Creative Workshop Exercises: Easy and Engaging Workshop Activities #22 Coaching for Wellbeing with the Squiggly Life Mindfulness Toolkit
Impact: This exercise is designed to help boost the mental wellbeing of someone reporting low mood, feelings of inadequacy, lack of self-confidence or similar
Materials Needed: The Navigating a Squiggly Life Mindfulness Toolkit
Remember, should you decide to buy one or more packs of cards, you can get 10% off your first shop order with a newsletter subscription
Professional Use: For use by work or life coaches, therapists, mental health professionals
Who is Coaching for Wellbeing with the Navigating a Squiggly Life Mindfulness Toolkit for?
This specific exercise is for people who report low self-confidence, low mood, lack of wellbeing. The toolkit as a whole is helpful to a whole range poor mental health issues.
How does Coaching for Wellbeing with the Navigating a Squiggly Life Mindfulness Toolkit help with low mood, low self-esteem and similar?
The information and exercises in this specific example and in the pack in general are based on good positive psychology science and are proved to boost mood and address other aspects of mental health. The particular exercises illuminated here help shift attention and focus towards good things, which creates a more positive, self-affirming and productive perspective and mood state, and also facilitates more confidence boosting and supportive self-story telling.
Preparation
Put the initial A-Z card to one side. Then take out the rest of the card pack arranged in the sections.
How to run the exercise
Start, as usual, by establishing what the client would like to be different. Let’s imagine, in this worked example, that they say: ‘I just want to feel better about myself.’
This is an expression of a desire for a shift in their emotions about themselves. So, a good place to start is the section Emotions and Thoughts.
From here you can pull out the card Energy and Emotions to help explore and illuminate where they feel they are and where they wish to be.
Having discussed that a little, you can then offer them a choice of engaging with either the 'What’s My Internal Weather’ or ‘Drawing Your Emotional Landscape’ card, depending on their preference for working through metaphor or through drawing. The exercise instructions are on the reverse of the card.
Then take the A-Z card from the very front of the pack
And ask them what of these goals or activities appeal to them in the context of their challenge.
Let’s image that our client picks ‘Remember the good stuff’.
Next you, or you and the client, can look through the cards and pick a few that seem to fit the objective. In this case that means cards or exercises that are going to help with 'feeling better about myself by remembering the good stuff'
For example we might pick these
From the Journalling Section: Celebrating our Good Qualities
From Meditation: Doubling down on our Strengths
From Gratitude: Select between Gratitude Tree and Gratitude Journalling depending on their personal situation.
All of these cards have specific exercises on the reverse. These are all supported by positive psychology research as being effective in boosting mental health wellbeing, mood and affect.
The It's a Squiggly Lift Mindfulness Toolkit packs featured here are available at the Positive Psychology Shop. A discount of 10% is available to new newsletter subscribers
If you have any queries about the exercises as described, please contact Sarahlewis@acukltd.com. We will publish any queries and answers in the next newsletter to the benefit of all.
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