Why I Became A Stress Management Trainer For Therapists and Coaches

Why I Became A Stress Management Trainer, Relaxation and Meditation Teacher than just a healer, therapist, and coach.

Why I believe we need more teachers and mentors in the holistic and well-being sector.

And why safe and effective practice as a holistic therapist and stress management trainer is so important to me.

My Journey Into Becoming A Stress Management Trainer

Like most healers and therapists I studied and tried many many modalities and tools before actually starting my business and becoming a Stress Management Trainer.

I began studying Reiki, Meditation, and Stress Management in the early 90’s then counselling, coaching, a variety of different holistic therapies, psychology, psychotherapy, and different forms of healing and spiritual development. This helped give me a wide range of skills and tools to be an effective stress management trainer and stress management coach.

My Own Health Journey

As someone who had a very complex health history from childhood and mercury poisoning. that mainstream medicine had little understanding of and no treatment for I found myself pivoted into the world of holistic well-being at a young age.

I had a strong interest in self-empowerment, self-help, and spiritual development. But at my core, I just wanted to get my health back, recover from extreme exhaustion, and lack of mobility, and heal my eye as I was suffering from threatened eye loss.

So as you can imagine I needed to find ways to cope and manage my own stress and anxiety. I was offered no support or treatment so, so I began studying lots of different courses on Managing Stress, and Building Stress Resilience, alongside studying different forms of meditation which would eventually lead to me as a meditation teacher, holistic wellbeing, and stress management trainer.

My First Stress Management Training

I remember one of the first open college courses I did in stress management while being housebound, was one written by the award-winning psychologist and psychotherapist Professor Stephen Palmer. This was not just a great introduction to stress management and stress resilience but it was a great taster into how wide the subject of stress management was.

Stress Management is a huge topic and includes many different lifestyle and stress management approaches.

I would go on to further my training in Stress Management and as a Stress Management Trainer through a variety of different types of stress courses such as the Open University, Stress Education Services, and Caledonian University where I qualified as a Stress Adviser and Advanced Stress Adviser Course with the highly respected Alice Muir.

Why Teaching Stress Management And Life Skills Was So Important To Me

But at my core, I knew teaching was a huge part of my purpose. As someone who was very much discriminated against and neglected around an additional diagnosis of M.E. and what appears to be now an undiagnosed case of Lyme Disease. I had to learn how to become mentally and emotionally resilient to a lot of abuse, neglect, and a long list of medical harm.

Discrimination, Neglect, And Serious Medical Harm

Despite having very rare and serious conditions it was my M.E and Lyme symptoms that impacted most of my daily quality of life.

But because of a lot of misinformation and miseducation in the medical system, I like many faced tremendous ignorance, judgments, and further complications to my health.

Sadly I know more than a few people who ended up with serious medical harm long-term in wheelchairs from medical practitioners’ abuse of power and lack of knowledge.

There were more than a few occasions when I should have been hospitalised but my parents were very concerned about how I would be treated.

On one occasion when I did end up in hospital, with rheumatic fever and other mystery symptoms at the time suspected Lyme disease, my immune system was so low I ended up catching another infectious disease in the hospital.

And even though I was admitted to the hospital extremely ill and hardly able to move my arms, my legs were swollen from head to toe.

One Doctor told my parents he was very concerned for my mental and emotional well-being because of the very distorted views that some of the doctors in the hospital had around M.E. And that because of my M.E. diagnosis they didn’t believe in, that they wanted me to be seen by the psychiatric unit. 

It was only sheer determination, self-help, anxiety, and stress management techniques that kept me sane, that kept me strong. And all sorts of financial sacrifices to invest in holistic and alternative treatments when I was really ill, bed and housebound did I get some of my health back.

The Power Of Stress Management

I realised very early on in this very lonely hard journey how important stress management, stress reduction, and stress resilience tools were to keep going on when so many gave up. This ignited my desire to be not just a therapist, and a healer but a stress management trainer.

At this time in my life, I also became acutely aware of how my own lack of self-esteem, self-worth, and lack of assertiveness had impacted not just my own life but how I was treated along the way.

So my desire to teach holistic approaches to health, meditation, relaxation therapy, and stress management became very very strong.

Why I Feel So Strong About Safe And Effective Practice

I also wanted to make sure I was first and foremost a safe and effective therapist, coach, and healer. Because of the most shocking and harmful practices I experienced or witnessed.

The number of products and services that I was sold, so many types of therapies and types of healing I know now I should never have been using.

Some things in life we can only learn through difficult personal experiences. But the reality of my journey helped me see how much harm and malpractice was not just in mainstream medicine, but holistic medicine and even the self-development industry. It taught me how little was being taught and how quickly people were getting certificates to work on other people’s health and well-being in some cases with just a few days of training.

The Problems With Fast-Track Training

Most did not come from ill intent but from ignorance, ego,  lack of training, or poor training. Equally, a lot of it was also down to lack of awareness, and expertise.

Sadly this has dramatically increased in the health and well-being industry with the explosion of fast-track training which in many ways sadly has become the new norm for a lot of types of healing, therapy, and wellness training.

The reality is no matter if we like it or not, there is only so much you can teach a healer, therapist, or trainer in a few weekends. And most of these training schools sadly charge so little or don’t have enough time to include much on safe and effective practice. Or to ensure that the student has a good level of self-awareness.

The Importance Of Awareness, Self-Awareness As A Stress Management Trainer

Self-awareness is such an important skill for anyone in therapy, coaching, and healing work. I believe it is also extremely important in the work of a stress management trainer.

This is one of the reasons that led me to be a trainer, a teacher, and a mentor to other therapists, coaches, and healers. I was getting constantly asked to offer training in certain areas because organizations had previous problems with healers, therapists, and trainers doing things that weren’t that safe or appropriate for their clients. I met and still meet so many clients who have very negative experiences because of poor training or lack of awareness.

So it wasn’t just my own experiences of poor practice that drove this strong desire to encourage more safer and effective practices. But also a long list of clients and students who came to me after feeling more damaged by the therapists they saw.

I believe very strongly that in any form of well-being, should always be based on DO NO HARM FIRST. That it should be about empowering the client or student, to take their power back, to make their own choices, of course on what is right for them.

I believe today that too many people hand over their health and well-being to someone else. The more we can teach others to learn how to manage their own stress, be more still and spiritually connected to themself. They have the tools to empower themself to know what is right for them. 

My Role As A Stress Management Trainer And Therapist Trainer

Now today I am a Stress Management Trainer to Therapists and coaches, I offer an Online Stress Management School which provides more holistic Online Stress Management Courses and CPD Courses For Therapists who come from a mind, body, and spirit approach.

I provide courses that train therapists to teach relaxation techniques, teach stress management and so many other holistic and spiritual tools.

Because I believe the world needs, people need to learn how to become more empowered in their health and well-being. Most people today don’t know how to manage and reduce their stress because of unhealthy conditioning and lifestyle distortions. Although I was mercury poisoned and I had what appears to now have been tick bites at a young age, I like you had a lot of anxiety and stress and didn’t know how to manage it.

I Believe The World Needs More Empowerers, Teachers

The world needs more teachers, and mentors that teach people how to be, and how to live the way we are supposed to live. More and more people want to learn things like meditation, but like everything, there are right ways to do things and there can be lots of harder ways to do or learn things.

That is why I became more of a Stress Management Trainer, Meditation Teacher, and Relaxation Therapist Teacher to therapists and coaches.

So I see my role is not just about teaching the teachers, but helping those teachers be more highly effective, to question things, to look at things from not just one perspective but from different perspectives. And that is why in my Stress Management Training For Therapists we explore lots of different relaxation and stress management techniques and approaches to suit different clients’ needs.

Everyone is unique and has different ways of looking at the world. Every client that comes to you is at different stages in their own awareness in their own life and spiritual journey. The more that we can bring them back to themself, bring them back to a more natural we of being we help them live the life they were born to live. That is why I LOVE supporting the empower and teachers of the future.