1. Neuro-Ninja Tool-Kit

2. …is coming to
Cranbrook
School

3. 8 Seminars.
1 Mission.
Helping students & parents go from
brain slaves to Neuro-Ninjas.
1. Well-Being Is A Skill
2 & 3.Being Anxiety Aware 1 & 2
4. Through Anxiety & Beyond
5. Brain Science of Meh
6. Tuning Into Your Mental Bandwidth
7. Your Brain On Other People
8 Way Of The Neuro-Ninja

4. You’re not
just
attending a
seminar,
you’re
joining a
movement…

5. How to respond to this material.
It’s training Jim, but not as
we know it

6. Who am I?
SENDCO
MA in education
Biology teacher
Academy consultant
21st century parent
Acting headteacher
Specialist leader in education (SLE)
Parent of 20 and 18 yo, 20 yo has ASD
Deputy head with 25 years experience
Studying neuroscience & psychology for 20 yrs
Used these strategies 1:1 as a SENDCO with families

8. 21st Century
Parent

9. We Support Professionals, Parents, Children &
Young People to become Neuro-Ninjas
Person-Centred Development Work

10. Going from a brain slave…

11. …a Neuro-Ninja

12. How are you?
No, how are you
really…?

14. Our children don’t have to
live in their brains as we
have…
We can help them unleash a
different way of being,
living, loving, learning and
growing.
And it starts with the
relationship we have with
ourselves.

15. Key Ideas

16. 50% of how we feel
everyday is down to
what we’ve done in
the last 24 hours!

17. We get to keep
what we use…

18. Whole Brain Integration

19. Session 1 – Well-Being Is A Skill

20. Brain As A Projector, The Mind As The Image

22. #learnyourbrain
#loveyourlife

23. #doyourrocks

24. If we don’t do them we go
wonky…

25. Seminar 2 – Being Anxiety Aware

26. Living In The Age Of Uncertainty (21st century)

27. A Toxic Food Environment

28. A Psychologically Intense Cultural Environment

30. The Way Of The Neuro-
Ninja to Being Anxiety
Aware
We need to start
approaching anxiety in
ourselves with cognitive
and emotional agility

31. Cognitive Agility
Thinking about you’re the
quality & type of thoughts
you’re having as you’re having
them.

32. Emotional Agility
Accepting emotions whilst
remaining kind and curious
about our feelings.

33. What happens
next…

34. The Neuro-Ninja Path
to Responding Flexibly
To Anxiety & Difficult
Emotions.
4 Steps.

35. CAKE is crucial
C – Common Humanity
A – Awareness & Acceptance
K– Kind Curiosity
E – Empathy & (Right) Expectations

36. Respond with
Common
Humanity…

37. Respond with
Awareness &
Acceptance

38. Respond with
Kindness and
Curiosity – What’s
changed? Why?

39. Respond
with
Empathy And
Right
Expectations
to the world

41. Anxiety And
Worry
What do you
think you
know???

42. How long do adults spend every day
worrying?
A B C D
60 mins30 mins10 mins 100mins

43. How much time does the average
child spend stressed out?
A B C D
100mins30 mins10 mins 240 mins

44. Worries and anxiety increase when
we don’t get enough
A B
FalseTrue

45. Everyone worries
A B
FalseTrue

46. What did you
worry about
today?

47. What do we
worry
about?

48. What do we
worry about?

49. What do we worry about?

50. Neuroscience of Anxiety

51. Pre-Frontal Cortex

52. Amygdalae –
Risk and
Rewards
Changing In
The
Environment

53. The Amygdala
– Change,
Risk & Threat
Assessment

54. The Amygdala
Up Close &
Personal

55. Amygdala is pre-loaded with some threats (spiders and snakes for example)

56. And yet,
some people
love snakes
and spiders…

57. The Pre-Frontal Teaches Our Amygdala What Not
To Be Frightened Of…

58. Year 6 Camp

59. Let’s Talk About Stress and The Two Halves Of Our Autonomic Nervous System

60. Sympathetic (Go
System)
&
Parasympathetic
Nervous Systems
(No Go)

61. Accelerator
& brake
pedal, two
parts of our
automatic
nervous
system

62. • Connect with the here and now, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 senses
game.
• Run your fingers over your lips.
• Breathe from your diaphragm.
• Mindfully breathe with 7/11 breathing technique,
in on 7, out on 11.
• Visualize a restful scene, mountains, waterfalls, a
forest.
• Listen to slow, gentle music.
• Playing with children or stroking animals.
• Yoga, Tai Chi.
• Walking in nature.

63. 8 of the Rocks Open the Parachute…
Rock 1, Rock 4, Rock 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and Rock 12

64. They evolved to deal with a very different world…

65. What these chemicals do to the body and
brain…
Drain blood for stomach, digestion stops
Repair stops
Breathing rate increases and gets
shallower
Immune system goes into emergency
inflammation mode
Blood pressure increases
Heart rate increases
Blood sugar rises

66. Our bodies
and brains
were built to
deal with
acute stress…

67. Not chronic stress…

69. You can end up with an
enlarged and overactive
amygdala which the PFC is
unable to sooth…you can
literally get locked up
inside your head…

70. When our anxiety has the
reigns the brain deploys
cognitive distortions to get
our interest so we pay
attention…

72. Cognitive Distortions

73. Cognitive Distortions

74. Cognitive Distortions

75. Cognitive Distortions

77. Cognitive distortions are unbalanced thinking, all emotion, little cognition, we’re at our best when we’re
balanced, when we integrate emotional and cognitive capacities…

78. We can help our
children recognise
anxious thinking by
teaching them to spot
cognitive distortions…

79. Our modern world bowls
as particularly complex
problems – Prickly
Problems. These are the
ones that can send our
brains into spirals of over
thinking and anxiety.

80. We need to
teach our
children to
spot Prickly
Problems,
write them
down &
develop plans
to tackle them.

81. We need to get nerdy about particular kinds of incoming problems…

82. Level of
Uncertainty
Equation
Time Spent
Uncertain (Hrs) x
Elements in the
Problem Space =
Uncertainty
Quotient

83. Mia’s Story

84. Hours spent in uncertainty for
Mia…
Sasha is away for 7 days,
that’s 168 hours. Grandma’s
going to be in hospital at least
another 2 weeks. So that’s
672 hours. Both these
numbers need to be on the
Time spent in Uncertainty
side of the equation.

85. Do The Math For Mia…
(168+672) x 8 = 6720.
A Huge Prickly Problem.
Left unmanaged her brain
will through up loads of
unhelpful, negative
patterns of thinking.

86. Knowing All This
How Can We Help Our
Children Build A Cognitively
and Emotionally Agile
Response to Anxiety?

87. Vaccinations
prepare our
physiological
immune system

88. Re-framing our
approach to
supporting parents
& students (&
ourselves) in
relation to anxiety…

89. What is the
opposite of
fragile?

90. Resilient
or Robust?
Right?

91. No, Anti-fragile.

92. If we treat children like they’re fragile we protect them so
much we never give their antifragility the chance to grow,
they then don’t grow the coping skills to manage adult life.

93. Prepare
Protect
&

94. Practices To Build Your Challenge Resilience
How Many Do You Practice?

95. Practice 1: Do Your Rocks Everyday

96. Practice 2: Use music to develop your emotional palette

97. Practice 3: Use noting to track emotional
ups and downs and trigger spot

98. Practice 4: Go Low Brain Response
Spotting

99. Practice 5: Map Your Zones -
Comfort

100. Mapping Your Zones -
Underwhelmed!

101. Mapping Your Zones -
Overwhelmed!

102. Mapping Your
Zones - Frazzled
and Burnt Out!

103. Mapping Your Zones - Whelmed!

104. Mapping Your Zones – Growth (A Little Bit Uncomfortable)

105. Practice 7 – Develop Calm Down Routines
(A Home & A School & An Out & About One)

106. Calm-Down Routines
These contain 4 or 5
elements that calm and run
for between 5 – 10 mins.
Breathing
Calm sitting space
Calm playlist
Drawing – Doodling
Mentally rehearsed routines
e.g. grounding exercises

107. Experimenting
Building Anxiety Challenges

108. Introducing
Anxiety
Challenges or
The Learning
Zone

109. Step One - Identify A Challenge

110. Step Two –
Write A SMART
GOAL for your
Challenge
Be specific
about what
you’re going to
do and what
success looks
like

111. Introduce Desirable Difficulties to Challenge
Anxiety Circuits

114. #learnyourbrain
#loveyourlife