About Paul Vittle
Working backwards in time: most recently I have been working part time for the local Youth Offending Team working with parents, families and small groups. Many of the families are known to the local police and the focus of most of my work is ‘parenting'. Most of the teenagers have been in trouble, often linked with drug related life styles. Whatever the initial reason for my involvement, invariably the focus is on communication. Once people start to listen effectively to each other and manage to identify and share their feelings - families usually start to make progress.
In the past twelve months or so, I have organised and facilitated the following courses: training parent and student mentors; identifying and managing stress; conflict resolution; anger management; parenting skills; student connected learning; basic counselling skills. My work is frequently based in local schools and colleges.
At the same time as my training work I am also seeing individual clients for counselling and life coaching. I have achieved my level two practitioner's qualification in Reiki Healing.
I am also enjoying my work for Oxford Brooks University carrying out quality audits on a further education Subject Learning Coach project. I have been involved as a local facilitator in a Government initiative ‘Every Child Matters'. I have co written and have had published the official manual for a course that I have been co leading entitled ‘Living With Parents'. This is a one day workshop involving both parents and teenagers.
Although I have been a part time counsellor for very many years, it was in 1993, when I stopped full time employment, that the varied training and therapy work took over. Before that my main professional work had been in education. I qualified as a teacher and moved through the ranks of Departmental Head, Pastoral Head, Deputy Headteacher and finally Headteacher (Principal) of a very successful state, day and boarding school for students age 11 - 18. As well as my original teaching qualification I have a Bachelor of Philosophy degree and a NCFE diploma in Life Coaching. I have an additional NCFE qualification based on Emotional Intelligence. I am also a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
I wrote and had published a Life Skills course for young people entitled ‘Knowing Me …. Knowing You….'. I have had a feature article published in the Times Educational Supplement and a number of my creative writings have either been published or used as part of various training programmes.
My leisure time is taken up with creative pursuits such as photography, art and creative writing. .
Much of my work is about encouraging people to take charge of their lives; to develop a keen sense of self awareness and recognise their uniqueness. When planning this page, two major things came to mind about my journey – so far. One; when I was eleven years old, my father gave up being a design engineer at an aircraft factory at Bristol, to train to be a priest. Looking back I can see that this had a huge affect on my life. Two: going back a decade or so, I had my own life issue. I can see now that I was a ‘workaholic', sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of my life. A really significant moment was when I accepted the hand of a therapist to help me make sense of my life; to help me find perspective and balance. It is my hope that some people visiting this site may be encouraged to make a similar decision Any questions? paul.vittle@lifecoachingplus.co.uk