A holistic approach to well-being

Think Pieces

By Jade Lawton and Basma Aboudihaj · May 2, 2024

Intuitive Thinking Skills developed the Skills-Tu Life programme after listening to some of the challenges facing learners on both our Intuitive Recovery and Skills-Tu Employment programmes. Many of the participants spoke about some of the mental health, anxiety, frustration, and sensitivity issues that they were experiencing in their lives.

We co-produce all our programmes, taking inspiration from our learners and the lived experience of our staff. One of the issues we focused on when creating Skills-Tu Life was the fact that most interventions were designed to deal with the symptoms that people faced rather than the causes.

What’s different about our approach?

The Skills-Tu Life programme takes a holistic approach, helping people live better lives by improving their well-being, including physical, emotional, psychological and social well-being. In other words, if you eat well, treat yourself well, and have good, supportive, emotional circles you will generally have a much better, healthier and more successful life.

Our societies have culturally moved towards finding shortcuts to stress management and well-being by medicalising all our innate problems. Our approach is to embed the practise of ‘skills not pills’ – in other words, looking at people’s inherent abilities to solve their own problems rather than medicalising, drinking, or using drugs to blur their reality. In addition to this, our practise is to focus on what’s strong, rather than what’s wrong in that we’re looking at everybody’s assets and strengths to resolve their issues and in this way building resilience rather than dependency.

How is it going? Our Skills-Tu Life stats for 2023-2024 

Shining a light on how Skills-Tu Life has supported participants on the RESTART scheme

We are commissioned as part of the wider specialist supply chain to support Jobs22 participants across locations in East-Central England with provision that engages the more challenging barriers to work such as long-term unemployment, mental health, substance misuse and offending behaviour. 

Over a 12-month period from Jan 22 – Dec 23, Intuitive Thinking Skills have supported 211 – Jobs22 participants through our Skills-Tu Life – Mental Health Resilience programme and of those learners, 65 x participants (31%) are reported by Jobs22 to have commenced meaningful employment. 

Click here for more information about the RESTART scheme