10th May, afternoon

 Feeling exhausted and a little unwell today. I didn’t sleep the night before last and yesterday’s course was 6 hours long so I haven’t been used to concentrating for that long somewhere for a while. The course was really good. We learned about the difference between confidence and self esteem. Confidence being about more demonstrating ability and esteem more about how we view ourselves. She used an egg as a visual example. The yolk is the self esteem and the confidence is the shell. If you have good self esteem then the confidence will be more secure. I guess we need to aim to be hard boiled eggs. So the yolk and shell are strong.   We know if we have both good confidence and self esteem because we will be resilient. We develop good self esteem by knowing and living our values. Values make us strong and can last forever. We picked out our top ten values from a list. Mine were:

1) Integrity

2) Gratitude

3) Creativity

4) Continuous improvement

5) Love

6) Safety

7) Freedom

8) Community

9) Fairness

10) Self respect

How we develop our values is consciously being aware of them and evidencing them where we can. So there was one guy in the group who had a value of gratitude and his therapist had recommended that he wrote down each day something he was grateful for, and over time, he would build up a bank of positive things in his life and he would know what bought him gratitude, he would know himself better and build up the value of gratitude. 

The people in my group were really lovely. They were other volunteers at Blackthorn. There was Gary, who was coming up to the end of his time at Blackthorn. He was nervous about what he would do next. At Blackthorn, he enjoys working in the kitchen. He’s quite a joker, friendly guy, made me welcome when I was in the kitchen as well. Blackthorn do help with people moving on so hopefully he will transition and find a good new routine for himself. There was Abigail. She had finished her time with the Blackthorn and was just taking stock before moving onto other things. There was Julia and she was a student from Germany, a young woman, she was also coming to the end of being a volunteer. Her self esteem seemed generally good already. She wanted to know how to maintain the good self esteem. There was Duncan, he was an open and friendly character, also coming up to the end of his time at Blackthorn. He seemed to be experimenting with lots of groups and therapies and like me had done some counselling training. Finally, there was another woman in the group who’s name I have forgotten. She works at Blackthorn and is the baker there. She was a lovely person. A bit quieter and peaceful to be around.