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Showing posts with the label Mental Health

Not a Happy Place

  A few months ago I stopped having therapy because I felt I had stabilised myself enough to navigate life without it. For the time being, anyway.  I'm sure the counselling helped me but I couldn't tell you how and I've chosen not to look deeply into it. For someone who is usually pretty analytical this is perhaps an interesting decision but I knew that I didn't want to be second-guessing my counsellor, Sue, or mentally cross-referencing stuff that I'd researched while we were talking. And talk was what we mostly did, with Sue suggesting hardly any specific tools for me to try. One that she did recommend was finding a happy place to visualise, somewhere that I could be out of the moment for a moment to calm disruptive thoughts. (Something like this .) Surprisingly, I found that I couldn't conjure anywhere up inside my head. That's when I realised that I've always had difficulty seeing with my mind's eye but never called it out. If I try to imagine ev...

Express, Listen, and Field

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report.  Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia.  ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole ...

BCS: Testing, AI, and Diversity

I spoke at the BCS Software Testing Specialist Group's Testing, AI, and Diversity Conference yesterday. That's me at the top, holding an imaginary marrow. There'll be videos of all of the talks online shortly but in the meantime, here's my sketchnotes. Sam De Silva , An overview of the draft EU AI Regulation. Adam Leon Smith , Software Testing Standards - why do we need them and when are they useful? Alan Giles , Giving ‘The User’ A Face - Accessibility Testing Using Personas. Andy Shaw, Mental Health, Testing and Me. Deborah Reid , Accessibility 101. Laveena Ramchandani , Testing Data Science Models.   Jonathon Wright , Shift Right into the Metaverse with Digital Twin Testing.  Image: Jonathon Wright on Twitter