With the busy survey season ahead, we wanted to equip our team with practical tools and strategies to address stress, spot early signs of anxiety or depression, and foster a supportive, psychologically safe workplace. The session, delivered by Andy Elwood, provided valuable insights into managing mental health and emphasised the importance of self-care, ensuring our team feels supported and prepared for the challenges ahead.
Andy is a Mental Health First Aid trainer and as an ex- ‘dope on a rope’ emergency helicopter paramedic, now focuses his experience on ‘brain health’ and the challenges of keeping teams effective whilst fostering psychological safety. It’s not just teams in the emergency services that need this kind of support, we can all benefit from learning the signs of depression or anxiety in ourselves, our colleagues and friends. The team learnt about early-warning signs, strategies for addressing stress upstream of overwhelm, how to talk about suicide and some grounding techniques to use during panic attacks.
It was a rare occasion having everyone together and feedback on the day demonstrated that the team will be going into the busy survey season more aware and better prepared for the challenges ahead.
Kelly Clark, Associate Director said, “If one person found the session helpful or finds the language to help and support one other person out in the world, then it was time well spent. We all learnt something in a supportive environment and have new strategies to have a go at to help us cope more comfortably with the stresses of our lives.”
Whilst we spent a lot of time looking at signs of stress and reasons for overwhelm, we did come up with a fascinating list of the different activities we do that would constitute self-care. Highlights included fly-fishing, sneaky TV watching in the afternoon, dog walking, arts and crafts, listening to or playing music, cooking with or for friends and even making miniature barbed wire – can you guess who? All of these things ticked more than one of the boxes identified in NHS research as key self-care techniques; connecting, exercising, noticing, learning and giving to others. Our 4-day-week word cloud shows what else we like doing in our spare time!
As an added bonus, Andy plants a tree for each learner via the Just One Tree project https://www.justonetree.life – so that’s 18 trees planted by our Baker Consultants team.
To enquire about joining the Baker Consultants team, please contact careers@bakerconsultants.co.uk