Emotional skills: These are the ones around recognising that once we feel put down or bullied the emotions we feel make it almost impossible to follow the main bits of advice we’re given – to ignore bullying and to tell someone!

Realising that emotions always come before logic helps us to make sense of why we find these particular pieces of advice difficult. The good news is that, in extensive testing, after children and teenagers learning the Lovegrove Approach, ignoring minor bullying, telling about serious bullying, and standing up to bullying behaviours became a whole lot easier! Result!

Problem-solving skills: Start by looking at what you want to achieve! Will revenge help long-term? (Sadly, No! Write a vicious letter THEN BURN IT!! You'll feel better!) Then:

Think how our feelings of self-worth determine how others treat us... 

1.It’s easy to experiment with how our feelings of self-worth affect our facial expressions, our body language and our behaviour. Interestingly, what happens is that when we feel bad about ourselves it gives out subtle visual clues to others about how to treat us. Those who feel less confident are an easy target for bullying. The Lovegrove Approach describes simple ways of changing negative feelings to positive ones. Positive self-worth leads to positive facial expressions, body language and behaviour - which changes not only how we feel about ourselves but, equally importantly, how others view us and treat us!

2.Using the same process it’s possible to examine how our feelings about others affect what happens where there is confrontation. Total hatred of someone who has humiliated you may be understandable - but it will give out clear signals which are likely to escalate that confrontation! Being able to recognise even ONE genuinely positive thing about others not only changes our facial expression, body language and behaviour, but those changes make it far more likely that we will sort things out successfully!

Social skills: The following are some of the skills that teenagers say they particularly want. Some are obvious things like feeling safer with a group of friends, others include:

The ability to be assertive – taking charge of the conversation so that only the stupid comment is ignored, not the bully.The ability to be humorous in such a way that the tension is lightened by a joke against oneself - rather than made worse by using sarcasm towards the bully!Always, but always look your best for being confident enough to carry it through. Decide how you want to look and go for it! Get advice if you're not sure! Choice: Having a choice of strategies hugely increases self-confidence.

Warning: This is NOT a quick fix approach! It gives you the power to feel good and to sort things out, but to be successful YOU will have to work at it. And once you have you'll never look back because although you, like everyone else, will STILL get bullied, now you'll be one of those people who copes successfully with it so that no-one feels humiliated, you feel good about yourself and people really like you!!

My book has a unique cut-out-and-keep card showing symbols of each of the strategies.

Now have a look at the Recent Work page to see who else is learning this approach!