The Life Skills Mentoring Academy

The Life Skills Mentoring Academy NLP Coaching & Counselling in Norfolk. Expert trauma-informed therapy for anxiety, stress & emotional challenges. Ages 5-100, whole family approach.

Fakenham-based, online UK-wide. Book free consultation. www.thelifeskillsmentoringacademy.co.uk

You may not need this but just in case - ⚠️ HILARITY WARNING: ⚠️ Mild ego bruising, questionable ID checks...And some ve...
18/08/2026

You may not need this but just in case - ⚠️ HILARITY WARNING: ⚠️

Mild ego bruising, questionable ID checks...

And some very red faced people at my front door ⚠️

Being 4ft 9.5 (the .5 is doing SO much work) means I live a permanent life of mistaken identity 🤦🏻‍♀️

Today's instalment:
💚NSPCC fundraiser at the door, second sentence in -

"I just need to check you're over 20 before I continue."

Sir. I am not, nor will I ever again be, 20.

"What's your secret..."

I try to stop the subconscious eye roll (I'm not even sure if it happened or not).

Sir, I do not have one, you have no idea what I'd give just to have a few more inches of height...

This is not a new phenomenon. Greatest hits include:

🛒 The shopping delivery guy who point-blank refused to hand it over because "there needs to be a parent home." I was in my pyjamas. I was also 34. When I asked what exactly he thought needed ID, he said nothing did - he just couldn't deliver to under 18s. To which I had to double check what he said... I had to fetch my ID from the car... I could see he had started to doubt himself, I handed the ID over and he went the colour of a tomato and muttered to himself all the way back to his van (nicely camouflaged into it actually) and profusely apologised saying "I've never gotten it so wrong"...

🧴 The time I got ID'd for car shampoo. CAR. SHAMPOO. What exactly did they think 22-year-old me was planning to do, drift into a life of crime with unusually clean alloys?

The only foolproof solution I've found is bringing my little girl - apparently nothing says "responsible adult" like a 6 year old in tow.

Everywhere else, prepare to be carded like it's last orders at a nightclub.

Small but mighty. Unfortunately also, apparently, still shrinking. Doctors' words, not mine 😅

See photo of me at the ripe age of mid 30's with my age identifier (not the card version)...

Check out the lovely Lorna at Lynton House Beauty Lynton House Beauty Academy
18/08/2026

Check out the lovely Lorna at Lynton House Beauty Lynton House Beauty Academy

A discussion I had with Kate Anderson Brand Photography in my accountability sessions recently was about the use of AI ...
18/08/2026

A discussion I had with Kate Anderson Brand Photography in my accountability sessions recently was about the use of AI and how AI watermarks have suddenly made everyone an expert on what counts as "real."

I've seen a few posts this week along the lines of "great, now I know which businesses to avoid." Delivered with real confidence, like this is a gotcha moment.

Except - AI's been embedded in daily life for years and nobody blinked. We just didn't call it that.

Nobody's out here boycotting their sat nav for choosing their route. Nobody's side-eyeing their bank for using AI to flag fraud. We don't bat an eyelid at Netflix or Spotify quietly building a profile of our taste, or at a robot hoover mapping the floor plan, or predictive text finishing a sentence for us. Alexa's in half the kitchens in the country. None of it got a label. It just became furniture.

So the sudden outrage over a visible AI tag feels a bit selective.

To be clear - I think transparency is a good thing. I'm not knocking that. I use AI tools in my own work, and I'm not precious about admitting it. Half the time I'm just typing a messy stream of thoughts into Claude and asking it to help me get them into some kind of order. (I've always had to try really hard in academia, it's not something that comes naturally to me).

But if we're going down the disclosure route properly, where does it stop? Does a ghostwritten book need a sticker on the cover? Does a sales page need a footnote saying "a copywriter wrote this bit"? Neither of those was written solely by the person whose name is on it either.

The real issue isn't the tool, it's the assumption that comes with it - that "AI helped" automatically means "there was no real thought behind this." For most people, it's the opposite. The thinking, the input, the substance - that's still theirs. AI's just helping them tidy it up, structure it, or say it more clearly. Even cropping a background out in Canva sets the same flag off now.

So label it if you like. Just don't assume the label tells you there's no person behind the work.

Here is a real photo of a real person trying to do her job as well as possible!

A broken bone shows up on an X-ray. Heart failure shows up on a scan. So what exactly are we measuring when we talk abou...
17/08/2026

A broken bone shows up on an X-ray. Heart failure shows up on a scan. So what exactly are we measuring when we talk about a "mental disorder"? 🤔

Where are the boundaries? Who draws them?
When does a feeling become a symptom? When does a behaviour become a disorder? A child who won't sit still, a teenager who won't make eye contact, an adult who worries more than someone else thinks they should - at what point does that cross from "human" into "diagnosable"? And who decided where that line sits?

Because someone did decide. A room full of people, at some point in history, agreed on a list. That list has changed before - dramatically - and it will change again. What's classed as a disorder in one decade, one culture, one country, isn't always classed as one in the next.

That doesn't mean distress isn't real. It doesn't mean suffering isn't real. But it does mean the categories we use to name that suffering are far less fixed - and far more human - than we're often led to believe.

So maybe the better question isn't "what's wrong with this person," but "what happened to this person, and what do they need." 💬

What actually is mental health? 🤔Chapter two of Sami Timimi's Searching for Normal tries to unpick this without reaching...
17/08/2026

What actually is mental health? 🤔

Chapter two of Sami Timimi's Searching for Normal tries to unpick this without reaching for the usual shortcuts - without calling anyone ill, disordered, or broken. And it left me with more questions than answers.

When is mood a symptom, and when is it just... an experience? Suffering?

What does it even mean to "cope"? Whose bar are we measuring that against?

What are the "normal stressors of life" - and who decided that, and for whom?

How do we define contribution - to a family, a community, a life - when we're so quick to measure people against a checklist instead?

We could go on. Maybe that's the point. The more precisely we try to pin mental health down, the more it slips through our fingers - because it was never really a fixed thing to begin with. It's relational, cultural, contextual. It depends on who's asking, and why.

I don't have neat answers here. But I think the questions themselves matter more than we give them credit for. 💬

What would you add to this list?

"Won't" and "can't" can look identical from the outside. 🚪"I won't" is a choice - usually about control, or wanting out ...
16/08/2026

"Won't" and "can't" can look identical from the outside. 🚪
"I won't" is a choice - usually about control, or wanting out of something.

"I can't" is overwhelm - anxiety, uncertainty, executive functioning struggles, low confidence, sensory overload. All happening beneath the surface, out of the child's control.
Before assuming defiance, ask: can they, right now?

🔑 See the whole child
🔑 Understand the load they're carrying
🔑 Be the safe place
🔑 Then, support can land

Every "no" deserves curiosity before correction. 💛

Another problem with psychiatric diagnosis... (and this one's harder to talk about) 🧠Sometimes a diagnosis becomes more ...
16/08/2026

Another problem with psychiatric diagnosis... (and this one's harder to talk about) 🧠

Sometimes a diagnosis becomes more than an explanation - it becomes an identity. Not just "I have ADHD" but "I am my ADHD." Not just understanding a child's struggles, but a whole family organising itself around a label.

"I thought it was just me, but now I know it's just my ADHD."

There's real relief in that sentence. For a lot of people, a diagnosis is the first time someone has said "this isn't your fault" - and that matters. It can lift years of shame.
But here's the harder question: what happens when the label starts doing more explaining than the person gets to do for themselves? When "I struggle with focus sometimes, especially when I'm overwhelmed" becomes "I can't, because ADHD"? When a child starts to believe the diagnosis is the ceiling on who they can become, rather than one piece of the story?

This isn't about stamping on anyone's identity or invalidating a diagnosis that's genuinely helped someone make sense of their life. It's about noticing when a label - however useful at first - quietly becomes a full stop instead of a starting point.

There's a phrase that's stayed with me: "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

Maybe that's the heart of it. A diagnosis can be a helpful word for something real. But it was never meant to be the whole sentence. The person underneath it is still unfolding, still more than any label could hold.

So how do we let a diagnosis explain without letting it define? I don't think there's a neat answer. I think it starts with curiosity instead of certainty - staying open to the whole person, not just the parts that fit the label.

What do you think? 💬

This is me, unfortunately. 😅📚The bedside table stack keeps growing... and voraciously getting ignored.But give me an aud...
15/08/2026

This is me, unfortunately. 😅📚

The bedside table stack keeps growing... and voraciously getting ignored.

But give me an audiobook and my dog Oakley's lead, and suddenly I'm "reading" for miles. Something about walking + listening just works for my brain - no pressure to sit still, no guilt about the pile.

Anyone else team audiobook over physical book? Or are you loyal to the paper stack? 👇

Healing can feel louder, before it begins to feel better. If you're in the middle of this and it feels harder than befor...
14/08/2026

Healing can feel louder, before it begins to feel better.

If you're in the middle of this and it feels harder than before, that doesn't mean something's gone wrong. It often means the opposite.

It can look like:
🌀 Emotions you've avoided beginning to surface
🌀 Old memories coming back into awareness
🌀 Questioning things that once felt certain
🌀 Feeling more, not less
🌀 Grief showing up that you didn't even realise was there

This is often part of the process, not a setback from it. You don't have to untangle it all at once - and you don't have to do it alone.

If this resonates, we're here. 💛

Credit to the image: The Counsellors Corner

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