Raise Her Up

The work landscape has changed and the pandemic has left us with a weakened economy, and the prospect of some tough times to come. Covid has also accelerated some changes that were already emerging in the workplace: flexible working; digital nomads; and the concept of having the same job for life feeling increasingly outdated. As we frequently tell our students at the GDST, we need to help prepare them for jobs that don’t even necessarily exist yet, through developing transferable skills that will serve them well regardless of the career direction they take.

However, many young people just don’t know what they want to do, and parents are often the ones to initiate conversations around this; parents who themselves come from a very different work experience and hinterland, and bring their own anxieties about an uncertain future to the table. This episode’s guest, Erica Sosna, is a GDST alumna, a careers consultant for several large firms, the author of recently published book The Career Equation, a 2 x TEDx Speaker and an authority on the subject of careers and the future of work. Erica offers some context and practical guidance for adults and young people alike on how to think about careers in a way to leave you feeling empowered, motivated and reassured.

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Meet Generation A, navigating their way through adolescence amid the perennial themes and challenges of social media, independence, sexuality, mental health - and all as we rebuild after Covid. How do they see themselves? What does it mean to be a female member of Gen A? And what are our roles as educators, parents and carers in nurturing them?

Our guest is Chloe Combi, writer, speaker, columnist and researcher. For her book Generation Z: Their Voices, Their Lives, Chloe interviewed over 10000 young people, and the insights she gained have informed her work with global brands on their future strategies. Currently researching and writing a follow up book on Generation A, she is also known for her itunes number 1-rated podcast You Don’t Know Me as well as her column for The Telegraph about teenage and family life.

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What impact have the past couple of years had on our young children’s behaviour? Our children played in person, in the park, in the playground for several hours a day: they negotiated, disagreed, made up, compromised. Overnight, their schools closed and they suddenly had only their siblings, their parents and themselves for company, at home, all day, every day. How did this sudden shift in home life affect families, and how have we readjusted? And what are the implications moving forward, as we are firmly told that Covid is part of the new normal, on top of the ongoing challenges of everyday family life?

Our guest on this episode of Raise Her Up is Livvy Gormally, a behaviour expert who works with families and schools to share her specialist knowledge of Early Intervention, Behaviour Management and School Inclusion. Livvy will talk us through the impact the past couple of years have had on our kids’ development, will offer her tips on how to recalibrate our childrens’ behaviour and manage our own expectations, and how to navigate the at-times challenging Christmas period ahead.

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It is a well-documented belief that writing your feelings down can make you feel better. A range of people, from seasoned mental health professionals to anguished teens, will agree that writing a diary, or ‘journaling’, to invoke the current buzzword, can help you to clear your head and make important connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Writing stuff down can help us to identify the things that bring us down, the events that trigger anxiety and low mood, and the actions that make us feel better.

Journalist and writer Harriet Walker is no stranger to the healing and reassuring powers of writing. As The Times’ Fashion Editor and recently published novelist in her own right, she says using the disquiet in her own mind to create something much more dramatic on the page can become a type of helpful catharsis. Harriet joins us to discuss her strategies for using writing to overcome and exorcise feelings of anxiety, and to share ideas with listeners of how to incorporate therapeutic writing into their own good mental health practice

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How many times have you told your child, ‘it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks!’ However, caring about what people think, and deferring to others’ judgement is an essential part of our young people’s identity development. So what can we do to help them navigate the challenge of comparing themselves to everyone else and finding themselves lacking?

To mark World Mental Health day, in this episode we welcome the brilliant Dr Tina Mistry, clinical psychologist, writer, speaker, podcaster and mental health expert. She’ll be reminding us of the need to validate our young people’s emotions and reactions, rather than soothing them away in a way that doesn’t really bring any long-term solution or comfort. She will also be explaining how caring what others think is a vital step on the journey to greater self-awareness and self-confidence.

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