Lauren Barratt (Founder of Wellbeing Workshops): Happiness, health and wellbeing

EPISODE NOTES In this episode, Claire talks with Lauren Barratt: a teacher and wellbeing consultant. Lauren talks about how her own first-hand experience of going through the education system as a teenager led her to becoming a qualified teacher herself. By her own admission, Lauren was someone who struggled with her behaviour and concentration in many of her lessons and was regularly ‘kicked out’ of classes. However, she had realised that her passion lay in physical education and she would regularly help teach younger children after having to leave other lessons. This led Lauran to realise that she enjoyed teaching PE and, after leaving secondary education, she became a sports coach before undertaking a teaching degree. Lauren also shares how she came to become a wellbeing consultant. Within her role delivering health and wellbeing lessons as a teacher at her school, Lauren felt that the curriculum and content she was delivering was missing out some key elements. This led her to leave her full-time teaching role and become a consultant developing her own programmes and content. Lauren now works with schools and colleges, and alongside the charity NCS, to deliver bespoke wellbeing workshops in focusing on the impact of social media, growth mindset, physical wellbeing, sexuality and race studies, and happiness.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Embedding happiness.It can be tempting to think about happiness and being happy as a state that some people effortlessly achieve. However, this is not the case and finding true happiness can take hard work and be an ongoing process that needs committed attention. Teaching pupils that this is the reality, and that achieving fame or having lots of material wealth does not automatically bring happiness, is an important lesson.Some strategies to help embed happiness focus around outlook. Spend time considering the positive aspects of each day because it can be easy to focus disproportionately on the negative events and consider that day ‘a bad day’. The truth, more often than not, is that every day is a mixture of both positive and negative elements. Along with this, regularly taking more time to consider and be grateful for the good things in our lives can help to change our mindset.Embedding happiness is more about developing good habits and thinking positively. Our own wellbeing as teachers.Teaching can be a stressful career and it can be very easy for teachers to struggle to maintain a positive outlook. One thing that teachers are good at is wishing their lives away with constant thoughts and references to how many days or weeks it will be until the next holiday. As with embedding happiness, teachers should consider their own mindset and take time to think about the positives and look to change perspective.Meditation can be a tool to aid this by spending ten minutes in silence each day pushing away negative or stressful thoughts and just thinking about nothing. Time to reflect should not be a luxury.As teachers, professional development is, almost always, something that happens ‘to’ us in the form of visitors, meetings or training courses. Sometimes, as a part of these development events, time is given to reflect on and then refine our own practice. However, this reflection time, if used regularly, can be really beneficial to teachers to consider and improve on what they do in the classroom.   BEST MOMENTS “It's about developing the kind of the critical thinking skills and the reflection on what [the children are] doing. We start to look at what procedures can they put in place when they realise social media is affecting them more? What procedures can they put in place when they realise that their mood is lowering? But the first step is to get them to be able to identify that.” “If you wonder why your five-year-old always wants to be on your phone, then that's because you are probably on your phone quite a lot around them and they want to model you. Sometimes it's easy entertainment to have that, but I think we just need to start educating and teaching at an earlier age.” “We all know the risks of a young child being on social media from a safeguarding perspective. As teachers and people in education, we know that. But how are we really getting that out there?” “Try to embed what you find out about happiness into your classroom and teach the children that you're teaching that happiness doesn't just happen. There's a reason that you don't wake up happy every morning. It's not an easy thing to be consistently happy. It takes hard work and it takes you embedding habits into your lifestyle.” “I think what teachers struggle with a lot is time affluence and that just refers to you having the perspective in yourself of how much time you actually have. When I was teaching, I found that teachers wished their life away a lot. They are constantly going, 'Oh, it's nearly the weekend. It's nearly half term. It's nearly the summer holidays.' Try to change your perspective so that you're not wishing your life away.” “If you're feeling something that is different or you don't want that feeling, then you need to think okay, why am I feeling this? And once you've identified that it is up to you to kind of put the strategies in there.” “If you want teachers who are constantly reflecting and adapting and changing you need teachers to have time to think because at the moment teachers are so overworked that there is absolutely no reflection time.” “Try to change your perspective on time as well because we feel that we have no time as teachers. And maybe you don't, but if you try to change your mindset around that, it might actually make you start to feel a little bit more positive about what you do have.”   VALUABLE RESOURCES Wellbeing Workshops: https://wellbeing-workshops.com/ Lauren Barratt – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_adventure_diary/ Lauren Barratt – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenbarrattadventurediary/ Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/ Classroom Secrets Kids: https://kids.classroomsecrets.co.uk The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/ Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/ Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/ LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/   ABOUT THE HOST 'My mother is a teacher. I will never be a teacher.' - Claire Riley Claire arrived at the end of her performing arts degree with no firm plans to move into the entertainment industry. A fully funded secondary teaching course seemed like the perfect way to stall for a year on deciding what to do with her life. Turns out, teaching was her thing.  Three years in a challenging secondary school - check. Two years in primary schools with over 90% EAL children - check. Eight years doing day-to-day supply across 4-18 - check. If there's one thing she learnt, it was how to identity the best ideas from every school in terms of resources and use that knowledge to create something that would work for teachers far and wide. In 2013, Classroom Secrets was born. Claire had seen other resource sites and wanted to add something to the market that she felt was missing. More choice + More quality = Balance. Claire is a self-proclaimed personal development junkie and is always looking for ways to learn and improve. It's usually centred around business, her new-found passion. In 2019, Claire launched The Teachers' Podcast that hit the charts on launch and is listed in the top 200 educational podcasts most weeks. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.