Professional/Short course Flourishing at Work

This course goes beyond a palliative approach to wellbeing which assumes stress is a failure of someone to cope with an emotionally challenging workplace, offering instead strategies to forget or survive things. Whether working in classrooms, health-care settings, or hospitality we all recognise the emotional labour of "putting on a show" when we least feel like it. Flourishing means more than minimising distress - it is about recognising our sources of nourishment, meaning and purpose, which can include the work we do. The pandemic accelerated our understanding of work as a place to go; work instead is a place to be in complex and multi-layered networks of relationships. If you are interested in understanding flourishing as understanding your place in relationally-complex environments, recognising boundaries and monitoring what we "spend" of ourselves, then this course is for you.

In addition to exploring the skills and attitudes for raising awareness of our relational "selves" in the workplace, I promote something more sustainable and ambitious, which is assessing the attitudes we no longer question about how we organise our working lives. Multiple lockdowns emphasised the problems we face in untangling ourselves from work. This is why I integrate exercises in relational competences as the keystone for change. We come to know ourselves through our relationships and this course introduces you to an understanding of ourselves and our place in the order of things which includes the world of work.

The facilitator, James Costello, is author of Workplace Wellbeing - A Relational Approach, and has decades of experience as a psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor across the private, third and public sectors and more recently through working with complex organisational dynamics at the UK Home Office.

Entry requirements

There are no formal entry requirements to join this course.
A good level of English language is required, as is a willingness to engage in the experiential exercises.