Hi, I'm Katrin Viella

Wellbeing is not just my work, but for me it's also personal! 

My academic background is in business and clinical psychology - you can check out my different qualifications below to get a bit more of an overview. My content and delivery of training is also highly informed by my own life experiences and lessons 'earned' so far.

Yes, it's important that we cover these important and often serious topics substantiated with a solid evidence base. In fact, quality assurance and raising the bar in mental health training is my big passion since leading the accredited mental health training academy at 'Mind'. I now run my own training business and continue these ambitions of top quality training experiences in the mental health and wellbeing sector. Very often though the biggest insights and powerful learning come to us humans when we exchange real life examples, stories, and experiences. My expertise lies in truly transformational insights and skills training in the most time effective and enjoyable way. I have poured hours of dedicated work and focussed study tow curate content that becomes accessible for anybody interested in these topics. My aim is always to translate complex, psychological constructs into easily understandable and actionable steps - so everyone can boost their wellbeing and improve their skills in supporting others.

It's my privilege to teach you topics that improve and transform not only your professional, but also private lives. Most mental health training is still focussed on the traditional, biomedical approach which isn't always helpful for empowered, everyday conversations and indeed normalising help seeking. I'm passionate about de-medicalising training content much further to remove barriers that so called 'non-professionals' might have. 

My professional experience and areas of expertise: 

In my early career I delivered leadership development and cross-cultural competency training. Later I studied and specialised in the field of clinical psychology working with people who had the most complex combinations of severe mental health conditions as well as learning differences and neurodiverse challenges. I came across so many occasions of earliest intervention being overlooked and contributing to longer recovery journeys and unnecessary, huge suffering. We know very clearly from research that earliest intervention is most effective and crucial, but practice still looks different. Better education is essential for recovery, so this brought me back to training and being involved in proactive, preventative strategies. 

I created and led a fully accredited training academy on behalf of a large, local 'Mind' charity where I also gained leadership experience leading the training department. Our teams delivered counselling qualifications, workplace wellbeing training and whole-school approaches. 

Since 2019 I work as an independent freelance consultant and have experience of facilitating training across all sectors, industries, and sizes of organisations. This includes senior executive training, leadership, managers and key workers. 

I also work with Wellbeing Leads, Heads of HR and L&D on tailored roll outs of wellbeing strategies and whole organisation training approaches. I've trained hundreds of MHFAiders (Adult and Youth) and also support with initial implementation and continuous development of support networks. I offer a whole range of additional trainings and supervised best practice sessions.

I have experience in designing and delivering Train the Trainer programmes on different mental health topics with hugely successful and sustainable outcomes for organisations, so get in touch if this is of interest to you. I also tailor and deliver bigger leadership programmes around psychological safety, cultural competency and suicide prevention/ postvention and emotional intelligence.  

My personal and practical experience: 

As mentioned before I've got my own lived experience of poor mental health and seeking professional help. I share my stories of recovery, hope and post-traumatic growth. These have helped so many others to recognise that we can build enormous resilience, strengths, and overcome feelings of shame and indeed self-stigmatisation. 

For my own wellbeing I like to run and walk in nature and have recently discovered my FLOW and overcoming perfectionism by painting  - I love it!!

And on just another note - I'm fully bi-lingual and all my trainings are available in English as well as German (my native language).