Occam’s razor, also called law of economy or law of parsimony, is a principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” 

If we expect a member of staff to go into a potentially violent and aggressive situation with the aim of controlling and restraining another human being for the purpose of keeping everyone safe, where heart rates and emotions will be high, you have to give them simple skills. Otherwise we are failing them.

In this podcast I talk about how our thoughts become things. How brain plasticity works and why this creates the behaviours we have and, more importantly, how you can change your life by changing the way you choose to think.

Someone kindly left a comment under my last Podcast entitled 'The Importance of Mind Training in Dealing With Conflict Situations' about the importance of visualisation which prompted me to do this one.

The fact is we don't actually see with our eyes, we see with our mind. In short our everyday experience and our life is a projection of our memories (good or bad) and our anticipations (what we expect to happen), which is why so many people live in a 'bataris box' of expected reality. 

This podcast touches on the phenomenal scientific discoveries in the world of quantum physics and quantum mechanics that proves this very point.

Enjoy and I'd appreciate your comments.

I was listening to a guided meditation by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on 'Right thinking, right words and right actions' which became the motivation for this podcast on Monday morning because the teaching highlighted how we all become the sum of our own actions.

Enjoy.

Resilience has been described as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, and we have all had our fair share of those during the last year.

One of the great benefits of practicing mindfulness and awareness is that we become more flexible and more resilient.

But meditation can also be useful in more dynamic ways. Meditation can help you do more than slow down your racing thoughts-it can help you think quicker. It can help you adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. It can be a key tool in promoting resilience. 

Without doubt, stress reduction improves resilience.

As we enter our third national lockdown for the next six weeks many people will be worried, especially those of us who have businesses that we depend on and that worry will be compounded by the hourly news and media coverage that will focus primarily on the negatives of the lockdown and this current pandemic.

But should we be grateful instead? 

A recent message from Afghanistan that I want to share with you may give you a different perspective on it. 

Lots of staff go on conflict management and communication skills courses where they are taught skills and techniques on how to manage conflict being presented by another person.

But what about staff? How do we expect a member of staff to control their behavior and not get triggered themselves? 

In short, how do we help staff respond appropriately as opposed to reacting without thinking?

In addition, many staff will take the negative experience of a conflict situation away with them and they will replay it in their minds long after the event has ended. This is one reason why stress is on the increase in our society.

This is what this Podcast is about.

Handcuffs and Covid in 2021 - Physical restraint is a hazardous activity in it's own right, and now with the covid infection and death rates rising once again combined with the rising tide of violence against staff, I want to broach the subject of handcuffing and how handcuffs and other forms of mechanical restraint devices can help reduce the risk to all concerned in a restraint situation.

I'd be interested in your comments so please let me have your thoughts.

Best Regards

Mark Dawes

Happy New Equanimity New Year to you all.

Now I know social media will be awash with everyone wishing everyone else a Happy New Year for 2021 as we leave behind a year most of us would like to forget.

But even as we move into 2021 we have the ongoing restrictions and fallout from this pandemic to deal with so I didn't want to glibly just wish everyone all the best. I wanted to offer you something that you can do for yourself, your family and even people you don't know.

Now as you may know I meditate every day and during this lockdown period I've been doing quite a lot of more of that which has been really helpful. 

Meditation has many benefits. It can help you become more compassionate, promote loving kindness and practice sympathetic joy, but the near enemy of compassion is burnout, the near enemy of loving kindness is attachment and the near enemy of sympathetic joy can become simply comparing and none of these near-enemy's are good for you.

One of the golden nuggets of meditation is ' Equanimity'. It's the secret sauce if you like. It helps us control what we can't control and not worry about what we can't control.

This can be a major benefit in things like conflict resolution and resilience training (and this is something we will be adding to our conflict management & resilience training this coming year).

This is about mental training (the inner game) and I hope that you take me up on my offer of checking out the app below and before anyone asks, no, I'm not an affiliate of the product. This is just one app that I've found to be very useful.

And Here's the 10% Happier App link - https://10percenthappier.app.link/share

This is a video interview I did with my good friend and professional colleague Tony Bleetman on the 18th November 2020.

In this video Tony takes a look back at how far the UK has come in the last twenty or so years in relation to restraint and how far ahead the UK is compared to many other countries.

We talk about the history of restraint, where it came from and how each different sector decided upon its own restraint training based on their own specific objectives and requirements.

As well as lots of other interesting stuff!