Let’s start with getting a bit of Thrive in your life!

How do you know if your wellbeing or resilience is flagging?

Its visceral, you feel it in your body, or in your mood, you feel a bit out of sorts, irritable, a bit bad tempered, a bit over relied on, tired, and possibly overwhelmed?

It's like noticing weight gain— which is easy to spot. But it's harder to track your mental and emotional health unless you're really paying attention.

It’s harder to know when your wellbeing or resilience tank is running a little low, well unless we are really in tune with what matters.

Wellbeing and resilience go hand-in-hand. By focusing on the science-backed aspects of wellbeing, we can better handle life's challenges.

It's not about avoiding problems, but about how we respond to them.

Imagine having a tool to quickly assess your wellbeing, even as a family or team. A kind of "wellbeing scale" could be incredibly helpful, don't you think?

After scoring themselves, they had the opportunity to discuss their results with my team and develop a personalised plan for their development.

The tool asked them to explore all areas of their life, not just the things that we traditionally think have influence on our wellbeing and resilience.

We talked about the quality of their relationships, how often they experience a state of flow (that sensation you have when you are compete engaged in activity and time seems to pass without you noticing). Our sense of meaning and accomplishment.

A number of things that we now know makes a difference.

Their reaction was one of surprise, they were in the wellbeing area of the festival so to some extent you would expect them to have an awareness and interest in wellbeing.

Despite the captive audience the majority had not considered these other elements, that we know make up the parts of the puzzle that are our foundations of our wellbeing and resilience.

We tend to think of wellbeing as very ‘health’ focused, exercise and movement, what we eat and how we sleep. I heard,

“Oh, I’m very healthy I do all the right things and eat all the right things”

Or we think of wellbeing as our mental health, how we feel right now, happy, or sad, perhaps we don’t always know or explore some of the key bits of the puzzle that go towards supporting our mental health or underpin our ability to be as resilient as possible. I call these skills because you can work on them, make them part of your personal development even.

Like anything these are skills that can be developed, you do not have to be stuck with where you are there are simple techniques and experiments you can try right away to make a difference and start to level up the different areas of the wellbeing and resilience.

What was particularly good to experience was families having a meaningful discussion about wellbeing together, it prompted some great conversations and lead to a potential opportunity to develop something with a school looking to support 16–18-year-olds, an area where we desperately need to develop resilience and wellbeing- so watch this space!

Whilst I was obviously promoting the new Thrive 4-part initiative I came away feeling as if visitors to the stand took something away that they would benefit from immediately.

I also had a catch up with Andy Ramage, who I’d not seen for a few months. Andy and I worked together on a personal development and wellbeing programme during COVID. I invited Andy to work with me whilst I was working in the NHS on a programme that went out to over 50,000 staff.