those who are “mentally healthy” can still improve their mental wellness. From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to improve or optimize our mental wellness. Can you please share a story or example for each.
- The Power of reframing- Reframing is changing the way you perceive an event and changing the meaning. When you change the meaning your responses and behaviour will also change. For example, someone may perceive a mistake in their work as a failure. The meaning they put to being a failure could be that they always mess up, they don’t deserve to be in that job, others are better than them and they are never going to succeed. A reframe on this could be that ‘there is no failure only feedback’. Making a mistake can be an opportunity to learn and grow. It can also be an opportunity to understand yourself better and enhance your strengths and skills. We often feel stuck in life because of the way we are interpreting a situation rather than the facts of the situation. Maybe a disagreement has occurred with someone, and you have felt rejected and ignored by them because they didn’t respond to a text or phone call. You then go down a rabbit hole of making up a fantasy story about why they are not responding causing you to feel even more rejected and hurt. There could be a very simple explanation such as the person was busy at the time when they received the text. Maybe their phone was low on battery, and they knew that they would get cut off if they answered it so chose to wait until later. I love the quote by Victor Frankl ‘between stimulus and response there is a space. In the space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’ Giving yourself time in the ‘space’ to observe your thoughts and feelings and decide how you want to perceive and respond to the situation, is a wonderful gift of emotional freedom for yourself and others.
- Gratitude — In Positive Psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. It helps us to experience more positive emotions, enhance the good experiences, find possibilities and opportunities in challenges and it improves health, wellbeing and relationships. The research from the heart math institute informs us that reconnecting with our heart feelings throughout the day such as gratitude, kindness, compassion and patience helps us to stay in flow with inner peace and calm, enabling us to handle life’s challenges more effectively. Throughout the day give yourself permission to consciously pause and check in with your mind and body. Notice how you are feeling, notice your thoughts and notice any tension in your body. Place your hand on your heart and imagine the kind of caring feeling or attitude that you would like to have, as you breathe deeply imagine that you are breathing this feeling into your whole being. Continue doing this for a few minutes and then anchor that feeling in. Notice how you feel after this practice.
- Connection with others — The story of lessons from geese is a beautiful analogy of the benefits of connecting and working together. When geese fly in a formation together they flap their wings which creates an uplift for the birds that follow. Flying in a V formation gives the flock a 70% greater flying range than if they flew alone. When the front goose gets tired it rotates back into the formation and another goose takes over that position. The geese flying in the formation honk to encourage the ones at the front to keep up their speed. When we connect with others and work together in harmony, we can co create an energetic field that is coherent and we can lift others into this coherence. The electromagnetic field of the heart can be detected several feet away and can affect the nervous systems of other people. What this means is that a group of coherent individuals can increase social connection and can achieve their objectives more harmoniously. Individuals thrive within the group whilst maintaining positive social relationships. Trust, empathy, and meaningful relationships are proven to lower anxiety and depression.
- Setting boundaries — In a busy world with many demands upon our time, we can fall into the trap of not taking care our boundaries. For example, answering work queries outside of working hour and not having any down time. Feeling unable to say no to people even though exhaustion is already taking its toll on your physical and mental health. Not speaking your truth and expressing yourself fully so becoming anxious, stressed, or resentful. This can lead to a feeling of disempowerment and lack of choice in how you live your life, feeling at the mercy of others. Starting your day with some breathing and journaling can help you to decide consciously how you want your day to be. How do you want to feel? How do you want to spend your time? What do you want to prioritise? How are you going to take care of your own needs as well as attending to your daily activities? Consciously designing your life every day can help you to decide what feels right for you and how you want to navigate your life.
- Curiosity rather than judgement — Practising curiosity rather than judgement of yourself or others, in my opinion is liberating. For many of us the default pattern that we go to is to judge ourselves harshly when we have made a mistake. Learning to be curious gives us permission to create self awareness and get to know ourselves better. We all do the best that we can at the time with what we have. Forgiving yourself for what you didn’t know can help you to access a state of curiosity rather than judgement. Through curiosity you can ask explore the reasons behind your behaviour and make adjustments and changes for the future. You can begin to realise that you are not your behaviour. All behaviour is attempting to satisfy a need within us even when the behaviour appears to be sabotaging your happiness. Many of us have unwanted habits that we want to change. Self-awareness curiosity and self-acceptance are fundamental in making any changes in your life.
How about teens and pre teens. Are there any specific new ideas you would suggest for teens and pre teens to optimize their mental wellness?
As someone who spent 15 years working in Education with teenagers I am very aware of the challenges and complexities that they face today. The teens I worked with loved the balanced breathing that I taught them as this enabled them to take a moment to unplug from their fast world and just be. Whilst they were in balanced breathing, I would encourage them to take a moment to appreciate themselves and each other and to observe how this felt. For many it was uncomfortable at first but as they practiced it, they enjoyed the feelings that they experienced and felt empowered knowing that they could control their internal world no matter what was going on around them.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
A book that has made an impact on me is Loving Your life by Grant Soosalu. I love this book as it brings me back to the simplicity of life and reminds me how easy it is to find joy, love, connection, and peace every day. Following Grants mantra of keeping it successfully simple I refer to this in my teachings to help people come back to their truest nature of calm and peace and live their life authentically. As someone who lived life once in high stress and nervous system dysregulation, this book taught me to love, honour and appreciate myself. L.I.F.E is for living in full enchanting and creating the magical and wonderous journey yourself.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
My vision is to share the magic of Neuro Linguistic programming and mBraining with as many heart centred leaders, educators, coaches and people who have people at the heart of what they do. A great movement that I feel would bring the most amount of good to the world would be to make every primary and secondary school a heart centred mBraining school, where everyone is taught heart coherence and we collectively raise the vibration of the planet for the good of humanity. That would be amazing!
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it — Maya Angelou
I have had several big transition times in my life where I have struggled. One in particular was becoming a Mum. Post-natal transition was a very difficult time for me because I was very unforgiving of myself and didn’t realize that I would birth a bag of guilt as well as a baby! I didn’t feel good enough as a Mum for several years and this kept me stuck in a cycle of fear, insecurity, guilt and shame. Thankfully I had amazing support, a good therapist and learned to forgive myself.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/SarahFletcherCoachingandTraining
Website — https://sarahfletchercoaching.com/
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/sarahfletchercoaching/?hl=en
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Sarah Fletcher: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.