Dr Eleanor Gunn: The Top Five Regrets of the Dying & What You Can Do Now

Do you know what the top five regrets of the dying are? Wishing you had worked harder, surprisingly, isn’t on the list. Eleanor will discuss the importance of discovering one’s true purpose as a key step in the way to long-term fulfilment.

In this interactive session, she challenges you to consider your own personal history, how it has shaped your identity and values and show how understanding that can help you lead a more meaningful life. Living a life that aligns with your values can be hard when you may have concerns about the opinions of others. Aside from the value individuals take from understanding their purpose, or ‘why’, in the workplace, more engaged and self-aware employees are happier, more engaged, productive and creative in the workplace – if your company values are aligned with theirs.

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Transcript

Eleanor Gunn 

So as kindly introduced by Mark, I’m here today to talk to you about the Regrets of the Dying, and I want you to start to think about what you can do now to live a more value driven life. So this session you might have gathered is experiential, so I’m going to do well. I’m going to be talking throughout the session, but some of the focus is going to be on you, and I’m really hopeful that this session will give you all the opportunity to start to connect with the things that you have heard and listened today. There’s been some wonderful stories and wonderful ideas and wonderful experiences, and I think we don’t get enough time in our lives to really start to think about what things mean to us and digest things. So I’m hopeful that this slot will provide that for you before you go off and have your wonderful discussions at dinner.

My Background

So a little bit about me. I’m a clinical psychologist. I know absolutely nothing about software, engineering, technology. I’ve sat here today listening to everything thinking, oh, gosh, this is flying over my head. But the thing I think that has been so lovely to hear is about people’s experiences, and that’s what I’ve really taken away today. So I’m really pleased to be here with you all.

So I work mostly between two places. I work both in the NHS, and I also have my own independent practice, and I work with individuals, and I work with people supporting teams. I’m lucky to work with Emotionally Connected, who was started up by Dr Suzanne Brown, and through that company, I work with companies to help them develop their their culture really around mental health, because I think emotional life deserves a lot of attention, because when we don’t pay attention To our emotional lives, it starts to create trouble and drama. So I am going today, start today’s talk at thinking about the end of our life, which is pretty somber for a five o’clock slot, but I think it’s really important. And yeah, but I think it’s really meaningful, and I think it’s a really important thing to do, because we do not pause often enough.

So there is an Australian palliative care nurse, and some of you might have come across this called Bronnie Ware. And what she did is she worked with people towards the end of their life, and through her work in this really precious time, she started to connect with things and started to notice a pattern across people’s lives, what people that were dying spoke about and what they described were five key traits, so which she wanted to share with the living. So we had the opportunity to do something different, and I’ve worked in palliative care as well. It was one of my most rewarding jobs, really, and I observed similar things to Bronnie.

So the first one I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expect of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I’d stayed in touch with friends, and I wish I’d let myself be happier.

So I just want you to take a moment to let this sink in, because I think so often we can let these kind of articles, this research, pass us by really quickly. So just take a moment and think about whether any of this connects for you. So I know for sure that at least two of these apply to me right here right now. Do any of these apply to you right here, right now? If they do, I want you to raise a hand, because the research shows that founders are find it really difficult to talk about their experiences, and as you look around the room, every single person, pretty much here, raised their hand, and that’s because we get so caught up in the minutia of day to day living that we forget to kind of zoom out and take a look and take stock.

And I mean, she definitely wasn’t the first person to talk about this, but there is a famous psychologist called Dr Elizabeth Loftus. That’s not her at all. Kubler Ross. Brain thinking in many ways. Dr Kubler Ross and she designed the grief cycle, which is something that we think about at the end of our lives, and it tells us about the ways that we process grief. And what she talked about was that we all avoid death. Many great philosophers talk about existential angst. So we all avoid our death because it’s far too painful for us to think about it, and actually we wouldn’t be able to function if every single day this is what was on our mind. So we avoid death, but in doing that, we really create a disservice for ourselves, because when we avoid death, we are avoiding the finite nature of our life, and when we do that, it means we are much less likely to live with purpose, because we are not connected to the fact that this all one day will end.

So you can all perhaps understand why I’m not very often invited to dinner parties, because I like to talk about these things. I do get excited, and I do think they’re really important. But I think what is really important, particularly here and now, is that you guys have a crisis in technology with your mental health, so 50% of you that have completed some of the surveys. And as I started to look across kind of the survey data, and then started to look in the academic research. This is something that came up time and time again. So 50% of people have a diagnosable mental health condition, so that means they suffer with something such as anxiety or depression, and that’s much higher than the general population. And I mean, I don’t need to tell you guys this at all, because I’m sure you all know it and you live it, and probably someone who did the research that’s probably sitting here right now, but another 52% of you experience burnout, which takes me back to Imogen’s talk, when you spoke Imogen about actually how when things started to stop and slow down a little bit, and there wasn’t kind of anything driving what you were doing that you felt burnt out. And that’s when it’s really important for us to start to rely on something internal rather than something that is external.

And 72% of founders report an impact of their entrepreneurialism on their mental health. So we have a problem. And as a psychologist, what I find really interesting about this, and what I truly believe, is that anxiety and depression are symptoms. They are flares, and they tell us that we need to pay attention to something, something is happening inside us that is important, something is misaligned, and we need to start to think about what this is.

The other thing, I suppose, that is really important is, whilst half of us might have conditions that kind of meet the DSM criteria, all of us, every single one of us, have emotional lives that that you know, deserve attention and they deserve to be nurtured and thought about, and we can do things that are proactive to help with that. So I want to think a little bit about imposed values. So I’ve picked these images up, because I believe that we are all born knowing exactly what we want to do. We and who we want to be and the direction we want to head in. It’s kind of intrinsic within us. And it is guided, we are guided, and they are driven by our emotions and by our feelings. They are our lighthouse. If we can connect with our emotions, and we can connect with our feelings, they tell us what we need to do.

So we see it in children. You know, for those of you that have children, what you will see is that they play, they experiment, they try things on for size. Am I superhero today? Am I going to fly a rocket? But what starts to happen eventually is that roads start to close. Values see start to get imposed upon them and imposed upon us, and they happen in many different ways. And once that starts to happen, eventually we pick up the gauntlet, and we ourselves start to impose values on ourselves. So we start to live a certain way. So eventually we step into the corporate suit, or metaphorically, and we live in a way that is not true to ourselves, and that causes a lot of distress, it causes anxiety, it causes depression, it causes burnout. So thinking a little bit more about imposed values, and this is important for the exercise, I want to start to pull things apart a little bit.

So, imposed values are things that others purposes, that others give us, and they often come about due to social conditioning or through reciprocal learning. So we see something happening, we follow it. These can be often delivered as unquestionable or universal truths. So they’re kind of these autopilot pathways that we tend to follow. They can be introduced in really subtle ways. So I know when I was at school, girls were not offered the opportunity to play basketball or rugby. So whilst nobody said girls can’t do it, we just weren’t given the opportunity. So that’s a really subtle way in which a purpose has been imposed upon me, and I’ve got a message that that’s not something I can do. They also might be more explicit. So I don’t know how many of you have had parents or have had experiences where somebody has told you you cannot do something, you are not able to do it. No, you’re not doing you’re not playing a musical instrument. It’s a waste of time. So much more explicit.

They are often based on fear or the desire to avoid something. So how many of you have said no to something that actually wanted to say yes to, or the opposite said yes to something that you really wanted to say no to because you’re worried about offending, upsetting, causing some conflict with somebody else. So what we know about imposed values is that the pursuit of them gives temporary pleasure, but in the long term, they create dissatisfaction.

So again, if you start to think about your experiences and your journeys and your companies as founders, start to think about actually what really matters to you, what’s important, are you pursuing things that are in line with what you want to do, or have you kind of fallen into a pathway. What we also know is that imposed values often happen when we are on autopilot. Okay, so what I see in clinical practice an awful lot, is people just doing something. They’re not questioning it. They’re not making conscious steps to create an intentional life. And I think it was Bob who spoke earlier about the fact that people often engage in behaviors, but actually they these are they’re driven by something that they don’t know. They’re driven by something unconscious. So I really want you to have the opportunity, but when you get to the end of your life, you have made choices about your regrets, because we will all have them. But it’s much better for those to be something that we have decided rather than something that we’ve kind of blindly made our way towards.

So at the other end of the scale, we have our liberating values, our guiding principles, and these are something when we connect with these we know it is something that indicates it is a real purpose for us, and it kind of leads to the discovery of our authentic self, who we are. They are often about heading in a direction rather than being the end point. So if you think goals are here to serve your purpose, they are not your purpose.

The Activity

So what I’m going to invite you to do today, and it is an invitation, is to engage in an activity with me, because that will help you to start to get in touch with your purpose and your values, so you do not have much time or space. I hear that in your talks, you all sound so cognitive, so busy, so driven. It’s no wonder that there is kind of conflict and there are mental health difficulties. So I want to offer you the opportunity to start to think about yourself and what’s important to you. So this is an exercise from a therapy called Narrative Therapy, and it was introduced to me in my clinical training as a psychologist. And after I got over the initial, oh my God, I’ve got to draw something. What’s everybody going to think of me? I’m a shit drawer, I became really excited about the exercise. And I have done this in individual sessions with people over a number of, you know, a number of sessions, eight sessions. I’ve done it with coaches. I have used it with teams in 45 minutes. So it’s a really versatile tool to start to think about.

So I am a clinical psychologist. That is what I do. It is not my purpose. My purpose is to connect with people and to understand them in distress, in times of happiness, and help them to walk to work towards change. When I started my career, I worked in public relations, and I thought that was great, because, yes, I get to work with people. I’ve always been chatty. I’ve always loved the party. Perfect job for me. But when I got there, I found out, oh, God, this is awful. I literally wore black every single day. I’m not saying it’s an awful job. It’s just an awful job for me. I wore black every single day because I was in mourning, because it just didn’t provide the satisfaction that I thought it was. I was going to wonderful dinners, but I wasn’t connecting with people talking about the things that I want to talk about, which is really about their lives and their pain. You can’t really do that when you’re trying to encourage somebody to sign up to something. Or maybe you can, I don’t know.

The Tree of Life

So you should all have an A4 piece of paper, and I would like you. I will invite you to draw a tree with me, so we’re thinking about your life and thinking about a tree before we start though, please make sure you start right at the bottom of your page, because I’m going to take you through a number of steps, and quite often, people like Eleanor, I’ve run out I can’t fit the leafs on, so I want you to give yourself enough space by starting at the bottom. I would also like you to move so that you are sitting next to somebody, so that you’re at least in groups of two, because this is an interactive activity, and you are going to be sharing your experiences to varying degrees with what you feel comfortable.

So if everybody could just have a move around, I would encourage you to notice any discomfort that comes up, because I definitely felt this when I did it for the first time. What’s she going to make me share. So move say that you are close to somebody or that you can turn backwards and talk to them. Okay, brilliant, so I’m enjoying hearing the nervous twittering. So, yeah, the tree is going to fill up the whole page, and you are starting at the roots. Okay.

So what I’d like you to do is, I’d like you to turn to the person next to you, go to your right if you’re, has everybody got somebody next them. Yeah, fantastic. And I would like you if you don’t already know each other. Do you need somebody? Three? You could do a three. Yeah, let’s go with Joe’s talk. Break the rules, not Yeah, breaking the bottle. That was it. Break the bottle.

So, yeah. So I want you to turn to the person next to you, or if you’re in the middle, to either side of you, and I want you to tell them your name and in three words, say how you feel about doing this activity. Excited, curious, scared, get me out. Whatever it is, be authentic. Show your truth, really quickly. Go.

Yes, right back. You’ve got plenty more time to chat guys, plenty more time to chat.

Your Roots

So I’m going to invite you to draw your roots of your tree.

Okay, so starting at the bottom, draw the roots of your tree. And when we are drawing the roots, we are thinking about where we came from. So where did what country from? What town, what village? Okay, what is your family history? What are your family values? And you can start drawing while I’m talking. Otherwise, we’re definitely going to be here to seven o’clock at night. Okay, your roots can be think about whether your roots are going to be really thick, if they are going to be really deep in the ground. Are you really connected, or were they like, you know, when you not, not at all. Yeah. I mean, I know nothing about technology, and I also know nothing about plants, which was really unhelpful when I worked with an environmental consultancy company. But think about is it is the tree in a pot with really tiny little roots? Yeah, so I want you to really kind of visualize this.

You can write words. You can do exactly what you want. So whatever you feel comfortable, you can write words next to them. If you don’t want to share that much, you can do something symbolic either way you are thinking about what your roots look like. So this is an opportunity to connect with where you came from. Okay, what are your family values? Is there a narrative in your family? You know, we get through. We try really hard. We go to university. We definitely don’t go to university. And I want you to think. Out Who taught you the most when you were younger? Okay, so you won’t need to think about every single one of these. Just want you to start to think about how you connect with where you came from. Did you get taught by what did you get taught by others growing up? Did you get taught that you were important? Did you get taught that you weren’t? What was your favorite place when you were a child? Was it a grandparent? For me, it was at the back of my parents will hate me for this. At the back of our garden, we had a really wild patch, and I used to think it was like the secret garden that I used to go to, but really it was just pure wilderness, but I found it really peaceful and soothing there. So where mattered to you when you were young?

What was a treasured song growing up? Is there anything that had importance? So again, you were drawing, you can write. You can create imagery. Notice if you were feeling uncomfortable. Okay, this is something new, something different, and if you notice that you were feeling uncomfortable, I want you to think about be curious. Why might that be? Yeah, what is it that I don’t want to know? Is there something here that feels painful in one way or another?

Okay, so what I’d like you to do now is I want you to share something of your roots with the person next to you. So this is an invitation. Okay, you can share as much or as little as you would like. Okay, so you might want to share where you came from, what your family history is, or you might not. You might want to say, Oh, my God, this is uncomfortable, this is awkward, and I feel really I felt really bad when I had to draw my roots. That might be the discussion. What I would say is whatever you share is likely to be what you get back. Okay, so turn to your people. Have a chat. What did you find? How did you find it?

Okay. So if you come back, it’s really lovely to hear everybody chatting. I can definitely see some uncomfortableness. How am I supposed to know what to do? What does she mean by drawing the roots? Well, just encourage you to be really playful with this. It’s well, I mean, it is meant to be pretty serious, but also fun to connect with something that is, yeah, in a way that you perhaps don’t usually. So hopefully you’ve been able to share something about your experience, either doing this or your roots, and shared something personal about yourself.

The Ground

So what I want you to think next about is your ground.

So what does the ground look like? And your ground is your daily life. So again, you can draw, you can write, you can color. And we are thinking about these questions. So what is your daily life like right here, right now, at the moment? Yeah, what do you do? Do you spend all of your time working? Are there people that are really important to you? What does your everyday look like? What are your hobbies, your passions, your interests? Do you have time for them? Are you still connected to them? Where is your favorite place to spend time now?

And I’d encourage you to play around with the imagery. Is your ground dry? Cracked? In need of a really, really, really good rainfall? Or some watering, some targeted watering? Are there some dry crack patches? Is it really, really rich? Is it full of nutrients? Are you engaging with things that are important to you on a day to day basis?

And I’d really take this opportunity to think and connect. Again, you might notice some uncomfortable feelings, some realizations, God, my my grounds pretty dry, or this area is really well watered.

Your Trunk

So if you have started to draw and think about your ground, I would then like you to move on and start to think about your trunk.

So your trunk is the things are the things is the things are the things that you are good at. And again, following the questions, what are your skills? What are your abilities? And if you often talk about your skills and abilities, and you can kind of present your professional self. I want you to think about what your natural talents are. What are your characteristics? Because these are really important, and they often get really, really lost. Are you kind? Do you take care of other people? What are the things that you do every day without thinking about them very much? So we’re thinking about the minutia really here.

And what we know, and what I definitely come across an awful lot, is that people find it really, really difficult to think about the things that they are good at, or, as I said, they might present some bits that are good at, like, I’m really happy with my professional identity, and I can talk about that, but I tell you what, what I’m like in a relationship, it’s a no go. Don’t talk about that.  And it can be really hard to connect with that and to allow that part to be seen.

So when you’re thinking about your trunk, I want you to again, play around with some of the imagery. Is your trunk going to show some really poor technical knowledge, again, about trees? Probably should have thought about this. Is your trunk being held up by, you know those metal things when they’re a sapling, you know what I mean, because they might fall over. Is your trunk like that at the moment? Or are you a mighty oak? Yeah, and I hope nobody is laughing at me saying trunk over and over again. I was and now I’ve got an innuendo in my head, and I can’t get it out because I keep saying trunks. So let’s be quick with this one and we can move on. So I don’t keep chuckling to myself.

If it’s hard for you to think about some of these areas and what you’re good at, I want you to think about what somebody else might tell you that you’re good at, okay? What other people think about you again, thinking about skills, abilities and qualities.

So I know for me, when I was at university, I ended up in my last year, missing kind of the final get together. So after three intense years of doctoral training where we connected a lot, we spoke an awful lot about how we felt we knew every single thing about each other’s families in a really small group. And at the end of it, I ended up pregnant and wasn’t able to do our kind of goodbye farewell, and everybody, they did an exercise where they talked about what they saw in people on the course and the qualities that they admired, and they sent it through to me in the post, and I remember reading it and being ever so touched, because whilst these are the values that I thought, These are exactly what I want to live by, I didn’t know that anybody saw them, because I really didn’t see them in myself at all. So when I read that, people felt I was authentic and that was genuine, and I stood up for things, and I stood up for people, and I was like, actually, this feels phenomenal, because I felt that perhaps some of this is what I did, but I didn’t really believe it. So sometimes it can be easier to reach out to somebody else and ask them about what our skills and abilities are, to help us see them in ourselves.

So what I would like you to do, you’ve guessed it, is turn to the person next to you, and I want you to share with them your skills, your abilities and your qualities. So you can start with, if you knew me, you would know that I am awesome at, okay? So share.

All right, everybody, so come back to me. Come back to me. It’s really lovely to hear all the talk around, hopefully what you are good at.

The Branches

So what I want you to start to think now are about your branches.

I mean, you couldn’t guess it right when we’re drawing a tree, but I want you to start to think about your branches. So I want you to think about your hopes and dreams. And if you think about what I said earlier, about we all kind of start with something, and it can kind of get diverted. I want you to try as best you can to remove your hopes and dreams from the things that are imposed upon you, whether that’s something that’s imposed upon you by parents, by families, your position in the family, I’m an eldest so there’s definitely some things that are imposed upon me, and I want you to really connect with that.

If you’re thinking about your work, I want you to think about, actually, what’s important, what your hopes and dreams we don’t think about used a really interesting phrase, Imogen, about the mentors, which I loved, and now I can’t remember, but yeah, the mentor whiplash. If you don’t think about the mentor whiplash, or about what investors want from you, I want you to think about your hopes and dreams. What are your wishes for the future? Is there a story behind these? Why are they important to you? How long have they been around? Have they been around for a while? And when they’re around, are they kind of always really strongly around, or do they kind of get buried and then surface again? That part of the tree metaphor didn’t really work. But so think about your hopes and dreams.

If they have been around for a while, what has sustained them? What has kept them going? So I know when I was young and I wanted to be a psychologist, probably at about 16, and I would definitely say, I mean, I did choose psychology, but it definitely, definitely, definitely chose me. Anybody that knows any psychologist knows that we’re in training for this role, professionally, personally, from about this high, so. But I remember again, when I went to university thinking, No way am I doing another day of studying. This is unbearable. It’s intolerable, and it’s really quite boring. So actually, in the end, after working, I came back and thought, Okay, I’ll plow in now, I’ll do the doctorate because I knew it was something that was important to me, and it had been a dream of mine for a long time to work with people in a meaningful way. So have a think about how long your hopes and dreams have been with you.

And where they come from. Are they related to work? Are they related to your home life? Are they related to the future? And again, I think this can be really difficult to connect within ourselves, because when we really want something, yeah, it can be hard to realize it, and sometimes it can be painful as well as liberating.

So again, I would like you to turn to the person next to you, and I do want you. I’m going to invite you to share your hopes and your dreams and your wishes. If you find it too uncomfortable, you can share that it feels uncomfortable, and perhaps think about why that might be, okay. So I’m really sorry that if there is any discomfort right before the end of the day, when maybe everybody was hoping this is going to be a bit more of a chill slot, because we know that when we reveal to others our hopes and dreams. And we’re more likely to act on them.

All right, everyone. Come back. Oh, this is an interesting one. Everybody, don’t make me dance. Okay, so seems like that was perhaps an important one, hard to interrupt.

Your Leaves

So we are nearly at the end. I hope you’ve got some space left on your tree, unless it is a very thin, withered one. I want you to start to think about your leaves.

So this is about who is important to you. Why are these people special to you? So they might be people in your family. They absolutely might not be. They might be somebody that you have met once that imparted something or gave something to you. They might be role models, so people that are famous that you admire, or people that you’ve connected with that you admire. I want you to think about memories you have of people that are special, and these might be for people that are here and for people that are not here. And I think it’s really important to make sure that we do put people that might no longer be there on that are important to us on our tree. Okay.

So I know on my tree, I’ve definitely got a mentor I would put on there who inspired me to be myself. Think about why the people are important to you.

Your Fruits

And then I want you to think about your fruits.

So this is kind of connected. I know I’ve done a quick switch here. I am conscious of the time, and think about the gifts you’ve been given by other people. So these might be physical gifts, so somebody has literally given you something, or it might be an act of kindness. These also might be things that are painful. And I often think that when something painful happens, that is where we can start to really experience growth, because otherwise, as Joe spoke about earlier, we are always in the comfort zone. And when we’re in the comfort zone, we do not grow emotionally at all, and sometimes some of the most difficult things that happen to us are the things that provide opportunities for growth. So things like divorce, death, so hearing something that’s really painful, painful feedback. They can really touch us, but actually in a way, not always. Sometimes they are just really crap. They can, yeah, contribute to our development.

And at the same time, thinking about if there is somebody important or if there is a gift you have received, thinking about what it is that you gave to that person that made them give you that gift. What was your relationship like with them? Was there anything that you might have done that encouraged them to connect with you and want to share something with you?

Wrapping Up

So hopefully you have drawn a tree of sorts, if you’re terrible at drawing, like I am. But more important than the drawing, because this is definitely not a test and don’t have an artistic eye, what I’d like you to do is reflect on how you found that exercise. Did you find yourself feeling really disconnected from it, not wanting to engage with it, finding it really awkward, really uncomfortable? Did you get right in? And no judgment, just want you to be curious and have a moment to think about what that might be.

I’m really hopeful that the exercise has given you a bit of time and space today and shown you ways that you can connect with yourself and what is important to you. And the reason I wanted to do this here with you guys today is because we can often think, you know, this isn’t, this stuff isn’t really important, but as I said, it creates a lot of distress. A lot of people I see in therapy, a lot of teams that I work with, come to see us because they are in conflict and because people are not content, they are not happy, they are not flourishing, they are really, really struggling. And we could say, well, this could be a HR function thinking about, you know, people’s emotional well being. But I’d really put to you that actually the fish rots from the head. So, you know, you are all founders, CEOs. You are in leadership positions. And actually, if you are not connected with yourself and what is really, really important to you, it will definitely filter down in one way or another. And we see it psychologist time and time again. I mean, depending on what school of psychology you’re into, and I’m definitely into psychoanalysis. So speaks volumes, but it does.

So how did you find it? What was it like? Confronting? Would you mind me asking, what was confronting about it? Yeah, that’s okay, good boundary. It was an invitation. But confronting, yeah, absolutely.

Anyone else? Confusing? What was confusing?

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Yeah? I mean, I think the thing is, with these exercises, in these tasks, is they do require us to kind of get out of our head a little bit, and that’s purposeful. It’s meant to be something that hopefully can be a little bit playful, but when something is confronting and it is uncomfortable, and we’re used to being in our heads not making any judgments. I don’t know whether you are, but for instance, lots of people are, and actually my myself when I started my training, this is absolutely how I was. I’m like, I’m definitely connected with my emotions, all about the feelings. And then I suddenly realized, Oh, bloody hell, I’m pretty closed off in lots of ways. And there’s places I’m prepared to go at this level, and there’s places that I’m not so, yeah. I think it’s interesting to see how we respond to it. Could also be, I’ve given you terrible instructions.

Anyone else want to comment on how they found doing it? Oh, does it look like my picture of the mighty oak? Oh, it’s beautiful. Your tree looks thriving.

So, thank you for having a go and giving me a try, taking a chance, letting yourself be vulnerable, or at least letting yourself kind of witness how you engage with the exercise. Thank you for your time. Really enjoyed it, and I hope you will take something away today from today. Whether that is an idea that you are living in line with your values. You are absolutely not living in line with your values, which gives you something to work on and think about, or actually, I’m a bit confused. I need a little bit of time to digest with my dinner.

So some things to keep on nurturing your tree. Should you want to take things forward from today? I have put together a few resources for you to think about. Which can, I’ve given you the Tree of Life prompts. So if you want to go away, try this again in your own time. You know, because it is pretty exposing to do this in the middle of a conference, then you’re welcome to if you want to share it with your teams, with your family. People do do these things with their family. I worked with somebody the other day, a coach, who went off and tried this out at home, which was wonderful. They did a family tree and some work around values. And I’ve put a parable in there of the Mexican fisherman. I don’t know if anyone’s heard it, but I really like it to kind of set things off. There’s some text there, some books for you to pick up on and read. So the happiness trap a really, really old book. But what I really like about it is that it does have lots of work about connecting with your values. It doesn’t have to be that you’re anxious or depressed. It’s just got some really good tools, no hard feelings, which talks about how we connect with emotions in the workplace, and of course, given I did the started the talk, talking about her Bronnie Ware’s book about the toy Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Okay, thank you.

Dr Eleanor Gunn

Clinical Psychologist, NHS & Emotionally Connected

Eleanor studied psychology as an undergraduate, partly in an attempt to make sense of herself and the world around her. It was an obvious step then to take a first job in PR for an insurance company upon graduation, but this role did not satisfy her desire to connect and work with people in a capacity that would lead to meaningful change. Following her doctoral training, she continued to work in the NHS in various roles alongside starting independent practice, developing specialist interests in perinatal mental health, trauma, ADHD, psychodynmaic therpaies and organisational functioning. 

She started working with Emotionally Connected following the pandemic, where she now collaborates with Dr Suzanne Brown, with the company focusing on emotional fitness, to help individuals, companies and organisations including Tyler Grange, Cognizant, Game Logic, Abbott, Sunderland FC, Arsenal FC, the RFU and other high-performing organisations.

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