Hello! How did you find June’s heat waves? I hope it was manageable and you found ways to keep cool and minimise any discomfort. More heat is supposedly headed our way, but not until August, apparently! It’s good to be prepared, though, as this can certainly relieve some of the anxiety we may feel when health alerts are put out.

Did you know that, annually, the last week of June is World Wellbeing Week? Hopefully, you caught our social media posts covering this, and you can find out later in this piece some of the ways our team have been looking after their own wellbeing over the past few weeks. If you need a reminder of some of the tools and techniques to maximise your wellbeing and get back into balance, just give us a call on the Duty Line (01983 217791) and chat with one of our lovely coaches.

Colour Personalities

Back in September, we had a Team Wellbeing Day at Medina Valley. It was the first ‘proper’ amount of time we’d spent there, as we weren’t due to make the official move until late October. It was a lovely opportunity to get together as a team and become familiar with our soon-to-be new home. Additionally, we had the opportunity to become more familiar with each other in a new, and fairly intriguing way. One of the activities was based around the concept of personality and, more specifically, colour personality. This is a method that organisations can use, to learn more about the people who work for them and is especially useful in recruiting new team members, providing valuable insight into what skills a team currently has in abundance, and any gaps that may need to be filled.  

This is a concept that we all found so interesting, and it often comes up in conversation in and around the office, even now, all these months later. As an organisation, we are careful not to label our members, focusing on the individual, rather than any diagnosis they may have. So this idea, to me, is an interesting one; we certainly don’t want to be minimising the diverse and wonderful array of skills and experience of our team members to a simple label. And yet, it is undeniable that we each found ourselves relating incredibly well to the attributes assigned to us under a particular colour category. So, what is it that is so captivating about the idea of being categorised by colour? Why are we willing to state that ‘I’m a blue!’ or ‘I’m yellow’? My guess is that although some people find labelling of any kind restrictive, others can feel empowered by it and better understood; that certainly seems to be the case here.

Strengths

It should be a given that we all have strengths, yet for many, during periods of unwellness, self-esteem can be so low that it has been impossible to name or own any strengths or talents. Through our Wellbeing Programme, our members gain insight into who they really are and what valuable contributions they can make, gradually increasing their self-worth, confidence and self-esteem, enabling them to move forwards more positively. Additionally, any member completing The Gift Foundation Course will receive a ‘Transcript of Wonderfulness‘, which details all the many positive attributes they have, as noted by their Gift peers and the course facilitators.

The beauty of looking at colour personalities, for us as a team, lies in the way it allows for easy acknowledgement that there are certain people better suited to specific tasks, whilst, at the same time, highlighting all the things we ourselves are good at. This is not something to feel bad or guilty about; it is something to embrace. We are a team together, and we lift and encourage each other to shine in the areas that each of us naturally thrive. By developing awareness of our team members’ colour personalities, we are also able to notice when someone is consciously pushing themselves in areas that are not naturally easy for them. With better self-awareness, we might admit more readily that we are struggling with a task and reach out within the team for ideas and support to successfully complete it.

Every personality has different traits and can, more or less, fit into either Red, Blue, Yellow or Green. It is also possible to fall into several, or all, of the colours, with one colour being more dominant.

It’s important to find a balance of all the colours within any team, to ensure people bring different strengths.

Over the next few blog posts, I will share more information about each of the colour personality types and how they show up in our team. Being as we are now in July and summer is well and truly here, it seems only right that we highlight yellow for July 😊 It is such a sun-shiny colour!

Yellows:

Yellows are the life and soul of the party; they are sociable, expressive, very imaginative and enthusiastic with it. Yellows are very informal, very optimistic and animated. Their imaginations can sometimes run away with them as they are very fast-paced thinkers. Yellows are very relationship focused and are visionaries with obvious high energy. They don’t like their opinions being suppressed, too much detail or when your interactions are impersonal.

Because yellows are such high energy, sometimes it can be difficult to gauge whether or not they’ve taken in what you’ve said. You need to strike the right balance between confirming they understand what you’ve said and being patronising. Yellows are the type to engage in non-work-related conversations, and this can sometimes be a great way of striking up a good relationship with them.

https://www.glurecruit.co.uk/

Colours in The Isorropia Foundation Team

Nat – “I am a split between yellow and _______”

Lisa F – “In the personality test, I came out with _______ and yellow, ______ being the strongest”

Naomi – “I was yellow and _______ I am pretty outgoing and spontaneous, which fits in with the yellow personality type.”

(To fill in the gaps, you’ll need to check back in to see future blog posts featuring the remaining colour personalities; Members – maybe you already have an idea what colours Nat and Lisa might be?!)

If you’re interested in finding out which colour personality you have, there are lots of free tests available online. We used this one: Color Personality Test.

Colour Therapy

What is it?

As part of my research for this post, I took a little look at how colour can be used to support our wellness. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of using colour in therapy, here are a couple of definitions to outline what it is:

“Colour therapy and healing (also known as Chromotherapy or Light Therapy) is a type of holistic healing that uses the visible spectrum of light and colour to affect a person’s mood and physical or mental health.”

www.arttherapyblog.com

Coming from an Isorropia perspective, I felt more aligned with this second definition (see below) which places a focus on Balance, which is, of course, the essence of Isorropia Foundation (for those who may not know, our name Isorropia derives from the Greek word for Balance)

“Colour therapy is used to balance the chakras of the body and enhance our body’s own healing process.”

www.colourtherapyhealing.com

Using Colour to Boost Wellbeing

I found an interesting article by Sarah Orme on the Calm Moment website, which looked at Colour Therapy in more depth, including how…

“We naturally associate colours with emotions: when we’re sad, we feel blue, when we’re angry, we see red, and we even feel green with envy. It’s perhaps unsurprising to learn that colours also be used to influence our moods through colour therapy. After all, we’re used to using colour to express our feelings.”

“Studies have shown that colours can have an impact on our mood and how we perceive the world. Colour therapy can even be used to relieve anxiety and boost your confidence.”

Sarah Orme – www.calmmoment.com

Sarah went on to interview Karen Haller, a colour psychologist who finds that positive behaviours can be brought about by the balancing of colours within an environment.

“Colours can influence how someone thinks, feels and behaves, so we can use colour to boost wellbeing and morale”

Karen Haller

If you’re interested to learn more about what Karen does and see with your own eyes her expert use of colour, do take a look at her Instagram account (with an impressive 11.4K followers), where you can also find out more about her book, ‘The Little Book of Colour’.

Yellow

“Yellow exudes happiness and freedom. This beaming colour is related to sunshine and rays of light, projecting a feeling of enlightenment onto others and ourselves. Golden shades of yellow often possess particular healing properties, including a boost in our metabolism and mentality.”

Michaela Zee, V magazine

Things you can do at home

You might want to think about bringing elements of yellow into your home: –

• Gardening: Plant yellow flowers, any variety, in pots or beds. Seed packets are fun and affordable to experiment with if you’re new to gardening. There are so many colours and varieties to choose from.
• Art: Choose or, better still, create your own pieces of art to display on your walls using shades of yellow. I found art extremely helpful to me when recovering from debilitating depression and anxiety; colour is so uplifting, and creating art is such a positive distraction from any worries.
• Clothing: Alyson Charles (Canadian athlete and author) describes the colour yellow as being “…obviously a very joyful colour. It connects to our personal will and our personal willpower.” Alyson suggests that we can exude a different energetic imprint on ourselves and our environment by choosing our clothes by colour.
• Flowers: This is a really simple way to add colour to our homes. Although fresh flowers can be expensive, you’ll see that the recommendation below is actually a really cost-effective option as they are one of the cheaper flowers to buy and also last longer than most. Perfect!

Yellow chrysanthemums

Benefits of Colour Therapy

Colour therapy can be used for all ages, including children and is even believed to be effective for animals. Colour therapists believe the use of colour to be helpful in strengthening the body, with certain colours relating to different parts of the body. Yellow is specific to the skin, digestive system, nervous system and metabolism. Colour therapists use colour in different ways, including by placing coloured silks on the body and encouraging visualisation of colour in meditation and breathing exercises.

Colouring in is another great option to try at home if you want to bring more colour into your life. It is believed that when colouring in, there is a release of Dopamine, the happy hormone (calmmoment.com) This is also true for many other ways of adding colour into our lives, including those mentioned above (themadameblue.com)

The benefits of Dopamine include pain relief, improved sleep and improved management of mental health (calmmoment.com) If you choose to do colouring with shades and hues that lift your mood, then this will make your efforts even more fruitful. 

Breathing in the Rainbow – An exercise to try at home

Why not have a go at this lovely breathing exercise courtesy of the Colour Therapy Healing website? Follow the link and try it out; designed to “encourage a balance of all seven main chakra colours for our wellbeing.”

Do let me know how you get on; I have a feeling you’re going to love it!

Colour and You

How do you feel about adding brighter colours to your environment, or even your wardrobe? Have you tried it as an approach to boost your mood? If so, do you feel like it made a positive difference? Are there any colours you avoid because they make you feel worse? I’ve noticed how some of our team members seem so much brighter and happier when they wear brighter colours; most recently, yellow summer dresses have been a big hit!

Updates and Celebrations

June saw the launch of our new out-of-hours workshops, which will be running fortnightly for our members who find it difficult to attend during normal working hours. The first session was a huge success, and we look forward to welcoming more people to these evening workshops in the coming weeks and months. An exciting development coming up later this month will be the move to running our workshops exclusively at Medina Valley Centre. We look forward to welcoming our members to our beautiful riverside setting, particularly those who have yet to see it in all its sunny splendour!

Let us know in the comments how you have been prioritising your wellbeing this month.

Until next time,

Lucy xx

References:

Definition – http://www.arttherapyblog.com/online/color-therapy-healing-an-introduction/

How to boost dopamine by Decorating and Dressing for Happiness – www.themadameblue.com

How to use colour therapy to boost your wellbeing – https://www.calmmoment.com/wellbeing/colour-therapy-boost-wellbeing/

Colour Therapy: Yellow – https://vmagazine.com/article/color-therapy-yellow/

Colour and Breathing – https://www.colourtherapyhealing.com/colour-therapy/colour-and-breathing