Laura’s approach to stress and lifestyle management is rooted in evidence from science and supported by 35 years’ experience of group facilitation, teaching and coaching.

Influenced by the work of early research by Walter Cannon, Hans Selye, Carl Rogers and evidence from sports physiology, laura has developed a homeostatic process model. Her person-centred focusing approach that combines Laura Mitchell’s progressive muscle relaxation and ideas about ease with Howard Benson’s ideas concerning the human relaxation response.

Fascinated by the brain’s ability to make decisions, she trained as life coach, and began to combine these skills with her unique approach to stress management and health promotion some 20 years’ ago. In the post-COVID world, Laura is comfortable working in face-to-face settings or in the virtual environment – whichever is your preference.

HOMEOSTASIS – FINDING EQUILIBRIUM 

Stress isn’t just something that causes worry and weighs us down. It’s something physiological that is experienced in our bodies. Laura’s an experienced life coach who can help you to move forward from bad feelings when you’re dealing with tricky circumstances:

• dealing with big changes in your life?
• struggling to sleep?
• worrying about your kids?
• overload of emails causing anxiety?
• difficult people around you?
• remote working?
• thinking about retiring?
• want to change things in your life that make you feel unhappy but don’t know where to start?

Laura loves working with individuals and families, seeing lifespan transitions – birth, early years, adolescence, new families, empty nesting and retirement – as challenges that provide opportunities for empowering lifestyle change. Stress makes us all feel worried and anxious. with more than 35 years’ experience of coaching and training, Laura will help you to cope and improve your well-being.

SCCAMPER TO WELLBEING 

Most people know what they ought to do to achieve greater well-being. But changing a lifestyle is a big deal.

Laura will coach you through the steps you can take to reduce your risk of the so-called ominous octet – including hypertension (high blood pressure), reduced sensitivity to insulin, visceral adiposity, raised levels of “bad” cholesterol. we won’t forget that all work and no play is boring; it is essential for well-being to laugh and have a bit of fun, too. Through the steps2well-being programme, you will reach your well-being goals. Staying well feels great!

Laura is also passionate about helping people make better choices for sustaining our beautiful planet – it’s a win:win situation. She can lead walking mediations and walk’n’talk sessions for both individuals and groups.

Contact Laura for a discovery call and let’s see where your well-being journey takes you! 

CREATING LEANER WORKPLACES

Promoting physical activity in the workplace and by your workforce can be simple and cost-effective. Workplaces benefit from active employees who lead a more balanced lifestyle because they are healthy, happy and less stressed. Laura’s experience as an educator ensures that all her presentations, while soundly based in research, are engaging, enlightening and inspiring.

Laura’s LEANER BUSINESS courses start by explaining the facts and the evidence about health risks

• Physical activity can help people to manage stress, back pain, weight and mental health conditions – all of which can lead to absenteeism and loss of productivity.
• Increasing activity levels improves vascular health and can protect your team against coronary heart attacks, strokes, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), colorectal cancer, stress, anxiety, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and low back pain – all of which are major causes of chronic disease and disability in our society.
• Studies have shown that employees who engage with physical activity initiatives have reported greater enjoyment of their work, increased concentration and mental alertness and improved cooperation and rapport with colleagues.
• Physically active employees take 27% fewer days of sick leave, which equates to over 2 days improved attendance and a saving of £135 per employee
• Laura’s training is based on her LEANER BUSINESS model and ISO 45003 – first global standard giving practical guidance on managing psychological health risks in workplaces.

One of Laura’s great strengths is her skill in group facilitation; she has the ability to create safe learning environments where people can share ideas, worries and fears about change and then problem-solve to find solutions that work.

Laura helps you to analyse the health and psychological risks to evaluate team and individual well-being. Then she will support your team to use best practice in monitoring wellbeing and profitability. She’ll help you to improve staff retention, support employability among older and disabled staff and reduce absenteeism.

LEANER BUSINESS courses are collaborative and tailored to your needs

STRESS FIRST AID – for healthcare teams 

Stress reactions are relatively common in workplaces but Stress First Aid (SFA) offers actions that can help to identify and respond to early signs of stress reactions in yourself and others in your team. The key difference between SFA and other approaches is that it considers the continuum of severity of stress reactions. Everyone responds to pressure but many factors affect how each person reacts and how they recover. Stress First Aid can be used by anyone who is in an on-going situation when functioning is impaired and significant distress is involved.

The Stress First Aid (SFA) framework is a self-care and peer support model that was originally developed in the US for those in high-risk occupations like military, fire and rescue and police teams (Nash, 2011). Based on the work of VA National Center for PTSD,

Laura collaborates with Jessica Smyrl of YSM Solutions (also a Fellow of the International Stress Management Association) to raise awareness of the SFA model in the UK. We are happy to offer courses that are designed to meet your needs e.g.

• short introduction to SFA group seminar
• SFA for stress first aiders
• SFA for leadership

In this photo, Laura’s presenting a poster about a well-being initiative for nursing students to the Physiological Society conference in Aberdeen. She’s pictured with Dr Alison Wood who is a colleague from Biosciences for Nurse Education (BiNE).

STRESS FIRST AID WEBINARS are free. They last about an hour and are offered monthly on Zoom.

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heart images on this page were created by David Murray: Pixel Pusher using AI software.