Coronavirus

Deflated? Never at Growing Talent – ready for any challenge!

Jane JamesLeave a comment

We all know the pleasure and the pain that Coronavirus has brought. Although we’ve all been in the same sea trying to get to the other side, we’re all in different boats.

It’s been a rollacoaster for everyone – maybe just to different degrees.

For those able to work from home, there’s maybe been the challenge that others in your family have been doing the same! Home schooling for those with children has been an added dimension – not all bad but not all good either!

Some of us have been forced to look at our own wellbeing. If we’re lucky enough to have gardens – they are likely re-designed and weed free! Some may have set some space aside for a veg plot having seen the advantages of growing your own – especially in a pandemic!

Some have taken the time to learn new skills – learn a new language, bricklaying or joined an online choir or logo class.

For some living in rooms without their own space or garden the initial lockdown is particularly tough.

Now we’re nearing the end of lockdown and the end of the furlough scheme which is seeing the unemployment figures rise exponentially. Graduates and those who have finished A levels are leaving full-time education. There has never been so much untapped talent in decades.

The poison chalice of unemployment quickly strips away self-worth and belief even in those previously highly confident with solid work histories. This needs addressing. It won’t work for everyone being put into a job without a programme of rebuilding their self-esteem – enter Growing Talent!

After six years collaboration with Job Centre Plus on Growing Talent, I was approached by two key cheerleaders of Growing Talent – also managers at JCP! – to run some programmes to address this self-esteem void along with knowledge for job searching to give those looking for work the edge wellbeing and so on.

Next week kicks off a week long programme for Jill – JCP manager at Bromley for some of her customers. Followed by two sessions the following week specifically aimed at Graduates. We’re really pleased Sophie and the team at Smart Works are joining us on these session to showcase their amazing offering.

In August a week long course is deliver for Rajen of Job Centre Plus in East London.

Meeting and exceeding the Government’s Kick Start programme our partnership will deliver empowerment to participants to sustainably move forward.

Ask any Growing Talent Associate or Graduate – we’re never deflated and always ready for any challenge!

Can’t wait to get started!Deflatd

Jane James1 Comment

I caught a news item on Aljazeera this morning which posed  thought provoking, ethical questions about a vaccine for Coronavirus/Covid-19.

 

Who should be the guinea pigs for a potential vaccine trial?  We know someone has got to try it without knowing any side affects etc.  Is it right to trial it on healthy people and then expose them to the disease?  Is it right to trial it on those who are already sick?  I know I wouldn’t like to make this judgement call.

 

The question was then posed, once there is an effective vaccine, who gets it first?  The citizens of the country who discover it, the poorest countries with little access to healthcare, the healthiest population to prevent them getting ill keeping businesses going? medical staff, carers?

 

 

The world is a very small place.  People have friends, family, connections globally not just in the country in which they live.  We are used to travelling far and wide.  We know Coronavirus is related to the flu viruses and will be around now.  The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.  A quote I heard from  one of the speakers on AlJazeera this morning is ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’.

 

One thing is for sure, how humanity answers and acts on these questions will determine if humanity has a bright future or if it’s going to be a ‘me me me’ scenario.

 

What do you think?

 

 

The power of journaling

Jane JamesLeave a comment

Having worked in the mental health and well being arena for so long, I’ve seen the power of journaling on the mind.  Capturing thoughts feelings, gratitude helps when reflecting back to learn to go forward.

 

But what if you are incapacitated and can’t journal?  Luckily for Mandy she had great nurses who went the extra mile to ensure when she recovered she could ‘fill in the gaps’ on the time lost through being in a coma.

 

 

93 days is a long time to miss from our lives.  We know how frustrating it is the morning after the night before not remembering what we said, did or where we were.  That’s just one night’s loss of memory through over indulgence.  But what about longer gaps like Mandy experienced through Covid-19?

 

The nurses started journaling each day for Mandy to read when she recovered.

 

 

Short entries but with powerful messages.  Now Mandy is home and starting the long recovering back to fitness without the worrying gap of those 93 days.

 

How amazing are our nurses?

Thinking outside the box when you business takes a hit

Jane JamesLeave a comment

Coronavirus and Covid-19 have put some businesses into positions of having to explore new markets and make themselves attractive to new customers whilst still being accessible financially to their new customers.

 

One such business is a ‘club’ of fishermen and women who had their usual market stopped overnight due to the pandemic with the immediate shutdown of restaurants, gastro pubs etc.  Under the Pesky Fish website, the daily catch is advertised at 8am each morning – be quick though most things are sold by 9am!  You can elect to have the fish filleted or left whole.

 

I made my first order a little nervously.  How can fish be delivered by courier and still be good quality and fresh?  I need not have worried.  My first order arrived today.  Sealed in an insulated box – full recyclable with a really nice touch of information cards about who caught the fish, their boats etc.

 

Not only have I got a good quality selection of fish that will last 4-5 days, it’s cheaper than supermarkets and higher grade but I also feel I’m supporting a niche industry too.

 

So Dean caught my Pollack fillets:

 

 

Matt caught my Mussels

 

Ian smoked my Salmon!

 

 

Fancy some fish? why not check these guys out and support our fishing industry as well

 

https://www.peskyfish.co.uk

 

What’s stopping you? – Yourself maybe?

Jane JamesLeave a comment

Coronavirus has forced us to stop and take stock.  Yes, we didn’t see it coming.  Yes, we don’t know when it will end. Yes, we still don’t know what the end result will be.  But, this is a unique, once only opportunity to stop, take stock of where we are in our lives and ask ourselves – am I where I want to be?

 

Hopefully, for most of us it will be a resounding ‘yes’.  For those who maybe feel change is needed in some areas of their lives, what usually stops them doing anything about it is them.  The negative part of their brain interrupts with self-doubts which get louder and louder if we let them.  This is perfectly natural as our brains are programmed to keep us safe and they do this by amplifying risk – think fight, flight or freeze situations.

 

We can learn tricks to move forward such as not thinking you can’t but just doing it.  I’m minded of the people throughout history across all corners of the world who have achieved great things when on paper stereotypical thoughts would be they can’t.

 

One who had diverse careers including that of a stuntman didn’t switch to being an inventor until his mid40s.  Trevor Bayliss initially starting making products to aid his peers who had been disabled through stunts.  On hearing about the AIDS breakout, he got to thinking of the isolation of remote villages who didn’t get healthcare information easily until he invented the wind-up radio – no batteries needed.  Totally accessible.

 

A fuller interview with Trevor is featured below…..

Taken from The Conversation…  This interview was featured following Trevor’s death in 2018.

 

Trevor Baylis, who has died aged 80, left his school in London at 15 without any qualifications. But he went on to become a physical training instructor, an engineer, a stuntman and, at 45, a full-time inventor, eventually finding fame for developing the wind-up radio.

Many of Baylis’s inventions were inspired from his time as a stuntman. He had friends who had suffered life changing injuries as a result of their work. “Disability is only a banana skin away,” he often said.

As a result, he focused his effort on inventing devices to help people with disabilities in their everyday lives. He came up with over 200 of these devices, which he named Orange Aids and included one handed bottle openers, foot operated scissors, can openers and sketching easels.

Then in 1991 he saw a TV programme about AIDS in Africa. The presenter described the difficulty of getting important health information to people who couldn’t afford batteries for their radios. Baylis immediately went out to his workshop to see if he could build a suitable generator for a radio. It only took him 30 minutes to come up with a solution.

The resulting clockwork prototype worked well but he struggled to get anyone interested in producing it. In 1994, as a result of being featured on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World programme and in an interview on the World Service, a backer came forward to help start manufacturing the radios in South Africa, employing disabled people. The vast majority of these early production radios were sold to aid agencies to distribute freely, but over time they also became very popular with consumers in the developed world and were able to be sold for profit too.

When Baylis’s design was manufactured as the BayGen Freeplay radio, it won him 1996 BBC Design Awards for Best Product and Best Design. It is still considered an iconic piece of British design, featuring in the UK Science Museum collection. Spin offs from this design included a wind-up torch and MP3 player, along with shoes that generated enough electricity from the movement of the wearer to charge a mobile phone.

The wind-up Baygen Freeplay radio. J. D. Pfaff/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Despite his fame, Baylis felt he had often not received the financial returns he deserved for his inventions and began to campaign for better protection for inventors. He argued that intellectual property theft should be a criminal offence. He suggested that all school children should learn about inventing and intellectual property in the same way that they learn about art. In 2003, he set up Trevor Baylis Brands to help inventors struggling to develop and protect their ideas, helping over 10,000 people and launching many spin-off companies.

Baylis provided some early examples of how design could respond to both social and environmental problems by producing products that didn’t require expensive and polluting batteries. He made his radio very durable and easy to repair so it would last as long as possible, a real shift away from the usual consumption driven product market. A 1998 study of radios with different power sources found that, despite its weight, the Baygen had a significantly lower overall environmental impact over a five-year lifetime than any other radio on the market at the time.

Ripples of change

Sustainable product design still struggles to be recognised and applied by industry today. Yet the innovation displayed by the Baygen radio, initially using human powered energy systems and later supplementing this with solar power, produced a ripple effect in the market and large corporations began to develop similar products.

Although many criticised the product for being unnecessarily robust, it wasn’t created for the same kind of use as typical radios in developed countries and instead was designed to be as durable as possible. Baylis’s radio illustrates the complexities of balancing environmental, social, ethical and economic decisions in design and is still a useful discussion piece for aspiring designers today.

Trevor Baylis embodied the role of the inventor, always looking for solutions to problems and proving his novel ideas through many prototypes. He understood the value of design and considered this to be an important step in the commercialisation of his ideas.

Baylis received an OBE in 1997 and a CBE in 2015 for services to intellectual property. Despite his many successes, he once said he had one big regret: not being selected to swim for Great Britain in the 1956 Olympics.

Wind-up radios can still be brought today.

 

If you are reflecting on potentially changing something in your life right now, don’t let self-doubt in.  Instead think about the wider impact you could make not only on your lives but those around you.

 

You don’t have to be an inventor to make a difference.

PPE – confused?

Jane JamesLeave a comment

 

Feeling confused on the PPE situation? Understandable if you are. On one side we have the Government stating there is enough PPE in the system and NHS workers have the protection they need but maybe aren’t using it appropriately – hugely insulting. As professionals the NHS staff know exactly how to use PPE appropriately to protect both them and their patients.

The opposing view is from NHS who state they don’t have enough and are risking their lives. Anyone would vote all NHS workers in hospitals, care homes, hospices, GP surgeries etc, should have more than enough PPE at their disposal. It should not be rationed.

For the first time today, analysis in The Times offers the view that maybe both sides are right. The NHS is massive and the billons of pieces of PPE that the Government have sourced just isn’t enough. See the feature below… ‘Suppliers struggle to fill demands’

This makes sense doesn’t it? With fashion houses making gowns etc for the NHS and FM companies like Churchill Services under the direction of Anthony one of their MDs using their 3D printers to make face masks – it seems we can make the equipment in the UK instead of buying cheap, single use disposable PPE from China. This could be sustainable and cost effective with specialised laundrettes like Geoffrey Gay’s below featured in The Times 13.4.20 enabling kit to be sterilised and used again.

Co-Vid 19 wil end eventually. Can lessons be learned from it’s impact on how to make the NHS sustainable by better procurement?

Only time will tell if logic will win……

Coronavirus – how are you handling it?

Jane JamesLeave a comment

It’s a scary time for all.  Coronavirus is unprecedented  and it’s impact on individuals unknown.

Some of us will loose a lot despite Government interventions – jobs, businesses, homes, relationships, our mental well being and so on.

Whilst Coronavirus may be completely out of our control, how we look on this period is completely within our control.

Action for Happiness is an excellent online organisation posting well-being thoughts. The feature photo above is from Action for Happiness and an excellent foundation for us to use as a basis to plan our journey through the challenging period ahead.

Let’s take each point in turn in the photo and consider making it work for us:

  1. Consider drawing up a schedule to set-up video calls with your friends/relations and call them at a regular time each day. Note down three of your top techniques for keeping calm. This might include breathing patterns, visualisation of happy places or mindfulness.
  2. Maybe use different perfume soaps and sing a couple of bars of your happy song – one that makes you smile.
  3. Consider making this a poster that you can reflect on every day
  4. Water is free – consider making a chart to see if you can drink a tumbler every hour. Try different ingredients or cooking methods to mix things up.
  5. Check out the indoor exercises on YouTube. Consider doing this with family and friends on WhatsApp Video.
  6. Remember the 2metre rule when helping others
  7. Your feelings are important. It’s natural to go through times of positivity and negativity. Key is to recognise and not dwell on the negativity.
  8. We all need time to just be. Make sure you take this time for yourself.
  9. There is a great film on YouTube called ‘It’s not about the nail’ -check this out. It will really help you understand how important listening is.
  10. Sleep is so important. It’s ok if you can’t sleep. Get up and relax for a while before trying again. One top tip is to repeat the word ‘the’ over and over. It helps the brain ‘switch off’ I’m told by a Health & Safety expert.
  11. This could be five things from your garden or window if you don’t have a garden.
  12. Find something connected to your interests or something you’ve always wanted to know more about.
  13. Remember, everyone else is in the same boat so take a breath and spread happiness and understanding where you can.
  14. When was the last time you played Cludo, Monopoly or something else from your childhood. Not only does this evoke happy memories it’s good to switch off from technology now and then.
  15. Is now the time to finish that project you started some time ago?
  16. Music is proven to affect our mood. Why not spend some time listening to some music from a favourite genre or era?
  17. There are a wealth of free on-line courses – why not check some out?
  18. One idea that springs to mind is dancing whilst preparing dinner?
  19. Maybe you could compose and send a poem via email
  20. Now this isn’t going to be consuming a shed load of chocolate nor a crate of wine! Think about what will enhance your self-care and mental well-being.
  21. Especially important for those we’ve lost touch with. Now might be the time to re-connect.
  22. Whilst all headlines are about Coronavirus, there are feel good stories there too. Focus on these.
  23. It’s interesting to remember how young the internet and smart phones are! We managed before their invention. Start by reducing your tech time if having a day tech free is too hard.
  24. Can you change what you are worrying about? If not, why are you wasting time worrying about it?
  25. Make a list of everyone you know and note these points. It will help you see those you need to keep close and those you need to let go
  26. Looking at some goals you’ve made or are making for your self. What would be a good first step in reaching these?
  27. Saying ‘thank you’ means so much to those receiving it. The method you use to say it can add to that value – e.g. a handwritten note
  28. Coronavirus is a moment in time. It will end. Why not make arrangements to do something special with family/friends later this year?
  29. If you have a garden and can physically get out into it this will be easy to do. If you don’t why not pick a particular view from your window and check the changes you notice everyday?
  30. Clear and logical. A mantra we should all remember.

Whether you follow this plan or not, remember all situations pass in time. Be kind to yourself and those around you. Ultimately, all will be well….

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