I know what it’s like to be in a dark place and feel you can’t share how you are really feeling. There is no reason why anyone should feel alone in our community, we just need to encourage everyone to talk openly about it and if you are struggling in any way whatsoever, know that you are not alone.
The effects of the pandemic on people’s mental health, and how it has taken its toll on so many within our industry, will unfortunately be long-lasting.
However, we always try to do the right thing for everyone that we come into contact with and while we don’t always get things right, there’s the promise that the sentiment is always there.
Looking after the mental health of our Travel Counsellors community is intrinsic to our day-to-day activities, our company ethos and our way of working together. It’s very important to us that nobody ever feels alone.
To combat potential loneliness and to support our global community we offer a range of resources through our digital platform - including forums, message boards and fortnightly virtual coffee mornings (something which started as a monthly occurrence but due to popular demand we’ve increased its frequency)
Just having a safe space to share how we are feeling helps an individual as well as the group.
This is why we also offer our wellbeing hub and welfare fund, as well as partnering with Able Futures, who provide a counselling service, alongside our own personal counsellor who has been in the role for more than 15 years and many trained mental health first aiders.
More informally - but no less important - are the raft of WhatsApp groups set up within our Travel Counsellors community - many of which were born out of the pandemic and continue to this day.
Our brand promise that ‘With us, It’s personal’ also runs deep within the company’s ethos. Whether that’s the way a Travel Counsellor conducts business with a client or between a Travel Counsellor and their support teams - we always ensure people feel part of a community and remember they are never alone.
We all know that asking for help is one of the hardest things to do, it’s something I only became comfortable with, quite late into my career. I was someone who had the belief that asking for help was a sign of weakness not strength. Now however, I understand that none of us are perfect and we all have strengths and perhaps areas that we’d like to develop or just need a little bit of help with.
The important thing to try and remember is that we should focus and rejoice in what we are brilliant at and that we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for support.
Karen Morris is operations director at Travel Counsellors.
