“Being nominated for this award has come as a complete shock”
A SELFLESS East
Yorkshire-based clinical hypnotherapist has been nominated for the Mail's Pride of East Yorkshire Awards for her work
helping students adopt a positive mindset and deal with exam-related anxiety.
Sheila
Granger, a professional lifestyle engineer and clinical hypnotherapist who
works as far a field as Australia and the USA, launched the Educational
Performance division of her business four years ago in response to growing
concerns over the number of children on mental health service waiting lists.
She
recognised that by providing support mechanisms to those young people with
lower levels of anxiety, it would prevent their problems from escalating into
something with much more devastating consequences.
Now, she has
trained a team of more than one hundred Educational Performance Practitioners worldwide
to ensure young people, their parents and their schools can access support of
this nature no matter where they are.
Sheila has
been nominated for the Mail’s Business in the Community award by her
communications partner Mercury.
“Being nominated for this award
has come as a complete shock,” said Sheila. “I thoroughly enjoy my work with
schools and it’s been incredible to see the Educational Performance side of my
business go from strength to strength due to increased demand over recent
years.
“We all have expectations
placed on us, either by ourselves or by others, and it’s these expectations
that can cause us the greatest stress. Students with low expectations who
believe they are going to fail, find it difficult to think positively – which
ultimately impacts on their performance.
“In much a similar way, top
performing students have to contend with the weight of increased expectations
and sometimes the pressure to deliver can set them up for a fall. For teachers,
there is already a vast emphasis on the delivery of pastoral care and teachers
have the added role of coaching individuals through the exam experience, as
well as preparing them academically.”
There’s no place quite like
home for Sheila. She says it’s been an honour to work with students and
teachers on her doorstep, in her hometown of Hull, to make a difference to
their lives.
She has been
working closely with students at Endeavour High School in recent months, which
is closing at the end of this school year, to make sure pupils go out on a
high.
Teachers at the school say
the initiative has paid real dividends with students better prepared than ever
before.
Headteacher Stewart Edgell said:
“If you have a student who is worried and you
bring someone in who can help them by arming them with new strategies and
coping mechanisms, they feel valued that someone has taken note of their
concerns and is doing something with them.
“Sheila’s
work has dovetailed nicely into giving students a positive outlook and creative
ways of preparing for exams, such as setting aside one hour a day when they can
worry but during the rest of the day putting any negative thoughts out of their
minds for example.
“I am in no
doubt whatsoever that this work has had a significant impact on the students
who have worked with Sheila.”
Rachael Dean, account
executive at Mercury, nominated Sheila after working closely with her in recent
months and being inspired by the true difference she is making to young people
in East Yorkshire.
She said: “It always moves me
when I see the life-changing results of Sheila’s work. As a recent graduate
myself, I know how detrimental the effects of exam-related anxiety can be and
it’s really inspiring to see how Sheila can help shape someone’s future who, in
their mind, might have already lost all hope.”
This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Catherine Lea, business editor of the Hull Daily Mail. 
