The talking stick, also called a speaker's staff, is an instrument of aboriginal democracy used by many tribes, especially those of indigenous peoples of North America.

The talking stick may be passed around a group, as multiple people speak in turn, or used only by leaders as a symbol of their authority and right to speak in public.

I often use a Talking Stick during my workshops or groups. The stick gets passed around in the group, and whoever holds the stick has the opportunity to speak while the rest of the group listen. As a sign of respect and deep listening, no one interrupts the speaker as they are talking, until they pass on the stick to the next person. 

When the stick is passed on, the whole group will acknowledge the person who have spoken by saying "A'ho!! or "Sia!!"

I love using a talking stick in groups as it ensures everyone is heard in the group and everyone is acknowledged. 

That is why I have named my Monthly Newsletter "Talking...

If you have clicked on this blog post you are more than likely thinking about booking or maybe have booked an Online Session with a therapist or supervisor... 

Online Sessions are becoming more popular as many therapists find the need to connect with their clients online and vice versa. 

If you are thinking about booking an online session I would like to offer you four tips to make the session as supportive as possible...

Make sure you have privacy

Maybe you could use your office, home office or maybe a spare room in your house. Ask your colleagues (if at work) / family or house mates not to disturb you during this time, as you are on an important call. 

Make sure to use earphones or headphones

Apart from the sound being a lot clearer when using headphones, it also offers more privacy for you. As the sound coming from your computer or mobile device would be for your ears only. 

Turn off distractions

Turning off any background noise like radios and televisions...

Everyone has an innate need to be "heard", and Effective Listening constitutes many different skills that will have a person feel heard and that you truly "get" them. In a study conducted by Adler and Proctor in 2001, they found that adults spend an average of 70% of their time engaged in some sort of communication, of this an average of 45% is spent listening compared to 30% speaking, 16% reading, and 9% writing.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I spend a BIG chunk of my day actively listening to clients, to their stories, but also to the emotional nuances of their voice, the silences etc. It is a skill that I have built a lot of muscle on over the years, but a skill that is a continuous work in progress!

Active Listenings as a skill is imperative to your every day dealing within your relationships -  whether they be romantic partners, family members, friends, clients, students, customers,  etc. It is a skill that most of us can improve on...

Let's look at whether you...

Gratitude is a powerful process for shifting your energy and bringing more of what you want into your life. The feeling of genuine gratitude opens the channels for more goodness to enter into our life experiences. Gratitude has also been said to have one of the strongest links with mental health and according to research, Grateful people reported higher levels of positive emotions, life satisfaction, vitality, optimism and lower levels of depression and stress. Below we have laid out for you 10 steps to take which will help you on your way to becoming more grateful.

1: Be Thankful & Grateful

Thankfulness is an attitude that you can practice and develop. Cultivating gratitude as the norm in your life will make keeping a gratitude journal much easier. Be thankful even for the small things in your life like being able to put on your own shoes every morning. I know for me personally, this became a Huge one as at the age of 21 years of age after I...

On Saturday I had the pleasure to be on an outing organised by my local gym. As part of the day, I delivered a talk on how we can look after our mental health, in 4 easy steps! I have to be honest, part of me felt like "preaching to the converted" as this group, are people who are into their fitness, health and loving life. 

However, one can never have too many tools in your toolkit when it comes to looking after our mental health, even if it means to pass on the information to someone who is struggling...

Just like a muscle in the body that needs to be strengthened with regular exercise, so too does our "Mental Muscle"! I love what memory expert Jim Kwik says about memory... "We don't have a good or bad memory, we DO memory!" In other words, it is not something that is bestowed upon us, when we enter this life... no, it is something that we can exercise and develop with practice. Having taken Jim Kwik's courses I can completely vouch that this statement is true... but I can...

It has been proven that people who journal are healthier, happier, more in touch with their emotions and more balanced. The good news is… you do not have to be a “writer”… you just have to WRITE!

I often recommend to my clients that they take up journaling as a part of their Self Care practice. In this blogpost, I would love to share with you 7 reasons why journaling is a great practice to follow and why you could make it part of your daily self-care regime.

1. Helps you to remember the little things!

You know when you often look back on life – we tend to appreciate the BIG things that we achieved, but more often than not it is the “small” things or everyday occurrences that people bring up at family get-togethers. These “smaller” things in life are very often the glue that keeps “things together” or the experiences that splash colour onto the pages of our lives. Often when we pencil these moments onto our...

Did you know that research shows that our inner speech clocks in at an average of 4,000 words per minute—10 times faster than verbal speech. And it’s often more condensed—we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean!

Wow! That is a whole lot of talking! And more often than not the quality of our "Self-Talk" or "Inner Speech" could be somewhat better! 

You might be asking what do we mean by Self-Talk, exactly? So, Your Self-Talk is that endless chattering in your ear and can be either your greatest friend or your worst enemy. Some people seem to be more naturally optimistic than others - and their Self Talk seems to be a whole lot friendlier, while others can lean toward a pessimistic world-view, and the quality of Self Talk can be quite critical and negative.

I have good news though! When it comes to the way that you talk to yourself, you can take control over how you perceive yourself and how you...

The Intū:it Method is a therapeutic technique designed by me to help you to uncover, rediscover and reconnect to your inner guidance and inner healer! As the name suggests, it is very closely related to your own intuition and how to listen to your inner wisdom. 

Intuition is the faculty that allows you to enter into a dialogue with Source, the Consciousness that you are part of but cannot see with the naked eye. In today's busy world where we are so "connected" that we are "disconnected", we are taught to externalise our guidance and depend on the guru, the doctor, the healer, the product, the newest app, that will help us to get to wherever that we want to get to.

It is amazing how we are taught through all these "aids" which are supposed to make our lives easier and fluid, to ignore the natural capacity to navigate our journeys and to access our inner guidance. 

We all have the ability to be intuitive, to read between the lines and get those "gut feelings" and...

I was attending Declan Dore's event "Trauma to Triumph" recently and during his talk, he shared a lot of his own life story and what has brought him to where he is today... but more importantly the "Life Lessons" he has learned from each story or situation... 

This had me thinking... What are the "lessons" I would share with someone if they ask... 

Well firstly, I would like to call them "Blessons", as I thoroughly believe that when we choose to learn from every situation/happening in our lives... we get to receive the gift or the blessing in each of these impactful situations. 

or as I have often shared with my clients... It is either sh&$%t or it is fertiliser! Your choice! 

So I would like to share with you 10 Life Blessons that I have learned in my life... 

1. It's not the quantity of friends you have, but the quality!
2. Your mother is always right, whether you like it or not!
3. Spend more time in nature... It is good for the soul and for the "sole" -...

What if we ended our relationships with the same amount of love and attention that we invested in it at the start of the relationship?

Very often couples attend therapy or marriage counselling when they want to "save" their relationship! But what happens when there is no more "saving" to be done? If they have come to a place in their relationship that it is not worth "saving" or that something so serious and irrevocable has happened in their lives that they cannot or do not want to continue the way they have been?

This is obviously a much larger topic and like many things has many more layers than what the eye can see...  and there is no simple answer to a lot of the hurt and anguish some people have experienced in their relationships.

In this article, however, I want to touch on the "Conscious Endings" of relationships.

As a therapist I am very interested in how people "do endings" in their lives... how they end relationships, end jobs, move locations etc. As the endings of...