Author Information:

My passion for my work has grown from my own meditation and compassion practice and how it has given me the means to work more effectively with all the challenges and difficulties of life. We might think that such techniques do not have a place in the cut and thrust of working life but my experience has been the opposite--that it is a surprisingly sane and practical response. I combine more than 25 years experience as a professional educator and senior manager in a non-profit organization where meditation and compassion were guiding principles. I learnt through experience how to integrate them into my working life and in 2004 I set up Awareness in Action www.awarenessinaction.org in order to share what I had learnt. I have trained people in these techniques in Europe, the USA and Australia. In the UK, Awareness in Action was chosen to take part in the creation and delivery of an innovative leadership programme across a spectrum of Third Sector infrastructure organizations in Nottinghamshire and in 2011 we secured funding from the National Lottery to deliver training to a range of front line organizations in the social services. In 2013 my first book, 'The Compassionate Mind Approach to Reducing Stress' was published. It shows how each of us develops habits to help us survive, which are often not in our own best interests. When we learn how to work with compassion we can transform these habits into new, healthy ways of working with challenges that we face. In my trainings, my main focus is for people to make a personal, practical relationship with the material so that they can immediately apply it to enhancing their own creativity and effectiveness at work. As each individual makes this shift they increase their contribution to the wellbeing of their workplace.