The Confidence Cocoon™️

Results Results Results! When you provide support in response to evidence of need, and lead with professionalism and compassion, the results speak for themselves.  THE BACK STORY During lockdown, we simply wanted to support educational settings, to provide mental health support for young people, in response to the rise in mental health crisis in kids and teens due to the pandemic.  The Confident Me programme was born! THE JOURNEY  In 2021, we developed 'The Confident Me' programme that became the foundation of a robust model, supporting young people to build resilience, widen horizons, set goals, acquire emotional balance, develop self regulation skills and develop unshakable confidence.  In addition to this, in 2022 we developed a mental health audit framework, allowing us to influce structural change and the culture of schools, in response to the Department of Educations requirement to the development of emotionally healthy educa...

Protecting our mental health is easier than you might think. We can all do it every day, and with the practice of simple activities built into our daily routines, we can teach ourselves that asking and recieving help, is OK, helping us to be better able to cope with life. Implimenting simple easy to do steps to manage and promote positive mental health, is like brushing your teeth daily . "important in preventing problems, and when adopted correctly, it can also be fun!" Check out the guide below.  Appendix: Research and guide taken from The Mental Heath Foundation. 

This is what we're fighting for!  Can you imagine how much more robust humans we would be if early emotional support was an intervention of importance in schools, as much as top up classes for STEM subjects? Can you imagine how much more calmer and balanced the adolescent chapter would be, if mental heath platforms of support was in place, as much as safeguarding? Can you imagine how more enjoyable the teenage years could be, if the narrative of good mental health support for young people. Was more than just the promotion of exercise or extracurricular PE lessons? Can you imagine a school were the mental heath, social and emotional needs were just as important as grades? Wow.  What. A. Beautiful. Prospect.  The DFE released a white paper that has aligned mental health support in schools as important as safeguarding children, this is a huge step in the right direction. It has triggered educational settings to think about how they can further support students as...

Enjoyment.  Pleasure.  Fun.  Happiness.  Contentment.  Sometimes it’s very easy to forget what they’re like. Depression whispers to us that they don’t exist, or that we don’t deserve them, or have time for them. Well, depression is wrong, and it knows it. It’s lying again. These things DO exist, and we all deserve to rediscover them. We can be very hard on ourselves, can’t we? We can feel battered by the demands we put on ourselves to achieve and to do. That feeling that everything we do with our spare time must have a purpose. It feels like it’s not enough just to be. But the things that seem to have little or no purpose are actually the most important things of all. Pointless things have a point WE NEED TO GIVE OUR BRAINS A REST The times when we least feel like doing something for ourselves are the times when we most need to do exactly that. We need time out. We need to give our brains a rest. Our poor heads feel full to bursting with all the...

This is the mental health jam jar model (it’s based on the stress- diathesis model if you want to look up the theory) and it goes something like this: We all have a mental health jam jar and it has limited capacity. To start it is filled with your vulnerabilities. In the original  model this was genetics or biological factors, but we prefer to think a bit wider and include childhood trauma, long term early stress, cognitive abilities and sensitivity to stress amongst other things. This will fill our jar to a certain level. The life throws stuff at us and this is the raspberries in our jar- the stressors that come our way. There will be different amounts of raspberries at different  times in our lives. If the combination of strawberries and raspberries fills our jar then it overflows and this leads to poor mental health.  However there’s things we can do to help our mental health. Firstly, sometimes (but not always) we can control the amount of raspberries comi...

Stress is our body’s normal response to increased physical and emotional pressure. When we’re repeatedly adding to our level of stress, and don’t have anything in place to counterbalance it, those stress levels go up and up until we reach our capacity, our emotional limits – negatively affecting our mental wellbeing. We all have a different capacity for stress and our own emotional capacity will change over time. However, what is important is how we might manage our stress levels to prevent ever reaching full emotional capacity. To stop our bucket from overflowing we need to add holes to our bucket; outlets to allow some of this stress to flow out in a healthy way. Self Care – The thing to remember when considering self-care is the ‘self’ – the things which energy, help you process, calm and soothe you. If we are looking after ourselves and making time for our own needs, we will keep our levels low enough to be able to avoid them overflowing. Saying No – We need to ...

When things go awry, we like to know what to do and how to do it, so that it can be sorted out – it’s a totally natural response. With some illnesses, the treatment is simple and we are able to move on. Unfortunately, mental ill health isn’t so straightforward, and to make it even more frustrating, recovery is hardly ever linear either – we don’t experience feeling better in a nice, neat, straight line. Life is mostly unpredictable and there’s only so much that we can control. Our mental health can take a knock-back from the things which go on internally for us, but also the things which happen externally. We may have been going along all hunky-dory and then something happens to cause one of those sinking-stomach rough patches that we work so hard to avoid. Similarly, we might have had a long murky spell and then find that something happens to give us a lift. Our mental health isn’t stationary, it’s transient and a counter reaction of so many individual factors. It’s difficult to alway...