So there was an interesting year. So many things happened and so many issues were dealt with in the spirit of humanity. Now we finish the year wondering about the new strain of the virus. Most of the populations of the UK seem to be in some sort of lockdown. And a vaccine is on the way. The Oxford vaccine has been approved. Now seems to not be the time to make rash decisions. And so it is with careful discussions that I have postponed the latest courses D8 were booked to deliver. We are delivering training and hands on consultancy to those who are in urgent need, those where the risk of not having training is assessed as too great to wait for the vaccine.

As the world is adapting to the new normal we have developed a modular online highly interactive workshop to assist us all in this new normal. Given that we can suddenly have certain groups of staff isolating for a period of time we now have the ability to put them on engaging training. So how did this online workshop come into being?

I have wanted to do a post about Hanlon's Razor for a while and the mask issue has led to me combining that here. Our non verbal communication being misinterpreted or misunderstood should not be considered intentional.

With all of us having concerning times we all need to do what we can for each other. There are many stories of people going above and beyond for those in their community. I see the people who have been through our system as part of our community. We all have people in our lives we need to support and look after due to vulnerabilities. As most of you will work within our industry or have people who you need to support within your household / family you will have difficulties supporting during illness and getting cover. Isolation is a concern - there are effectively physical walls between us.

The mind shift almost always travels from introductions where people say / imply things that contradict the basic philosophy of the course to an ending where people state publicly (or privately to me) how they always thought like this. Usually adding something like - “it is great that a training like this exists so that all those other people I work with whose attitude needs adjusting can access it”.

Teaching different groups can lead to predictable responses. When you teach a group where half the participants work with younger kids (under 11 ish) and the other half work with young people (teens) there is a clear dichotomy in their attitudes and responses around problem behaviour. It all comes back to the issue around the distractor versus the reinforcer.

Certification in itself is a process that cannot be rushed, this is a good thing as it is important that the system does exactly what it says on the tin. Throughout the months of preparation, assessment and certification it is hard to appreciate what the outcome will look like for our efforts. Today (6th Feb 2020) the image of the list of certified companies looks like this - today only, however I like the imagery :-)

As you know from our previous post about offloading we @D8 have always fundamentally separated the concept of Debriefing into 2 distinct and different areas. As we are in 2020 we should add that the Restraint Reduction Network Standards (2019 version 1.1) have also got these laid out into the same 2 areas.

Over the last few years we have had a terrific response in terms of de-escalation with our course incorporating Affect Labelling. Emotions arise to make us pay attention to our environment. The more emotional our experience, the less we can think clearly, resist impulses, and engage in constructive problem-solving. By creating even the simplest label, we learn to express what we are experiencing. At a rudimentary level, we think about what is causing us to feel emotion and take action to experience either more or less of the emotion, depending on the situation.

In a previous life I worked as a trainer for another organisation. This organisation had several trainers which meant when delivering update days I would, more often than not, be delivering an update day to a group who I had not delivered the original course to.When doing the introductions on an update day I used to consistently hear a couple of common comments.