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