Welcome letter from Andrew Wright from 'Action Your Potential' to Parents, Carers and Students!

Welcome back to another college year, it’s so wonderful to have everyone back in school.  This school year will be different in a number of ways, a key one is we are getting to work together.  My name’s Andrew and I work at a company called Action Your Potential. We’re working with all of you this year to help you learn all about your amazing brain. To learn more about me and our company click here. 

We work in over 100 schools and colleges across the UK, supporting children, parents and school staff to learn all about their amazing brains.  In the next few weeks and months we’ll be delivering assemblies, information videos and much more support. 

As families you can already access our website – www.actionyourpotential.org – where you can find out much more about your amazing brain.  Our website has been written for parents and students, to help you dive as deep as you’d like to learn about your brain. We use evidence-based information built from science and psychology to help all of us build the daily skills that support us to be the best version of ourselves.

Our programme has 3 strands;  Well-Being, Mind Management and Unleashing Learning

Within each strand there are 10 #NeuroNinja skills we’ll be sharing with children, parents and school staff. Here’s a video saying hello and giving you a bit more information.   During this first term we’ll be focusing skills to support well-being and mental health through building the skills of emotional awareness. Well rested brains that notice, accept and talk about their emotional experiences are better at learning and making progress.  Later in the year we’re diving deep into the processes of learning, growth and how to respond to anxiety.

Here’s a link to a poster of the 12 Rocks of Well-Being, we’ll be explaining how they work and why they’re important for all of us every day in an assembly with the students and then we’ll be sending a video home for parents and carers.

We’re so looking forward to working with all of you.  As we continue to live day to day with the ever-changing complexity of a global pandemic there has never been a better time to use what we now know about our incredible brains to help us live inside them positively. Our programme is a journey to support all of us in better understanding our brains, applying two of the most powerful ideas from psychology and cognitive science. These are the skills of mentalising and metacognition (see below).  Mentalising and metacognition are structured ways of using our minds to respond rather than react to experience, enabling us to achieve more positive outcomes in our learning, growth, relationships and life. 

The ten skills we will be teaching are summarised below:

10 Skills

Skill 1 - #DoYourRocks (The 12 Rocks of Well-Being – Balance & Bounce)

Well-being is a skill & underpins learning effectiveness, requiring diligent application of bounce & balance 

Skill 2 - #Live+ (Managing Emotions and Mood - ANT)

Living positively with negative biases of our mind; using emotional awareness to notice, accept & process experience 

Skill 3 - #BeAnxietyAware (CAKE)

Applying common humanity, awareness, kind curiosity and empathy to our response to uncertainty & anxiety

Skill 4 - #CalmToolBox 

Build a calm tool-box to activate your natural calm down system when under challenge

Skill 5 - #DesirableDifficulties

A strategic step beyond your safety zone in a managed way that supports personal growth & opens experience

Skill 6 - #Bounce (KNOW how to respond to setbacks)

Applying self-compassion when we’re face set-backs so we learn the lessons of experience with less suffering

Skill 7 - #Learning3not1 (Getting It, Practicing It, Using It)

Exploding intuitive myths of learning so we manage it as efficiently as possible 

Skill 8 - #UDrive (Self-Directed Study, Learning and Development)

Growth & learning involve struggle & effort, if you’re going to progress you have to drive some of it yourself 

Skill 9 – #LOL (Little and Often Learning and deliberate practice)

Barriers to learning melt through the application of carefully applied and designed practice

Skill 10 - #RunTheDay (The Daily Plan)

Our lives require positive habits applied daily to progress; iterative improvement, values & purpose key drivers

It is going to be an amazing year, one when we all learn more about our incredible brains and how to get the most out of it every single day.

If you have any questions or would like to get in touch just email me at andrewwright@aypuk.com or follow us on social media, find us on Twitter, Facebook Youtube, LinkedIn or Instagram.

Once we learn more about our amazing brains we can improve well-being, stress management, learning, how we respond to our emotions, how we challenge ourselves and how we engage, enjoy and thrive.  Welcome to the #NeuroNinja journey and the neuroscience revolution.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Wright

Action Your Potential