Be a More Effective Foster Parent by Responding not Reacting and Create a Better Life for

Yourself and Your Family

Are you calm and in control enough to respond effectively to everyday crises?
Or are you so stressed it's all you can do to avert a disaster?

My name is Mica May I'm a Life Coach and I support foster parents using skills I've built up in a long career helping families.

To say foster parents experience stress is a major understatement. I know you often have several children with 'conflicting needs' under your roof, who are all clamouring for your attention. You usually don't get enough support or training and meetings with the local Head to try and avoid unfair suspensions are probably all too common.

I work with Foster Parents to help you create a breathing space for yourself so you can get a grip of what's going on and turn around your own life and the lives of the children you care for: to enable you to create a more Effective Response.

For information about my work with parents going through separation and other changes, please visit my website at www.fixourfamily.co.uk.

Most of us don't even have time to think what our life could be, we're too busy whirling round in the middle of a nightmare; that is if we get any sleep at all.

	Are you running round in circles?
	Do you yell at the children, and then regret it?
	Do you feel guilty for not doing better for the children in your care?
	Do you wake up thinking, there must be more to life than this, or worrying how you'll cope with another day like the last one?

Subscribe to the Effective Response Newsletter, for useful tips and breathing exercises for some free help right now.

Send your details to info@effectiveresponse.co.uk or fill in your email address below.

The support for foster parents I provide is on two levels; you can choose either or both, to support yourself right now, and to improve your quality of life permanently.

The Effective Response Silver Service

I use simple breathing techniques to help parents reduce stress and gain control of themselves in difficult or crisis situations. Try the exercise below.

The Effective Response Gold Service

I use life coaching and visualisation to support you to really change your life, so that not only do those difficult situations not happen so often, but you can even plan and create a life you and your whole family love.

When you choose to respond more effectively by working with me:
I will help you work out what's going wrong and how to put it right.
I will support you to understand why your children behave the ways they do, then you can create more effective strategies to cope.
I will enable you to come up with a creative plan that is all your own, to get your life and the lives of the children you care for, on track; and then I will help you stick to it.

When you commit to life coaching and visualisation work with me you will learn to:
Calm yourself enough to respond to events in ways that give you more choice and control,
Recognise and use the choices you do have more positively; and,
Carry through your actions to complete what you've set out to do.

Your responses will be more effective.

These skills can help you now, and they can also enable you to change your life for the better in the long term:
You will develop more understanding of yourself and your children.
You will be more in control of your life, you will find you have more opportunities and more time.
You will feel more adult, more confident and happier and you will realise that your life and the lives of the children you care for can be lives you all love.

3-Minute Exercise

Take a moment for yourself; begin changing your life, right now. 3 minutes is all it takes.
Just stop for a moment. Close your eyes and give yourself time to breathe.
Sit comfortably with both feet on the floor.
Allow yourself to exhale noisily, "Ahhh". Feel your body relax and sink into the chair.

12 deep breaths take about a minute, counting them is the easiest way to measure the time. This whole exercise is just 36 breaths long.

Ask yourself these questions
"What do I want?" " What matters to me?" (not what you don't want, you probably know that well enough)
Don't restrict yourself to this minute, this week, or even this year. Allow your thoughts to fly free.
Don't censor your thoughts, they are all important.
Write down what you find yourself thinking about. (If you choose to move beyond the brief support I offer, to the

Effective Response Life Coaching Service, these thoughts will be the beginning of your plan for a better life for yourself and your whole family)
Over the next month, aim to increase the time you spend breathing deeply and thinking, take these 36 breaths every day.

Give yourself the gift of these 3 minutes, just breathing deeply and thinking.
Don't do anything, think your thoughts, allow your breath to clear your system and let yourself find out what happens.
First we have to calm ourselves, then we can see what we actually want to do now, in this moment, and in the future.
Create some space for yourself.

Taking a proper breath slows us down. Few situations need us to respond that very second.
A good lungful of air creates a bubble of calm we can use to change the way we feel and act.
A deep breath buys us time to work out a truly effective response.

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